Recordkeeping: Hotel Paradise COMPLETE
Jun. 24th, 2020 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xyzzysqrlI've been working on a different Huge Open World Game for ... ooh, at least a month now, but today I took some time out to futz with the aformentioned Racial Justice Bundle from itch.io and look through some of the offerings. I had thought maybe I'd play something cute and gamesy as a break from having my brain stew things over.
Instead I went 100% No Thoughts Head Empty and played through Hotel Paradise.
It's a pretty simple game. You're in a hotel, all garish carpets and long corridors full of doors and paintings. At the end of every corridor is a fork. Each fork leads to more corridors. In your hands is the key to your room. Find it.
This could be a horror game, if there were a monster! There's no monster. There's just you, your free time, and door-lined hallway after fork after door-lined hallway. Once you stop trying to orient yourself using logic or reason, you can just walk.
Admire the eye-numbing carpet texture. Stop and straighten a crooked stock photo on the wall. Take a left. Take a right. Take three lefts. Doors and doors and doors. Tinny music coming out of a speaker somewhere above you, fading behind you, fading back in ahead of you. Notions of time and physical space drift away and all that exists is carpet, wallpaper, hallway, doors.
Eventually, there it is. You win.
My only real complaint is that one of the photos has a big obvious Stock Photo Logo over it, which is a touch jarring. It felt almost like a jumpscare every time I noticed.
Aside from that, I might enjoy it if there were simple up/down elevators now and again, or a utility door leading to stairwells you can go up and down and up and down and come out in a different hallway that's the same hallway that goes on to another hallway that may or may not have another stairwell off to the side.
Look, sometimes a game is about getting lost for a while. This made me feel comfortably numb and dreamy.
That's all I wanted here.
Instead I went 100% No Thoughts Head Empty and played through Hotel Paradise.
It's a pretty simple game. You're in a hotel, all garish carpets and long corridors full of doors and paintings. At the end of every corridor is a fork. Each fork leads to more corridors. In your hands is the key to your room. Find it.
This could be a horror game, if there were a monster! There's no monster. There's just you, your free time, and door-lined hallway after fork after door-lined hallway. Once you stop trying to orient yourself using logic or reason, you can just walk.
Admire the eye-numbing carpet texture. Stop and straighten a crooked stock photo on the wall. Take a left. Take a right. Take three lefts. Doors and doors and doors. Tinny music coming out of a speaker somewhere above you, fading behind you, fading back in ahead of you. Notions of time and physical space drift away and all that exists is carpet, wallpaper, hallway, doors.
Eventually, there it is. You win.
My only real complaint is that one of the photos has a big obvious Stock Photo Logo over it, which is a touch jarring. It felt almost like a jumpscare every time I noticed.
Aside from that, I might enjoy it if there were simple up/down elevators now and again, or a utility door leading to stairwells you can go up and down and up and down and come out in a different hallway that's the same hallway that goes on to another hallway that may or may not have another stairwell off to the side.
Look, sometimes a game is about getting lost for a while. This made me feel comfortably numb and dreamy.
That's all I wanted here.
