So, I played Hotel Architect for the first time during it’s January playtest, and had written a bit of a review then, but it was looking like it was also coming to Next Fest with a new demo and decided to hold on since that fits the blog. I’m glad I did, as the new demo included a new location and some other changes, including one of my original gripes with the prior version (yay). It didn’t change so much that I can’t keep most of my original writing though (also yay).
It’s a hotel management sim inspired by the like of the Two Point series, as well as Prison Architect and other building sims. You lay out your rooms, zone them as what type of room they are, and fill them appropriate items and staff them if needed. Each type of guest has their own preferences in what they need in a hotel room, though the early game only has you appeasing the two easiest to appease guests.
Key though, is a special type of guest, critics, who get to check out the full hotel and assign you a star rating at the end, moving you up or down one from your current rating. Each star rating also has it’s own requirements, limiting you to three stars in the demo. They show up every few days, so you have plenty of chances to fix things if you don’t succeed at first.
Moving onto the second location, you have to manage temperature, which is a bit difficult because there isn’t anything like overlays or ways to tell if you have enough cooling, or how effective fans vs ac really is. Missing, though still referenced in the game is the promotion aspect that was in the prior version, though I can’t say I used it much. Keeping my hotel full up on guests was fairly easy, and room requirements make it also easy to build towards who stays in those rooms. It would be nice if the guest preferences had tooltips rather than small icons to show what they need as well. It is just a demo and a work in progress, and it’s clear between the prior version that the teams putting in work and tweaking things. Like the gripe I hinted at before, sometimes items would require a full replacement and you’d have to remove, then rebuy and wait for construction to take care of it. Now you can do repairs and pay the cost with your existing maintenance staff. It would be nice if there was a research option to have them do that automatically instead of manually tracking it down and clicking the button, especially where maintenance doesn’t have much of a research tree as is.
Odds are the demo will come down at the end of Next Fest, so you only have about another week to try the demo. If you’ve enjoyed the other similar management games that inspired it, you’ll likely love this. Even if I do think it could stand to lean into the weird (like the Two Point series) a bit more.