Skull Hotel Review (PC)

Forget the pillow chocolates and giraffe-shaped bath towels; Skull Hotel neglects lavishly traditional hospitality and seamless check-in experiences. Here, the curtains don’t match the drapes; the guests consume the curtains, and they hide behind the drapes waiting for their next victim to pass through with a bucket and mop. And in case you haven’t put two and two together yet, that bucket-and-mop-sporting victim is you. Did I forget to mention that it’s also your job, to mindlessly sweep the inner boroughs of a monster-infested motel? Yeah — Skull Hotel is that sort of clean-up simulator. Eat your heart out, House Flipper.

To put you in the picture, Skull Hotel is a short, roughly ten-minute-long psychological horror in which you, the cleaner of a rough-and-ready establishment, are given the monumental responsibility of excavating hotel rooms of all their dirt, grime, and blood-stained duvets. But, there’s a catch: each room that you enter in Skull Hotel is also a home to a guest of some sort—a teething creature who, true to their hospitable nature, prefers blood lust to good old-fashioned room service. It’s your job here, then, to carry out one simple job: clean the rooms, and avoid the clutches of whoever (or whatever) stalks the shadows. Easier said than done, mind you.

Curious to learn more about Skull Hotel and its relentlessly ravenous inhabitants? Then go ahead and throw on your lanyard, grab a bucket and mop, and stick with as we begin a graveyard shift.

Room Service for the Dead

Your goal in Skull Hotel is a simple one. It’s so simple, in fact, that if you can complete it without bumping into any issues with the guests, you ought to be able to clock out in as little as ten minutes. The only thing preventing you from cutting your shift short, of course, is the fact that the guests don’t want you to breeze through the routine. In a rogue-like fashion, if you get caught by one of the guests during your nightly round-up, the shift essentially begins from scratch, meaning, to fully complete the game, you shovel through all of the objectives without touching gloves with whoever decides to spring out from beneath the woodwork at any given moment. Again, a lot easier said than done.

To say that Skull Hotel is an easy game just wouldn’t me true, as it does in fact feature some tenderly difficult moments and unavoidable confrontations with the in-game inhabitants. Moreover, as you cannot physically tackle your opponents in the game, you essentially have all but one choice available at your disposal: carefully navigate the corridors, and use a well-oiled combination of tactical manoeuvres and mind-mapping skills to evade their grasp whilst you go about your daily activities. In other words, die, fail, and die again, until eventually the cogs align and the process becomes somewhat easier to work through. Is there fun to be found in that? Yes and no, though I suppose it all boils down to a rather simple question, really, and that is, how many times are you happy to lose your life to the same inescapable climax? For me, about thirty minutes was enough.

Scrubbing the Bottom of the Barrel

Skull Hotel touts “realistic” visuals, but doesn’t necessarily deliver on that front. Similar to your average swathe of indie psychological horror titles on the market, the world itself doesn’t stretch much beyond the signature tropes and thematic set pieces of a fairly generic husk. By that I mean, asset-wise, you wouldn’t struggle to pluck out a handful of familiar items from the mix and compare them to another game of its kind. But that’s just nit-picking for the sake of nit-picking. Even still, Skull Hotel just doesn’t look that great, to begin with.

Although Skull Hotel does lack in visual appeal and originality, it does, on the other hand, capture and maintain a good amount of suspense in its atmosphere and frequent cat-and-mouse-like chase sequences. Are they petrifyingly good? Eh, they’re not not unsettling, though I’d also argue that, after witnessing a monster jolt out from beneath the woodwork a couple of times, the novelty sort of wears thin and doesn’t leave much else to the imagination. Again, perhaps this is me merely prodding the hive for the sake of it. That said, like all formulaic horrors, a good scare is often marred by a routine follow-up that’s barely a fraction as effective. Sadly, the same thing sort of applies here.

Verdict

Given its affiliation with a universally accepted free-to-play model, I find myself willing to give Skull Hotel a couple of extra notches on the bedpost. That said, there are a couple of things that make this particular overnight affair a little less accommodating that most supernatural-psychological horrors of its kind—a lack of direction or a compelling narrative, being two of its shallowest downfalls.

For a ten-minute experience, and for a game that offers an excruciatingly evasive endgame that doesn’t come cheap, I will say that you could, in all fairness, scrape an hour or so out of Skull Hotel. As for whether or not you will actually want to return to the same bedsheets and bucket-mop duo, however, is another question. Sure enough, there are numerous jump scares to grovel at here, and not to mention a solid handful of rooms to explore and bits and pieces to nibble at to satisfy that alluring hunger for some good old-fashioned atmospheric horror. It doesn’t boast the “realistic” visuals that it mentions in its description, I’ll admit. That said, I’ve certainly seen countless other indie psychological horrors step up to the plate and fail to make an inning. And I don’t think Skull Hotel falls into that formation, truly.

To cut a long story short, if you are on the hunt for something a little “different”—a short but equally immersive romp through a haunted locale with a generously packaged roster of creatures, then it’s highly likely that you’ll enjoy scrubbing the backboards of this twisted vessel of hospitality for an hour or two.