Hotel Dusk: Room 215
It's a cop-story or rather an Ex-cop story, it opens like a thriller, your former cop partner (the good cop, I assume) betrayed you over unknown circumstances a couple of years ago and shortly vanished. Now you're retired as a cop and live your life as a door-to-door salesman, Kyle Hyde is the name to be clear, and the next stop is Hotel Dusk which is found by the county road on somewhere in Nevada. As you might suspect what happened back then when Kyle was in the force was too personal to let go and in reality his whereabouts is a cover for picking up clues as to where his former friend Bradley went, but as it turns out there's more than meets the eye to this rundown Motel, and some people there have peculiar connections that seem all too relevant; all to coincidental to the ghost which Kyle's chasing. In a hotel where rooms have titles, Kyle gets room 215, aka "Wish" and not long after settling in, it becomes clear to Kyle that there's something of a mystery to the Hotel and its vacants, which might just give him the answers he's been longing for.
I describe this like the synopsis to a book because that is literally what this is--
You hold the DS on the side when you play it, and the game is built to a T around this playstyle, from solving puzzles, investigating the nooks and crannys of the hotel and NPCs talking in response to Kyle's snoopy looks of the top screen on the bottom-screen. The game even utilizes the Nintendo DS hardware in ways you never would've anticipated, sometimes even seemingly does things with the hardware you wouldn't think would be possible. In reality, it's the storytelling that's the true draw of the game with some of the most believable characters both in motivations and background but even just the way they
talk to each other. It was fortunate to be handled by a true Japanese novelist Rika Suzuki and translated by some of the best NoA employees available at the time. Unfortunately the tale of the game's success or lack thereof is indirectly related to the fact that its developer went bankrupt 2-3 years later after its sequel Last Window: The Secret of Cape west released.
Ghost Trick
Shu Takumi's second masterpiece. The man created Ace Attorney and directed, wrote and planned all the first three games from Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, to Trials & Tribulations. This, a new concept of gameplay, feels like the collective experience and talent he had built up over the course of those 3 games served as a new IP and seemingly created in a state of creative bliss. The game scored
excellently even for sites like IGN yet either due to its namesake, release-timing or unrecognizable gameplay style the game simply didn't appeal to enough people and in fact, it tanked so bad I've heard Capcom internally labeled Shu Takumi as the "failure of the year" among leads or something crazy like that.
Trace Memory
I get chills when I think of this game.
Some might be in the know. (Not a twist, not horror, but the unfortunate horrors of real (fictional) life in the Post-WW2 lives of the late 1940s)
Trace Memory AKA Another Code is an adventure game that IIRC lauched alongside the DS, with point-&-click controls, pixel hunting and a good deal of dialogue exchanges and while plotting has flaws the writing is generally just as great as it is in the spiritual successor of this CING-adventure: Hotel Dusk.
Transformers: Autobots/Decepticons DS.
This is a special one actually. It's fully voice-acted, Keith David as the police-car-guy who is your mentor. An Original story, GTA-style missions & free-roaming, player-avatar, steal-scan cars. It's a little... flat in terms of game-design but I spent HOURS in it, and it brought the Michael Bay awesomeness of 2007 almost fully realized to a little DS.
Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen
The mechanics are just... mmmh! The mission design and story-campaign lets it down, but the gameplay loop itself is actually not too bad.