The Norwood Suite Review
I played The Norwood Suite and, like we said when we first watched the trailer, it’s weird. But not necessarily in a bad way. The Norwood Suite is a sequel to Off-Peak, which I didn’t play but maybe I should because it happens to be free. Regardless, here is where we are. The Norwood Suite starts you out cold on the driveway of the Norwood Hotel. With little direction, you make your way to the hotel itself and check yourself into The Norwood Suite and the true goal reveals itself. You are tasked with delivering a CD to DJ Bogart who is currently spinning music in the basement party. In true adventure game fashion, however, you can’t just walk in and talk to him. Instead you must fashion together a multi-part costume which can only be obtained by speaking with the other tenants of the Norwood Hotel.
On paper, The Norwood Suite is a pretty straight-forward game. If you were so inclined, you could blast through without really listening to any dialogue and only looking for keywords then fidgeting with the very obvious interactive elements to the world. That would be doing the game a disservice, though. Working through the dialogue from the rest of the characters is a fun and outlandish experience in some cases and as the game goes on, it’s quite fun to check in on characters and see how they start interacting with not only you but each other as well.
The “gameplay” is quirky, to put it simply. You start off as you might expect checking into the hotel and fidgeting around on a computer but as the game opens up, someone will want you to fetch music from somewhere else in the hotel, but first you’ll need to get something from a locker, but before that you need to figure out where to find some beer, and did I mention secret passageways? I’m not going to pretend this is some mind-bending stuff, though. Every item has a purpose and you can’t combine items or anything and if you get stuck, there’s a built-in hint system which is why I said this game had “gameplay.” If you boil it down far enough, The Norwood Suite is essentially a glorified walking simulator but it didn’t bother me personally so I was fine going along with it.
We should talk about the presentation of The Norwood Suite. From a visual standpoint, The Norwood Suite likely wont win any awards. It’s not technically bad but the visuals look so rough and thrown together. There are some points where this adds a unique effect and the way text is presented certainly has character but The Norwood Suite certainly suffers when you see a random clip of the game or especially screenshots. Everything else about the presentation, though, is fantastic. The Norwood Suite is driven by music. Around every corner is a jam for you to enjoy while working through dialogue. In place of actual voice acting, characters make somewhat musical sounds, almost like the adults in Peanuts or something. It would have maybe been fun to hear the dialogue sync up with the music at times but the chaos probably does something better for the game.
There are some story presentation things I’d like to talk about but I also don’t want to spoil the game too much if I don’t have to. What I can say is there are some very subversive moments in the game that are maybe enhanced by the graphics, which I just called bad. I’m not saying this happens but if, say, in Half-Life 1 someones head started spinning for no reason, it would probably be easier to laugh off than if Nathan Drake’s head started spinning. Or maybe both would be equally funny. Is that just me? OR maybe I’m giving The Norwood Suite too much credit. Who can say? My point is actual hiccups and stiff animations seem weird but in a way that works for this game.
Let’s do that score thing. I don’t have any fancy graphics or presentation tricks so sorry this just kind of rolls through. To me, The Norwood Suite is a 4 out of 5. The game is $9.99 on Steam right now and I beat it in just under two hours. You could probably get more time in if you listened to even more dialogue and it looks like I missed one achievement but if time is valuable to you, The Norwood Suite might not have enough quantity. Beyond that, the graphics might be hard to get over for some, the music can get grating if you do play for a longer period of time, and the video game equivalent of an acid trip isn’t for everyone but if you do want a pretty far out experience, make a reservation for The Norwood Hotel.
4/5 — If you’ve got a couple hours and want to get weird, get The Norwood Suite.
Disclaimer: The Norwood Suite was played on PC with a code provided by the developer. The screenshots used are all from The Norwood Suite’s Steam page.
I can’t do any kind of video for it right now as I’m about to leave for the Phillippines in literally 2 hours. I’ll be sure to rope Nelson into talking about it more on the show when I get back, though!
I’ll also do a post soon about my thoughts on scores. I should do them but I want to do them in a way that makes sense from a readers perspective. A 79 sounds great but what does that really mean? If I’m going to bother having scores at all, they should probably be as straight-forward and intuitive as possible! But, I’ll talk about it more when I get a chance to write some stuff.
