When Two Horizons and Focus Entertainment’s Hotel Renovator was released, I was excited by it but quickly put off. The renovator genre such as your House Flippers and its ilk all have certain amenities that make the more boring parts a bit easier or more enjoyable. Parts of Hotel Renovator feel cumbersome, lacking refinement, and maybe just a few oddities to make it “original” that feel like a step in the wrong direction. All of this makes it sound like Hotel Renovator is bad, but the “Mostly Positive” reviews do account for something.

You play as a wannabe interior designer (in this economy?) who just so happens to have been given control of renovating a whole hotel. Too bad there isn’t a whole basement full of guns and women in a 40s-style call center putting hits out on Jardani Jovonovich. Jokes about turning the hotel into the New York branch of The Continental aside, you can practically do that exact thing, as long as you don’t mind painting some ceilings with unicorn murals and bathrooms with 15 sinks. Like most of the renovation genre, the point is to give you quite a bit of freedom but also provide you with a hint of direction.

Storywise, there was something about a vampire called Vlad who lives in the basement and from there, you are basically given free rein to do whatever you want. Arguably a little too heavy on giving direction, which the majority of is to force you into voiced-story elements. In terms of writing, Hotel Renovator isn’t going to unleash a whole new perspective on the world, but what it does is serviceable for the exact game Hotel Renovator is, another podcast game. My favorite genre of “I hate the world, I need to drown it out and enjoy something.”

On the surface, the gameplay of Hotel Renovator is certainly similar to most in the genre that we’ve played plenty of. Including things like Ship Graveyard Simulator 2, both House Flippers, and so on. However, what I think quickly put pay to my wanting to enjoy Hotel Renovator upon its release (and making me forget about it for a while) is the amount of trash you have to clean up and how you deal with it initially. I’ll stick my neck out and say that in any given room, you’ll find that there may be anything from 50-150 pieces of trash to discard.

Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Well, you can pick up and move the trash around with a simple left click, but to dispose of it you have to hold the left mouse button. Now you see the tiring monotonous gameplay becoming not only boring but also quite annoying: Every disposal takes a second or three too long. Eventually, there are ways around it, and you can get rid of dirty, discarded, ugly, cobwebbed, and unusable furniture, but it takes a while to get there and no one tells you about the ability to do so. Where House Flipper has a trash bag, I use a sledgehammer.

Though unlike a man that spits water over wrestling fans, I had to put a shift in at the “fill out this quota” style of renovation school. Be it the lobby, the hallways, or even the rooms themselves, you are given several tasks as tracked on the right with a few words or symbols to tell you what to do. Sometimes those quotas are certain styles or certain color-themes. Though often you’ll be interrupted by Sandra, your woman at the front desk telling you of noisy guests, someone wanting a special item(s), burst pipes, broken elevators, dirty rooms, and of course, a chicken that wants to play Street Craps in the hallway.

Ok, it isn’t street craps, but it certainly is a chicken. I assume it is the same chicken that keeps destroying some rooms and leaving golden eggs on the beds. No, Hotel Renovator isn’t taking itself too seriously, and that isn’t really where I have many problems. In fact, I found myself quite enjoying that for the most part. The gameplay once you’re able to get into the swing of it is quite relaxing and the occasional interruption to clean up a room, collect the wads of cash left as tips, fix pipes, and so on all lends itself to breaking up the monotony.

It would be nice to maybe turn down the frequency of certain random events, similar to Gas Station Simulator. The Ghostbusters reference only goes so far, and the bit of gameplay for that segment isn’t exactly explained, so you’ll go to Steam discussions. Let me head you off at the pass: If you’re looking to trap the ghost in Hotel Renovator, you have to go into the furniture build menu, open the special menu (the star), and from there you’ll find a small hexagonal shaped box called “Ghost Trap.” Place that, use the vacuum cleaner’s special ability, and sort of drag Casper the destructive ghost toward the box.

Quite repetitive, certain random events get in the way, sometimes too much and too frequently. However, that’s only the iceberg of a complaint about gameplay. It seems ever since the mid-2010s the entire industry has had an obsession with radial menus that let you pick certain things. In Hotel Renovator’s case, it’s the decoration tools, upgrade/bookings menu, and the destruction/cleaning tools. None of that is really the problem.

Furniture, on the other hand, very much is a bit of a problem that feels like a step backward in the progression we’ve had in other such renovation titles. Much like the menu for flooring, wall, and ceiling coverings, you have a small bar to scroll through that shows a couple of pictures. Some are direct and tell you exactly what is in them, such as ceiling lighting or beds. Others are the DLC theming items, which also have separate lighting, bedding, cabinets, and so on all in the same submenu. I hope you can remember where everything is, because there is no search function.

Sometimes this option works, especially when you are building the gym on the second level (or third depending on where you count from). Other times you’ll get frustrated trying to make a room look nice and get the burning desire to go play anything more relaxing, like Celeste or Resident Evil 4 VR. Truth is, I do like Hotel Renovator when it is not asking me to clear out a large room filled with more garbage than the political ads we’ve seen the back of for another 6-12 months. The problem is that it wants to interject itself a little too much to show how different it is from House Flipper and so on.

The furniture menu is clunky at best and cumbersome half the time. The random events, though sometimes breaking up the repetitiveness of clearing out rooms, can often be too frequent to generally be wanting for another one anytime soon. The destruction of trash does get addressed with upgrades, but very much after an hour or a few (depending on how many walls you smack your face off of in frustration) which makes playing laborious.

Despite playing for more than 10 hours (finally), I think it is also worth noting that the looks of static shots are not complimented by a solid frame rate. When I first played Hotel Renovator I was playing on a PC with a 30 series RTX, with an i5 and 16GB of RAM, meeting or exceeding the minimum or recommended specs suggested on Steam. Often met with dips to the 30s, though this was on launch.

Playing again this past week, this time on a 40 series RTX, i7, 32GB of RAM, and blowing right past the recommended specs, “Epic” settings still show dips. Smaller, less frequent dips to the high 40s and low 50s, with an occasional drop to 30 in elevators. Not a terrible performance, but for the look and the PC producing it, something about the performance isn’t great. For reflections similar to that of a PS2-PS3 game and reality TV star-like dead eye stare from NPCs, a rare constant 60 is a little disappointing.

Ultimately, if you’re the type to get excited when you can be very granular while designing houses in The Sims, you’ve got a decent building/renovating game in Hotel Renovator. With no snapping tools or other alignment options, it can make eye-balling frustrating. This alongside a few other complaints can make Hotel Renovator tiring very quickly and makes the desire to play disappear for quite some time. However, when you can look past all of that, get a couple of podcasts or TV shows to second-screen, you’ve got a good baseline to design John Wick’s Disney Princess Room.

A PC review copy of Hotel Renovator was provided by Focus Interactive for this review.

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Hotel Renovator

$24.99

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• Somewhat granular when designing rooms.
• Random events that are (sometimes) worth breaking up gameplay.

Cons

• Less than preferred performance, especially on "Epic" settings.
• The menus to select items are clunky and cumbersome.
• Those early gameplay mechanics are very off-putting.