Hotel Renovator (2023)

If you’re the type of person who gets a kick out of design and renovation, you’re likely going to love Hotel Renovator. It scratches that cosy simulator itch, providing you with repetitive but wholesome tasks to complete. Random events and the odd injection of humour aims to mix things up, but ultimately, Hotel Renovator is at its best when you’re knee-deep in redesigning a hotel room, making everything beautiful and just how you want it. Bliss.

Hotel Renovator is overall not a bad simulation game experience. The title developed by Two Horizons takes several elements found in the competition while adapting the overall experience. The decoration of the rooms is really fun and you don't feel the hours passing. It's a pity that we are constantly interrupted in the story mode and that the management of the lighting effects doesn't allow faultless modifications. It would also have been interesting to add visual guides to place our objects in a more uniform way. The regulars of the genre will be charmed by the proposal while the neophytes will try to understand why the game is interesting.

Hotel Renovator joins the ranks of simulation games where you have a job, like Gas Station Simulator, Construction Simulator, and Lawn Mowing Simulator. You start out your journey alongside your sibling, taking on your grandfather’s run-down hotel, which is haunted, probably a murder scene, and looking very shady and condemned. You start off with little to no money and a mission to clear out a room, lobby, and hallway to con some naive person into staying overnight. Along the way, you will progress to more rooms that need to be fixed up and other parts of the hotel to fix up on your way to a five-star rating.

Hotel Renovator tries to convey the highs and lows of upscaling a hotel. However, anyone expecting it to be a luxury experience with chocolates left on their pillowcases will be sorely disappointed, as many minor issues lead to a subpar stay.

If you’re a fan of the sim/building/cleaning genres and games like House Flipper, you’ll probably enjoy Hotel Renovator, though it doesn’t exactly break new ground. The process of demolishing and refurbishing the rooms is relaxing and chill enough, as it should be. That’s probably enough, but I wish the controls and camera were a bit more responsive and the campaign a little less skip-worthy. In the end, Hotel Renovator was engaging enough to keep me away from actual cleaning around the house, so goal accomplished.