Sunset Motel Review (PC)

Scoot over, House Flipper — there’s a new allotment in town: Sunset Motel—a hospitable, frivolous, and grandiose place that, while not overtly pretentious or submerged in champagne showers and bottomless brunches of coq au vin, has the potential to become the next go-to spot for fledgling vacationers. Well, that’s what the brochure says—the brochure that I created in an outdated version of PowerPoint thirty seconds after chasing the vermin away, I’ll admit.

Here, you won’t find the finest Egyptian cotton stuffed into your pillow, nor will you enter a luxurious eatery where the eggs come served on charcoal slates with matching white gold cutlery to embellish the aesthetic of the dish. The lights will flicker from time to time, and the room service won’t stretch much beyond the basic level of a cheeseburger on a plastic plate. But there’s hope. In my eyes, Sunset Motel can and will amount to a lot more than this generic roadside, eerily vacant Norman Bates-like establishment. With a lick of fresh paint and a good old-fashioned montage of breaking old windows and installing new structural elements to elevate these sturdy foundations, it will become a major staple in the hospitality sector. Or at least, that’s what the bank baron thinks.

I feel as if I know this trade like the back of my hand by now. It wasn’t all that long ago, in fact, that I was wildly pummeling my way through a paper-thin wall with a stone sledgehammer, tearing down one boneless plot to erect the framework of another. Oh, I’ve seen this scenario numerous times before, and so, in my mind, there isn’t a great difference between building a home and restoring a motel. Boy, I would love to be wrong. Please, let me be wrong.

A Five Star “Service”

I mentioned House Flipper for a reason: the game was, much like it was the renovation-centric project that paved the way for countless others of its kind, a public textbook for its readers to extract information from. And unsurprisingly, that same textbook was used to establish the basis for Sunset Motel. In a similar vein as the cult two-piece series, the game invites you to bulldoze your way through an old husk of a business, renovate its derelict bones, and slowly transform its seemingly humble roots into a full-fledged bastion of joy for holiday makers and tourists.

It starts out with a simple chore: remove the rubble and grime from the rooms, and invest in the usual embellishments that you would find in your bog-standard motel—sofas, beds, coffee tables, dining utensils, and so on and so forth. As you begin to lay the foundations for these rooms, new tasks become available—checking in guests, fetching ingredients for the kitchen, expanding the motel to incorporate wards like restaurants, spas, and other facilities, and keeping tabs on the general cleanliness of the building, which involves scrubbing pictures, removing trash, and even extinguishing the occasional fire. And at the heart of all of this is a simple loop: earn money, unlock items, and evolve your skills and the boundaries of your motel.

Sunny Side Up

As with any sandbox-like business simulation game that leans on a lot of those slow-burning stepping stone chores, Sunset Motel doesn’t really “take off” until you find the means to earn a decent wage. It’s a painfully slow and often tedious preliminary phase that doesn’t offer a great deal by adding any lavish incentives for you to pursue. But that’s a double-edged sword, as a lot of the “fun” tends to orbit the initial portions of the development process—cleaning floors, laying down furniture, and giving decaying materials that overdue spit shine. Again though, like House Flipper, or perhaps even PowerWash Simulator, if you enjoy those daunting tasks and grafting for penniless rewards, then it’s unlikely that the process of building a motel will strike you as being overly strenuous. Still, it’s worth pointing out that, while the latter portions of the game are more sprightly  — it’s a slow game.

The good news is, with so much to feast on, it’s only very rarely that you find yourself at a loss for odd jobs to do around the motel. For example, once you have successfully checked your guests in, you might find that the kitchen has no more eggs, which means that you may have to go out and visit the supermarket, or tend to other matters elsewhere to earn a few extra bucks to fund an entirely different venture. The world still moves on regardless of your whereabouts or your current objective, but the fact still remains: your to-do list is always sourcing new ways to expand the page. And that’s great, because nobody likes to twiddle thumbs, right?

Cue the Dark Cloud

So far, I’ve dressed Sunset Motel up to be something of an excellent, faultless simulation game. And yet, with every sunset there’s a dark cloud, it seems — especially in this endeavor, where such clouds are often draped in bottomless menus, irritating narration, and a quest-based system that refrains from granting you all that much freedom outside of the tasks that are directly in front of you. Alas, this isn’t the creative sandbox that it could be. It has a lot for you to do, for sure, but it’s also linear and on rails for the most part, meaning, if you’d much prefer to do things in your time, then you might be in a for a shock with just how little flexibility you have here.

The audiovisual aspect is another thing. It’s an indie game with the usual trimmings of a simple business simulation vessel, which means that NPCs are wooden and without any defining characteristics, menus are oddly recognizable, and the mechanics are sprinkled with the standard janky overlays and clutter. That being said, Sunset Motel certainly isn’t the worst of the bunch. In most cases, it makes an effort to flow through the motions and lather polish over the finer details, like implementing furniture, serving guests, and adding general embellishments to the structural design of the motel.

Verdict

As the saying goes, if you’ve played one version of House Flipper, then you’ve more than likely played ‘em all. And I’ll be honest, if you removed the room service and general catering tasks from the platter, that statement wouldn’t be all far from the truth. But, that isn’t to say that Sunset Motel is a bad game. As it turns out, it’s actually a pretty solid construction sim with no short supply of engaging features. However, it’s the lack of freedom that it keeps from you that dampens the overall experience—the fact that it doesn’t allow you the opportunity to build on your own accord, but do whatever is asked of you at the time. It’s still a fun journey, and it still has a lot of satisfying moments for you to unlock, I’ll admit. But there’s just that one thing missing.

Of course, if you’re all for the idea of rifling through a familiar cycle of cleaning, earning, and upgrading, then there’s a strong possibility that you will enjoy a solid portion of what Sunset Motel has to offer its guests. It’s House Flipper without the added luxury of being able to progress on your own terms. If that doesn’t bother you, and you don’t mind an A-to-B career path, then you should feel right at home here.