Check out the Hotel Renovator Review Trailer:
Hotel Renovator, developed by Two Horizons and published by Focus Entertainment, is a renovation sim for DIY and HGTV lovers. Players renovate a rundown hotel and attempt to turn it into a successful five-star Instagram-worthy getaway. Hotel Renovator offers a story and sandbox mode with thousands of options for walls, floors, and furniture.
Story
The plot of the story mode is simple but still pretty fun. Players inherit a neglected hotel that is an urban spelunkers/dumpster diver’s dream; they then trash, clean, and refurbish each part of the hotel aiming to get great reviews from the guests so the hotel can claim the coveted five star rating. As players progress in the story, they also discover clues to the secret history of their family’s hotel.
There is also a stream of interesting VIP guests with a diverse range of requests for their stay. From a vampire who wants to sleep in the basement to a cowboy who needs to fill the lobby with hay bales to a wildlife enthusiast who lost his iguana, players will split their time between helping guests and renovating the hotel.
There is also a subplot about a rather devious chicken, but I don’t want to spoil that for you.
Gameplay
The gameplay in Hotel Renovator is super straightforward. Players must renovate everything in the hotel, including the lobby, office, basement, hallways, and guest rooms. The game has a lot, I mean a lot, of customization options, so it is really easy to spend fifteen minutes deciding between two slightly different colors of mauve.
One aspect of gameplay that can get tedious is that players must interact with every single item to trash/destroy/sell it. This means clicking, and clicking and clicking, over and over and over. As players gain stars and progress through the story, they can unlock tools to help with chores, like dynamite instead of a crowbar and a vacuum instead of a broom, which is a major motivation for progressing in the story.
In story mode, renovations are constantly interrupted by guest requests and necessary hotel repairs. The guest requests are timed, and the faster a player completes them, the better the review the guest will leave for the hotel. Right now, though, there are only about seven guest requests that repeat. It can get annoying having to repeatedly put a surfboard in a room or catch another ghost, especially when it interrupts trying to pick between those two slightly different colors of mauve.
The game has a tutorial, but it is very short, and I didn’t feel like it prepared me for the game. Yes, the tutorial covered the basics of destroying the trash and adding walls, floors, and furniture, but I constantly had to undo or redo actions because I had messed something up. Also, the tutorial failed to mention that every single cobweb must be destroyed individually; otherwise, cobwebs will still appear after the renovation, making the room look messy.
Art
As soon as I started playing Hotel Renovator, I kept having wave after wave of deja vu; this game looked familiar. It finally hit me that the art style has some serious Fall Out Franchise vibes. I adore Fall Out, especially the part where I build and design my base, but I have to wonder what 2015 graphics are doing in 2023.
The only part of the game that actually truly drove me nuts was the lighting situation. Light in the game changes depending on what time of day it is. Unfortunately, this affects the way colors appear when players are designing rooms. I would pick a light stone gray for the ceiling, but testing it on the wall with the light changing meant that it was really difficult to tell if the color actually matched the rest of the room. And don’t get me started on trying to color match with the sun zooming by. Many of the color options don’t have names (or are mislabeled, such as labeling black as emerald green), so if players don’t paint every single surface of the room in one go, they might as well just re-renovate because they will never find the exact same color again.
Bugs
Hotel Renovator doesn’t just remind me of Fall Out because of the art. The bugs in this game would make Bethesda proud. My favorite was a glitch that caused the Cowboy character to repeatedly enter the lobby with his horse without deleting the previous generation. At one point, I had about ten horses hanging out in my lobby while a wedding was happening in the restaurant. Other bugs include NPCs getting stuck in the elevator floor, plant leaves poking through walls and weird gaps between walls and floors.
The next thing I want to mention is not really a bug, but it causes as many problems as bugs. The game doesn’t have a feature to click items into place. For example, if I’m trying to center a lamp in the ceiling, I just have a wish and a prayer that it won’t be all wonky. This also means that small items, like toiletries, plants, lamps, etc., not perfectly placed on a table or shelf will fall onto the floor. And players cannot just pick it back up and up it on the table because the vase will not reset to its upright position; it will just stay on its side. Players in this position have no choice but to sell the item back (for half the amount it took to buy it), then rebuy it, and try to place it correctly. Again, this isn’t a bug, but I hope developers consider adding a click-into-place feature that can be toggled on and off.
Overall
A super solid 9/10.
This game has everything I could ask for. I love simulators, I love virtual cleaning, I love decorating, I love weird bugs that don’t actually affect my gameplay. I actually found myself procrastinating writing this review because I just wanted to play for thirty more minutes.
Hotel Renovator is fun, engaging, and has the right amount of cheese. The simple story gives a sense of momentum to a game that could otherwise get monotonous, and the timed guest requests add a bit of a challenge.
I haven’t gotten to the sandbox mode, but I am looking forward to it. I can already imagine the hundreds of hours I am about to spend renovating and then re-renovating the different levels of the hotel.
Hotel Renovator is available for PC via Steam.
Related: Reviews by Michelle Jones
I'm a completionist gamer who just needs to find that one last object and clear that final dungeon. I love all video games, from open world sandboxes on a console to a mindless match three on my phone. In addition to gaming and writing, I am a graduate student working on a thesis about the ancient Icelandic Sagas. Feel free to ask me anything about Vikings.
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