Hotel Architect – First Impressions of A Fun New Hotel Sim

Hotel Architect is a business simulation game that is currently in early access. It’s also free to play until February 2nd, so you can go download it on Steam and try it out now. However, is it worth the time and hard drive space that it will take to play it? Well, I just started playing it, so let’s take a look at my first impressions of the game.

What is Hotel Architect?

Developed by Pathos Interactive, Hotel Architect is a business sim where you can – you guessed it – build and maintain your own hotel. Fans of classic sims like Roller Coaster Tycoon and Two-Point Hospital should feel right at home with this game. While creating your own hotel is what draws you into the game, you’ll spend a lot of the game worrying about money and keeping your guests happy. Oh, there are also critics who can and will slam your hotel. 

So far, I’ve been playing the tutorial level, and right at the beginning of the tutorial, I ran into an issue that almost made me stop playing. The first thing the tutorial teaches you is how to move the camera around. For each step in the tutorial, you have to perform the directed action before you can move on to the next step. So, far, so good, but there’s a problem.

See, the third step in the tutorial is to zoom the camera in and out, and the friendly tutorial assistant instructed me to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. I have a laptop computer with a touchpad mouse and no mouse wheel. I tried pressing both mouse buttons at once, using the arrow keys, and everything else I could think of, but nothing worked. I was on the verge of turning off the game and quitting because I couldn’t get past the tutorial.

Fortunately, I took a look at the settings and discovered that yes, there was an alternate way to zoom in and out with the keyboard. I tried it in the tutorial, and it worked, but some other players with touchpad mice might not look at the settings, and they might also think they can’t advance past the tutorial. I would recommend that the developers add instructions for zooming with the keyboard to the tutorial. 

Okay, I Got Past the Zooming, But Now What?

So, what is the actual game like? Well, you start off with building a bedroom, of course. Right at the beginning, you’ll notice a difference between this game and most other business sims. In most business sims, you build an item, and you immediately get the item as soon as you place it. Here, you place an item, but that only sets up a blueprint. You have to call in construction workers to actually build stuff, and depending on the number of workers and the complexity of the stuff they’re building, this can take a while.

In addition, rooms in your hotel have to be zoned. Zones include bedrooms, restaurants, gyms, and more. Each zone has a required set of items that you need to include in order for the room to be functional. For example, bedrooms must, of course, have beds. Players who like to torment guests in business sims will probably be disappointed when they can’t annoy guests by giving them bedrooms without beds. 

There are also a variety of objectives to complete in each hotel, and completing them will reward you with different decorations, wallpapers, or fun items. Of course, some of these objectives are harder than others. One of the objectives in the tutorial level is to attract your first “sporty” type guest, but my first sporty guest still hasn’t shown up, even though I’ve built a gym. 

I’ll Keep Playing Hotel Architect

I grew up spending countless hours on the Roller Coaster Tycoon games, and I love modern indie business sims such as Arcade Tycoon, so Hotel Architect seems to be my kind of game. I’m going to keep playing this over the free weekend, and I’ll be sure to discuss my continued experiences with Hotel Architect in future articles. You can try Hotel Architect out yourself by downloading it from Steam.