Hotel Renovator | PC Review

Sometimes it’s just nice to sit down, boot a game up, and chill out for a few hours. The growing popularity of sim games in the last few years has provided a wealth of different experiences that allow players to escape into another person’s shoes. Whether that’s flipping houses, power washing, or mowing lawns, gamers have plenty of options. Two Horizon’s Hotel Renovator is the latest entry into this ever-growing genre. The sheer amount of content in this title makes this an enticing game; however, depending on what you’re looking for, it may or may not be the sim for you.

Starting at Square One

In Hotel Renovator’s meaty story mode, you are tasked with completely renovating a hotel that your Grandpa Roy has let fall into neglect. After selecting an assistant from five candidates (which includes a robot) you’re off to the races.You’re limited to just renovating the first floor and lobby at the beginning, but you’ll gain access to the other floors after progressing the story. Each room/area has a checklist of tasks that need completing and a certain number of specific items that need to be placed in the space you’re given. You have a wonderful amount of freedom with how you choose to decorate these areas, though.

The options for furniture, flooring, wall coverings, etc., are almost staggering in the sheer number of them. Coupled with being able to choose different patterns and colors for most of these, you won’t be suffering for choice. I loved this aspect of the game, and tailoring each room to my liking was immensely satisfying. You’ll occasionally have to make concessions for certain guests, such as painting the walls a certain color or including X number of a particular item, but you can change these after the guest leaves, if that is your wish. 

Brick by Brick

As you progress through the campaign, you’ll gain access to better tools and services. You start out with a crowbar and a broom to help you clean the rooms, but you’ll soon gain a vacuum cleaner and a sledgehammer to speed things along. By the end of the story, I even had robotic vacuums and dynamite to help me clean. These are a major boon; you just need to have patience to be able to unlock them. There are also multiple ways to cover the walls and floors. Unfortunately, this isn’t communicated to you in the game and I had to mistakenly press the Q key to learn this fact.

Speaking of pressing keys, at the time of this review Hotel Renovator does not have controller support and it’s not recommended to play on Steam Deck. You use the WASD or directional keys to move, press Q to switch between different decorating methods, and selecting design options is achieved by right-clicking on the mouse and using the scroll wheel to choose each specific item you want. It takes a bit to get used to these controls, especially if you’re not a big PC gamer. Once you get this control scheme down pat, though, it becomes second nature.

The Downsides to This Hotel

I did have some gripes during my playtime, unfortunately. I just wasn’t a fan of the emergent events that would randomly occur while I was in the middle of renovating a room. Sure, occasionally finding a lost wallet, fixing a broken water pipe, or dice battling a rogue chicken (yes, you read that correctly) isn’t a major diversion the first couple of times they occur. After the tenth time of these popping up, though, it became more of a chore than a fun addition. I just wanted to be in a zen mode, but these regularly pulled me out of that relaxed state.

Also, don’t get me started on taking the elevator in this game. Navigating between floors, which you have to do often because of the aforementioned random events, is a pain. Each elevator ride takes roughly 30 seconds, which is just far too long. A patch was released to fix this during my playthrough but it didn’t actually remedy this issue. The patch also caused my game to glitch and caused some of my rooms to lose their renovations that I had spent close to an hour completing. Most of the time this was fixed simply by exiting and re-entering the room, but not always.

The Final Check-In

Hotel Renovator is a sim game that will appeal to many, but the pros and cons need to be weighed. The campaign is meaty and took me roughly 12 hours to complete. The plethora of design options is absolutely incredible and the game always ran at a smooth 60 fps for me. The inclusion of a sandbox mode for those that wish to build their very own hotel from scratch also adds extra bang for your buck. Your mileage may vary depending on your willingness to wade through a few bugs and your tolerance of random events constantly occurring. I really wanted to love this title more than I did, but I can see this being an addictive title for many players. If you’re a fan of games such as House Flipper, this has enough to keep you invested if you choose to dive into it.

To hear me talk more about Hotel Renovator, be sure to listen to the March 14, 2023 episode of The Gaming Outsider podcast around the 1:05:35 time stamp.

This review is based on a PC copy of Hotel Renovator provided by Sandbox Strategies for coverage purposes. It is currently exclusive to this platform but will be coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S at a later date.