This game gave me House Flipper vibes, and I was in the mood for a creative-type game. Though I do admit I was a bit confused by this game. It’s another one of those games, like Barn Finders or Gas Station Simulator, that has that low budget, Euro-jank feel to it, but Hotel Renovator was published by Focus Entertainment, a publisher I’ve heard of before and usually publishes solid, AA games. So, I figured Hotel Renovator might have a bit more polish on it compared to those other games.

Well, there is definitely a good layer of clunkiness here, mainly related to the NPCs. You have an assistant manager that runs the front desk and gives you your missions. I was surprised she actually appeared in your hotel as an in-game model and not just a HUD element. She doesn’t move, but hey it’s something. The hotel guests will walk around and will set down in chairs, or close to chairs. Their pathfinding is very basic. They more wander aimlessly and stare at walls more than anything. There’s not a lot of variety in NPC models, but they are unique. You have a lady in a cocktail dress, a bald dude, and a big biker dude. There’s also special guests who stop in occasionally like a cowboy & his horse, a fisherman, a Stephen King knock-off, a stuffy old maid, etc. Outside of your rooms, the hotel has a bar, pool, and spa. It would be nice to see those locations populated with guests. They just sit, empty as ghost towns and it makes renovating them seem a bit lackluster.

There is a story to this game, but it’s not the main focus. You and your sister inherit a run-down hotel from your grandfather and have to make it profitable again. As you clean out the mess, you find old mementos from your granddad, like his bellhop uniform and an old love letter. It gives the game more flavor than being a straight decorator simulator, but it’s by no means a plot with intrigue. You also get missions from the unique NPCs requesting certain things be added to their room that nets you extra cash. You also have a couple run ins with an angry chicken that challenges you to dice games and leaves golden eggs for you to find. This game plays it much straighter than most of the games of this quality. The chicken is by far the goofiest part of the game, with the vampire being a close second. You also have little events that pop up to distract you from the renovations, like fixing the electric, sweeping the floor, or fixing the elevator. If you play the game for a long stretch of time, you’ll see all of these events too frequently.

The main focus of this game is, as the name states, renovating a hotel. As someone who loves the feel and history of classic grand hotels of the 1920s, I was excited to make the next Waldorf Astoria. You get a decent selection of items to design with. Each item, whether a bed, chair, shelf, or sink, fits into one of three loose categories. There’s the Japanese influenced set, Modern Minimalist, and the Art Deco style. My main areas like the lobby and hallways were all classic Art Deco inspired. The actual rooms I experimented with. Sometimes I followed the suggested design ideas, but very rarely. There’s enough variety in furniture that I could make a room straight from 1974, a Greco-Roman room, an artsy black’n’white room, or the one I’m most proud of being able to recreate is a colonial America style room. The hotel has just enough rooms, because by the last few rooms I was running out of ideas and didn’t want to repeat myself.

You unlock more items through a level up system that encourages you to go back to older rooms and update them with new floors or wallpapers. Though there were a few of the junk items I would’ve liked to been able to build, like some old portraits. One thing I didn’t care for was the game gave you a list of required things that must be included in a room, like 1 bed, 4 chairs, 2 sinks, etc. It does help to have a little guidance and encourage people to build realistically functional hotel rooms, but sometimes I didn’t want to cram 2 wardrobes into one small bedroom, but I had to before the game would allow me to finalize the room.

The gameplay used to place items is simple. You don’t have to paint walls realistically like House Flipper. You just pick a color and use your finger to pick what parts of the wall you want painted. You place furniture by manipulating the ghostly outline of the item into the spot you want it. Your character does clip through everything, which probably makes pathfinding easier, but it is a bit immersion breaking. The way you place objects can be a bit obtuse. They follow your cursor and automatically snap to the farthest point of your view. This works for big things like beds and tubs, but trying to put decorative sculptures on a shelf was near impossible. It keep colliding with the shelf itself. Having an ability to pull an object towards you a bit away from the wall would’ve made life much better.

All in all, this game was a fun time for the price and I enjoyed being able to see the hotel change from a dump to a classy joint. The developers have stated that Workshop mod support is something they are eager to integrate and once we get a wider selection of old school items and designs I may go back to this game to build a new hotel.