This game tries so hard to be like Gone Home, Firewatch, or What Remains of Edith Finch, but ultimately butchers it's sensitive subject matter (no pun intended).

Firstly, I loved everything about the hotel. Graphically and audio-wise, it feels amazing, and you can absolutely tell immediately from the atmosphere that the game is a homage to The Shining. Exploring it, trying to figure out the layout at first, and then later on finding secret passageways and unexplored rooms to continue the story in, was also incredibly cool in a Luigi's Mansion kind of way.

However, this is more of a shame than anything, because the rest of the game does not make good enough use of the building. The first thing that stuck out to me upon finishing the game was that it doesn't even use all the rooms. Why include the Ski Room or the Arcade Room (there are more examples), but then never give the player a reason to visit them, while some rooms like the Garage and Master Suite are visited repeatedly?

The gameplay is literally just walking (excruciatingly slowly) around the hotel in first-person view, occasionally clicking to pick up an item, open a hidden door or turn the lights back on. Once you do it, there's usually a conversation which you can't skip and where you have a time-limit to choose options that don't really fit what the characters are actually saying, before you're teleported abruptly back to your room in the Master Suite.

The story starts off interesting, but gradually becomes more and more convoluted, with the main characters going through wild and unjustified personality swings throughout, before ending up completely off-the-rails and painting a paedophile as a misunderstood mentor figure. The closest thing I'd liken it to is BBC's Sherlock, a bunch of twists and turns that just leave you with an unsatisfying story, unrelatable characters, and more questions than answers.

The story is told through constant unskippable phone conversations, where tone and level of familiarity between the characters seems to vary randomly as if the conversations were in the wrong order. Although the phone is a cool idea and the voice-actors are skilled, there are missing words in the script (as well as typos on the books) which are really jarring. Combined with the overall story, it definitely feels as though there was a rushed rewrite.

Overall, I would say that the atmosphere and world were certainly evocative, with really amazing graphics and sound-design, but the story and especially the ending needed a lot more work to make the plot-twists more believable and satisfying. The characters were relatable at first, but did not develop in a coherent way, and the gameplay simply needed more polish so that it doesn't just feel like holding the W key down and waiting.

TL:DR - Don't waste your money on this one. Just watch someone else play it for the exact same experience. Then buy Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch instead.