Management games and – in recent times – usurped classics like online poker games and now dominate the so-called “Dad game” market which was originally occupied almost-entirely by middle-aged men, gaining popularity despite being often misunderstood. This is largely in part due to management games requiring the skills such as focus, time management, and financial acumen. When you combine this with a mystery storyline—another genre known for its slow, tense atmosphere—it seems like the perfect match. Enter My Hotel, a game that no one expected, but here is our review.
My Hotel plunges you into a hotel management simulation set in 1950s Chicago, a city rife with gang conflict. Four factions vie for control: the Russians, the Police, the Italian Mafia, and the Damocles, a group of prostitutes who frequently use your hotel.
As the story unfolds, you must balance resources, maintain your reputation with each faction, and manage your finances to avoid bankruptcy, death, or prison. Trust me, it’s much harder than it sounds, especially when the game seems determined to stop you at every turn—more on that later.
Gameplay: Have you got what it takes to succeed?
Upon loading into the game, you are thrown head-first into the first-person view of the protagonist as he monologues about his uncle’s suspicious death and the circumstances surrounding the unsolved murder. To start letting people into your hotel, you must renovate the lobby, then move upstairs to open a room and furnish it, this is where the problems first arise.
You check the floormap on your way to the first room to see what furniture you need to complete it, all while the main character rambles on in his (likely AI-generated) voice. The voice became so grating that I eventually muted the game. As you add each item to the room, its value increases, which in turn determines how much you can charge for the room. However, once the room has the basic essentials—like a bed—you can open it up to the general public.
Decorating the rooms is an exercise in frustration as – unlike other games in a similar vein – you can’t manually rotate the furniture, and it instead aligns itself with the closest respective wall, which can lead to some very strange layouts in rooms in the beginning as the rooms are smaller. One notable irksome experience was the first room, where the only reasonable place the bed could go, was directly in front of a set of prominent pipes – not exactly indicative of the art-deco nouveau aesthetic which the hotel is attempting to project now is it?
Further to the ‘decoration’ using the furniture, which is limited in the beginning but unlocks as mission rewards going forwards, you must also clean the rooms and dispose of any existing garbage by taking it to the garbage chute, where it will cease to exist. The same must also be done with the laundry however I notice no consequences to not doing this, and in my endgame, I became so preoccupied that I didn’t both to remove the laundry and the garbage. I received no complaints from customers – as you can’t – and there was no penalty to not undertaking this section of the game.
Like with a great deal of the game, it seems entirely optional and without impact, rather like the rats which you must deal with as part of the main story, but then can largely ignore as the game progresses. Traps are supposed to deal with rats, but often the rats just run across them with reckless abandon and don’t seem too fazed. On the off-chance that the trap does go off, you must dispose of the rats down the chute, one-by-one. Now this is fine in the beginning when there are only a few, however if you became occupied elsewhere and forget them for a while, it can quickly build up to the point where there are massive waves of them in each room and hallway. And just as with everything else in the game, you must do this all yourself as there is no way to hire staff to delegate these actions to.
The game includes an optional segment where players fix radiators, electrical systems, and plumbing in various rooms. These tasks are completed through a typing minigame, where you press two keys in sequence. While the minigame is fun at first, it quickly becomes repetitive after completing it ten or twelve times. On the positive side, these mini-games are entirely optional and don’t affect a room’s rental potential. For instance, tasks can appear in rooms that haven’t been purchased yet, meaning they can’t be rented out. This raises the odd question: why would you need to buy individual rooms in a hotel that you already own? It’s just another quirky aspect of My Hotel, which pushes you to pay for unnecessary things, like saving your game—more on that later.
After completing the first few rooms, the local police chief visits you. He explains the gang ecosystem and delivers a thinly-veiled threat in his AI-generated voice—so irritating that I eventually muted the game and just read the subtitles.
As the story unfolds alongside your hotel management, you take actions to satisfy each faction. Tasks vary: you might clean up a botched “conversation” for the Russians, plant a gun for the Mafia, steal documents for the Damocles, or wiretap other factions for the Police. Each action boosts the employing faction’s reputation while damaging the targeted faction’s standing. Renting out rooms also affects your reputation, but it makes no sense: renting a room slightly lowers your reputation, while denying a rental results in a large penalty.
When your reputation takes a hit, you can try to recover it by offering each faction its stereotypical drink. The Russians prefer vodka, the Italians drink wine, the Damocles (all women) like gin, and the police favor whiskey. Unfortunately, the game never specifies how much your reputation will recover with each faction. While not a deal-breaker, these options made me roll my eyes so hard I thought I’d see my brain. The stereotypical nature extends to character names too, with the Russians named Dimitri, and the Italians sporting names like Giuseppe and Lorenzo. Again, not a deal-breaker, but another hint that AI-generated content is at work here.
The act of balancing reputation while also maintaining the hotel is sometimes a Herculean task and can often lead to a number of annoying moments of frustration. This is, in large part, because the cost for balancing each one, can appear to be completely trivial and changes day-to-day.
Bugs: Why doesn’t it work properly?
The act of balancing may, at times, be frustrating, but there is nothing more frustrating than being unable to finish the story through no fault of your own. I understand that as an Indie studio, Brainswapper, don’t have access to thousands of QA testers and this came apparent a number of times. I experienced a number of game-breaking bugs as listed below which made it impossible for me to complete my experience with the game, and each one does seem to occur as a matter of luck. It is because of this that saving often is key in My Hotel, however saving the game does come with an in-game cost which increases in line with the money you have available.
The bugs are as follows:
1: The newspaper which provides you with tasks to benefit/harm your reputation and earn you money failed to load which meant that I couldn’t progress as the objective on-screen was to ‘check the newspaper’
2: Elevator failed to generate when I was on the residential floor, and I couldn’t get back to the lobby so had to restart my campaign.
3: Attempted to exit game in order to finish my session, game crashed, failed to save(even after charging me $900 of in-game currency) and I had to restart my campaign.
4: Left game on while I was away from the screen, game closed itself and lost all my progress.
I detail the above as a matter for both you as the consumer, and for the developers to look over, because I feel it is fair for you to have a full picture of the game.
Graphics: It is pretty though, isn’t it?
Ask anyone worth their salt and they will tell you that the art-deco movement is one of – if not – the most important architectural movements of the last 400 years, and My Hotel truly does understand this. The game – while a little unpolished in places like the cutscenes – does display 1950’s Chicago beautifully.
The hotel is a large central Chicago building with gold and black everywhere you look, and each room can be – eventually – decorated with gilded wallpaper and era-accurate furniture and flooring. Wherever else My Hotel falls down, it certainly doesn’t in its portrayal of 1950’s Chicago hospitality.
Sound design: Do you like jazz?
Set in the 1950s, My Hotel naturally features jazz throughout its soundtrack. The first time I heard the slow-thumping lounge mix, I was instantly transported back to the era, surrounded by smooth saxophone solos and beautiful piano arrangements. However, as I played on, I quickly realized the music looped endlessly. After about an hour, the once-enjoyable tunes became more irritating than immersive, and the AI-generated nature of the soundtrack became painfully obvious. Eventually, I ended up switching to my own jazz playlist and muting the in-game audio for the rest of my session.
Sadly, the same issue extends to the voiceovers. For a story as emotionally charged as hunting down the killers of your relative, you’d expect a passionate, skilled voice cast. Instead, My Hotel delivers more AI-generated voices, and it shows. The result is a cast of characters who sound flat, dispassionate, or out of sync with the dialogue’s emotional beats.
AI analysis: There’s more to life than AI
In recent times, AI has become a talking point about everything from political speeches to pieces of visual art. The issue with many forms of AI, is that it is entirely logical and only knows what we tell it. This is unfortunately what leads the resulting projects to sounding and feeling empty and vapid. The use of AI in the making of this game has made the game far less than it could ever have been, because it lacks the human element. Whether it is the characters voices, or the names of the guests that frequent the hotel, it removes all human feeling and results in the game feeling too processed and too artificial.
So… what’s the verdict?
Overall, My Hotel fails to make waves in any real and meaningful way. While a murder-mystery game with a management focus could have been a really interesting fusion of existing ideas, the execution of My Hotel doesn’t do enough to make a case for it’s own existence. The annoying AI voices, the repetitive gameplay and the clunky mechanics mean that for most people, My Hotel might be worth playing, but – perhaps suitably thematically – maybe only for one night, assuming of course you don’t experience half of the game-breaking bugs I encountered during my review.
Note: The author received a game key from the publisher to produce this review.
