Day 59 - Holbrook Hotel
Horror, Short and Free, Immersive Sim ·
Sam’s Take:
I was pretty out of the indi-dev loop after Flash died, so I didn’t realize how saturated we currently were in ps1-era crusty 3D horror games. Compared to No Players Online and M. Stain, I’d probably have to say this is the weakest of the lot. No Players was a little deep into creepypasta land for my taste, but honestly I’ll take creepypasta over some of the nonsense in this game.
I came in really wanting to be more positive about this one. Fourteen year old dev trying to balance their school life and game dev passions, making something cooler than I’ve ever made before. BareBones, on the off chance you read this, your game was good enough and sane enough to receive actual criticism (see some of our other reviews for a counterpoint on that), and I never made anything this cool when I was fourteen. You made a functional game that I finished and enjoyed little bits of, and looking at the comments, a lot of people really loved your game. Please do your best to not let this next bit of criticism get you down too much.
Almost every single plot point in this game is incorrect. It’s a strange criticism, there’s not much plot in this game at all, but let me hit you with some examples. First of all, this isn’t a hotel… this is an apartment complex. Look at the room:
Also we have a frozen meal in the fridge:
Ignoring the fact that this should be in the freezer, this also implies that we live here… like an apartment. Now is it completely impossible that we are staying long term in a hotel that has large rooms that look like entire apartments? No, but it’s strange enough to trigger the part of my brain that demands an explanation. On its own this would be a very petty complaint, but stick with me for a bit.
We brush our teeth and go to bed, only to be woken up by a scream at 3am. We have this to say about it:
There are two issues with this sentence. First off IS THIS A HOTEL OR AN APARTMENT MY DUDE?! WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?!! Second, it IS NOT the apartment next you at all:
In this shot I’m standing right outside of our apartmen (hotel?) door. The apartment across from us with the caution tape is not accessible, nor is the apartment next to us. The apartment we are supposed to search is the open door two away from us. Again, could our character have heard wrong? Sure… but why is everything in this game just a little bit wrong?
Anyway, the window in the apartment is open and our boy from Baldi’s Basics comes out to jumpscare us:
You have to run to the elevator and get downstairs before he catches you. This is the highlight of the game. The distance from the room to the elevator is enough to feel like you barely escaped, and the button has a delay, so you need to watch him walk down the hallway at you as the elevator closes. Nothing revolutionary at all, but there was a genuine moment of panic as the elevator door stood motionless for a bit longer than I wanted.
This is the last time you are in any danger for the rest of the game. From this point on we are in full on point-and-click land. I won’t go through this part of the plot in as much detail, but I will point out some more of the moments that have that same brand of “wait-what?” confusion.
Wait, this hotel/apartment has no phone? Nobody does for miles? How do people book rooms? What year is it? Where are we that has full size apartment hotels but no phone? Why are we asking where the parking lot is? Why is the answer that the parking lot is 2 blocks away? Is it because this is a big bustling city? If that’s the case why isn’t there a phone here?
Turns out the parking lot is down an alleyway, but it’s guarded by a cop:
Wait, the only way to the parking lot is through this ally? Why is the parking lot of a hotel/apartment in the middle of other unrelated buildings? Are the police not letting people go to their cars because of missing people? Is that normal? Do we do that?
I’m sorry what?! Why is that the first thing you think of? Why would you think dumpsters hold the key? How is it that you are correct and there is both a novelty disguise mask and a bloody police uniform in the dumpsters?
Once you get past the cop, he says “Don’t trust anybody shady lookin’”. Within seconds we are accosted by a man saying “GO DOWN THIS DARK ALLEY AND GET ME MY PILLS” I tried to ignore it, but you can’t open your car until you complete this objective. It’s revealed that he has your keys… somehow. I think this is done for comedy. I don’t know.
You drive to a phone (one in a much less populated area than the city we just left), go to a police station only to see everyone dead. You check the jail cell and find this poster:
As much as I do appreciate the shadowy image being the same as the one in the mirror of your apartment, nothing else about this makes any sense. I guess you escaped prison, stayed at the hotel/apartment then killed people? Also the phone number being all 6s… is this a joke? Nothing is recontextualized with this ending, it just feels like someone is filling out a horror Mad-Lib.
I can not figure out the tone of this game and even if I could, none of the weird inconsistencies in logic make sense for horror or for comedy. Everything about Holbrook Hotel is flimsy. The plot has too many logical leaps for me to feel grounded in the situation, the tone switches back and forth between horror and comedy in a confusing and unsatisfying way, and the ending twist serves no purpose other than referencing other endings where you were the bad guy all along.
An honest effort here. Certainly a finished product, but I really don’t know what BareBones was attempting with their story here. It seems to me like the only goal was to make a 3D horror game. A fine and worthwhile goal, but unfortunately doesn’t tend to lead to games that I can recommend.
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: 0%
Time Played: 20 Minutes
Skeeter’s Take:
Good on Sam for actually reading the descriptions to these games - I hardly ever do that. I’m a bad blogger/reviewer/charlatan hack fraud. Thank goodness Sam does though. I would have never guessed that this game was made by a 14 year old. Bare Bones, if you do read this - keep making games, bud. This is incredible work compared to 99% of what we have played and reviewed so far, and you have a ton of time to learn and to grow. You did a great job setting up a specific atmosphere. It’s like Sam said, that chase sequence was very well timed. There are so many good things here - you’ve got a solid foundation. I also appreciate the effort of trying to tell a story without “telling” the story (i.e. leave it for the player to piece together). I feel like I’m writing just to Bare Bones at this point - look I’m trying to glaze over the criticism I’m about to give with a sugary coating. I don’t want to discourage you. I want you to keep making games. I want to see what your next project is. I know people can lie about their age online (I’m 60 years old after all), but if you really did make this at 14, that is incredible. You’ve got an eye for horror ambience. Keep creating. Don’t let shit ass critics who have never made a game in their life tear you down (Hi, that’s me. You’ve made more games than I have.)
Alright, now that my personal letter to Bare Bones is out of the way, I feel like I can now be critical of a neat game that a 14 year old made.
My issues with Holbrook Hotel align very much with Sam’s issues. The logic of this whole game is kind of off its rocker.
Sam already thoroughly covered the “Apartment” vs “Hotel” debacle, so I won’t rehash all of that - just know that I was also confused.
You start out in the elevator to your Apartment Hotel. The elevator buttons allow you to start the game or quit the game:
I want to give props to Bare Bones for this intro - I’m a sucker for “in game” main menus (if you could call it a “menu”). Once you open the door with “play” you are met with the title that is also in game:
I like this trope a lot. I think it’s neat. I don’t know if it’s more “immersive” than a main menu since floating letters aren’t exactly immersive, but I think it’s a fun way to drop the player into the game.
I wasn’t a fan of the “To Do” objective guide at the top of the screen however:
There is only one room in the hallway that you can interact with. We don’t need to be told to “Go to room 297” because the player will naturally end up there with a very small amount of exploration.
But then, as the game went on, I realized that this “To Do” list is actually essential because the logic of this game makes no sense. What the player has to do to progress the story is almost as crazy as a point a click adventure that has you combine two random items like a Ladder and Shoes to progress (looking at you, Broken Age). Without this “To Do” list, the player would be completely lost as to what their next objective is.
After the player is met with the knife wielding maniac in the room down the hall, they are told to go talk with the concierge of the Apartment Hotel. Sam already made the point, but there is no phone anywhere in this building? How is that even possible? Even when people used payphones, they still had landlines in buildings! Is this just a case of a 14 year old not knowing about landline phones, or are there no phones due to plot convenience? “Well, they didn’t have cell phones back in the 80s, so I guess there were just payphones. There aren’t a lot of payphones these days, so they were probably pretty rare - I’d guess one per town, and it’s probably out in the middle of nowhere where people have to drive to access it.” It just doesn’t make much sense.
The player is then prompted to go outside to find the parking lot so they can drive to a payphone. Your car is inexplicably hidden down an alley that’s blocked by probably the absolute worst police officer I have ever seen. Your whole goal is to get to a payphone to call the cops and here is this cop, standing there guarding an alley. If you tell him you were almost murdered, he hits you with the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man Special:
Ok… If this is the law enforcement in this town, why are we trying to call them? It doesn’t matter, because your To Do list now becomes the most important thing in this game. It tells you to “Search the Dumpsters”. Excuse me? Search the dumpsters? Why the fuck would I need to do that? This cop is blocking our way, what could we possibly find in the dumpsters that could help? If this was a “To Do-less” game, we would have no direction pointing us towards the dumpsters. This To Do list becomes the crutch the player needs to use to progress the game. It’s kind of frustrating. On one hand, I don’t love that it’s there. I like having a little more guesswork as a player, and figuring out how to progress without the hand holding is much more rewarding. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t have been able to progress because there is not a world where I would have thought that the next step in this game sequence would be to search the dumpsters.
After searching the dumpsters, you find a Groucho Marx disguise and a bloody police uniform and head back to the cop. The cop, seemingly doubling down on his position as “worst cop ever”, looks at Groucho Marx wearing a bloody police uniform and waves him right in. Maybe he has a serious case of face blindness, but Jesus, who vetted this guy to be a cop? Probably no one. He probably also found his police uniform in a dumpster and threw that shit on. There are no rules in this world.
After making it past the alley, you are met with a drug addict stuck on the other side of a fence who begs you to get him his medication. If the “To Do” list had not prompted me to “Find Medication”, I would have happily walked to my car without a second thought. But since it told me to go looking for the medication, I did that and SURPRISE the drug addict somehow has your car keys. I didn’t even know I was missing my car keys. I might have, had I gone to the car first and tried the door. That might have even prompted me to go back and explore the area for the drugs. Instead I was told what “To Do”, so the element of surprise was undermined. Again, how he got my keys is neither here nor there. No idea how that happened.
After contributing to the Opioid Crisis, you make it to your car and drive out to the middle of nowhere to find the single payphone in the town. You call the cops, report the murder and the dialogue stops half-way through implying bad things have happened. You drive to the station, and sure enough, the single cop they have working there is dead. You find a missing person’s poster in a cell full of blood and it’s YOU!!!
I like horror that doesn’t spell everything out for you. I’m ok with some esoteric endings and I don’t even need answers for everything, but I do need something to latch on to. A good twist ending should recontextualize everything you just saw up until that point, and put the final puzzle piece together for you - not make you more confused the longer you think about it. What exactly is the implication of the missing poster? Is it simply just there to imply that you are dead? Or since it’s within the prison cell are we supposed to believe that you are the killer? Either of these answers don’t really work for me, and it’s hard to piece a narrative together from this. My best guess for narrative is this:
Killer is detained in the local town prison. Killer breaks out and kills cop. Killer steals cop uniform and a groucho marx disguise to help him lay low and not be identified. He makes it into the city and ditches the bloody cop uniform and disguise in the dumpsters. Here’s where my theory starts to fall apart. We know that the player and the guy who was standing at the concierge desk are both missing:
So, they had to have been gone long enough for the local police to investigate. Plus, there’s the room across the hall from yours with the caution tape implying there was an investigation. If this is the case, then there is no way the killer could have escaped from the police station and then committed the murders, since the police would be preoccupied with the Police Station attack. Perhaps the Killer was caught after the first couple murders and what we see was his escape after the murders? That still doesn’t explain how you ended up dead, since you still have to be there to witness when he breaks in again? Are you supposed to be a ghost? Are you really missing or have you just not left your apartment in 4 months despite friends inviting you out every weekend?
The more I try to explain this, the more I don’t think I can. I think there might not be an answer to the narrative. It might not go that deep.
There are some great things in here, as well as some confusing logic. It’s a hell of a project for a 14 year old (if that is true). Bare Bones, If I were to be more constructive with the feedback, I’d say to try to see if you can prompt the player without the To Do list next time, and if you can’t, the gameplay logic might be too confusing. I want you to keep making games. You’ve got potential, kid!
Also, apartment/hotel PTAC units are nowhere near this big:
BYYEEEE
Recommend: No
Replay Percentage Chance: 1%
Time Played: 25 Minutes
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