The Dark Hotel
By Karen Feigenbaum
** out of *****
The Dark Hotel is an interesting on-line comic idea, but one which
is, unfortunately, far underdeveloped in its actual implementation.
The comic content itself is not interesting enough to capture my attention
(and I read two and a half episodes), and its execution is not nearly
as user-friendly as I want it to be.
The premise of the comic is something about this Balkan guy named
Drago…the most entertaining line I encountered was: Drago
and Hugo were probably the best damned Balkan folk musicians this
town has ever seen. That amused me. But the story was a little
too slow to build - I had gone through about twenty screens by the
time I called it quits on the plot.
And in my opinion, I think that's part of the problem - too much
click-through is required. The comic doesn't storyboard out well -
every cell is a separate screen, and the viewer has to wait
for it to load to read the next block. I could never get through
a comic book if it required that much patience from me.
As far as the site's setup, it starts down the right path, in terms
of leveraging the non-linear storytelling advantages of the web page,
but it under-utilizes that potential. You start out at the Dark Hotel's
front desk, and the different rooms' mailboxes have links to different
stories. All the stories tie together under the purview of the Hotel
itself, and there are a few links at the bottom of the screen that
have pages on items such as time-line indices, character descriptions,
and Hotel history.
Sadly, the links lead to content-skimpy pages, and the plot of the
comic itself wasn't interesting enough to me to make these pages that
enticing a place to spend time.
The concept of this site is definitely in the right place, but more
work needs to be done to make the site more captivating. I honestly
believe a big first step in that direction would be to map
out each episode on a single page that can be navigated by
scrolling, as opposed to requiring a new page for every animation
block.