Hotel Story review: there must be more to do at a hotel than this

Hotels are hives of activities. They’re busy enough when viewed from the outside—can you imagine what they must be like to handle on the management end? Hotel Story is a management sim from Singapore-based studio Happy Labs, and while it’s a good, old-fashioned management sim, it misses out on capturing the hectic pace of hotel management.

Hotel Story puts you in charge of managing your very own hotel. Your implied goal is to build it up so as to create a great holiday experience for your guests.

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Each facility you put down in Hotel Story adds to your profit margin. These range from internet cafes, to laundromats, to bedrooms. Everything your guests use in this game contributes to your total income, so, as with all management games, you’ll want to focus on building more—and better—facilities fast.

Except that in this game, you can’t. Hotel Story keeps to a slow pace from the very beginning, limiting you with just two workers and very little cash. Most freemium mobile management sims are very generous when you start, offering you premium currency and allowing the player to level quickly so he gets immersed in the game.

Not so with Hotel Story. When I built my first hotel room, I had to wait a full five minutes before I could do anything else! Building absolutely anything requires the use of a worker, never mind if he immediately throws down a shrub or a tiled walkway; if he’s building you a toilet, he can’t plant a shrub for you.

There is a quick fix to this; completing certain tasks wins you loads of diamonds at the start, and these can be used to give your hotel an immediate boost because they can be used to finish construction quickly. However, players aren’t blatantly told they can redeem their diamonds, and it’s up to the player to figure this out on his own. As you can see from the pace of the game’s introduction, native gameplay has been designed to be resolutely slow, and to be honest, this almost made me stop playing within the first day.

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That being said, there is a good, old-fashioned management sim in Hotel Story if you’re patient enough. Hotel Story’s hotel management extends beyond putting down facilities and watching them being used. You also have to keep on upgrading these facilities to extract more income, and you can watch your guests move in and out, and level up. Occasionally, these guests find items, which you can use to provide a permanent buff to the rooms or facilities’ stats. Eventually, as your hotel expands, you’ll also be able to build more levels. But you need a lot of patience to achieve all of this.