Though technically a follow up to the 2005 DS game Another Code: Two Memories, this Wii edition actually has a lot more in common with Cing’s other championed adventure, Hotel Dusk: Room 215. Where the first game set lead character Ashley Robins on an isolated quest to find her father through exploration and inventive puzzle solving, this sequel sees her trying to uncover the mystery of her mother’s death through the Kyle Hyde method of talking to everyone she meets.

Some of the conversations involve memory tests like this one.

Another Code R’s packaging proudly states “read and solve like a mystery novel”, and the comparison is no exaggeration. Ashley’s quest is extremely text heavy and rarely features any more interactivity than the average web page – go there, click that, read this and so on. And though the new setting, an idyllic camp site and nearby research centre, is very big, there’s so much gate keeping and shepherding that it takes hours before you get to see it all, the NPCs sending you back and forth so often that you have no choice but to sit through hours of dialogue. Which wouldn’t so bad if the writing wasn’t so dull, or if Nintendo had bothered to make use of voice actors rather than just text.

In terms of puzzles, there are very few here unless you count hotspot grazing as a puzzle. Most points of interactivity aren’t taxing at all and are more about figuring out how to use the motion controls to perform a particular action – like throwing a life ring into a lake – than they are about solving some conundrum. The cleverest of these is a new item called the TAS, an in-game lock picking device intentionally shaped like a Wii Remote that requires you to input a series of button presses and motions to break electronic locks. Simple at first, the device later requires you to input characters that do not physically exist on the Wii Remote, forcing you to think outside the box but never, sadly, to the ingenious extent of the DS game’s greatest puzzles.

Low on interactivity and high on dialogue, Another Code R definitely takes some serious will power to complete, which really needn’t be the case. The Japanese adventure has always been more about following a story than its western counterpart, hence the often used tag of ‘visual novel’, and there are many examples, like Kojima’s enthralling Snatcher, that do manage to hold the player’s attention for a short while at least.

Despite the narrative issues, the visuals and interface is impressive.