You check into a hotel, but no one’s there. Not even at the reception desk. You sign your name, but then the paper disappears. Things only make less sense from there.
The entire structure of the hotel makes no sense. Turn a corner, and suddenly you can see where you were before at the other side of the room, or an impossible corridor that turns in on itself. And what’s that oozing red substance that seems to be everywhere?
Hotel Infinity is a geometrically impossible labyrinth of an escape room, and that’s precisely what makes it one of the best VR experiences I’ve ever had in the medium.
The brainchild of Manifold Garden developer William Chyr and his team at Studio Chyr, Hotel Infinity takes the abstract puzzle exploration of his previous work and implants it into a roomscale VR experience like few others. Indeed, it builds on many of those ideas of impossible spaces and portals to new areas that the game deployed to allow that unique puzzle title to thrive, naturally translating the idea to this very different medium.
Basic techniques that Hotel Infinity employs to make its physically 2×2 meter space feel much larger are not itself new, and you may have experienced the idea before in Tea For God. But how it combines the approach with interesting puzzles makes for a unique experience.
Your reasons for arriving at the hotel are unexplained, but the point once inside is to reach your room, then find a way out. Which, when no corner or object in this space obeys the laws of physics and order you’re used to, is more difficult than it sounds. It’s also incredibly unnerving to never know where you’re going next, witnessing everything from dense corridors to sights of massive hedge mazes and the ever-present glowing neon sign of Hotel Infinity. There’s no dialogue, and there’s barely any music bar the occasional riff and subtle audio cues during puzzles to guide your way. But that doesn’t mean that the game doesn’t raise your heartbeat for its unique atmosphere and the uncertainty over what’s to come.
It’s split into five chapters, each taking you through a set route through the hotel before warping you back to your hotel room and venturing deeper. There are puzzles that must be cleared along the way but beyond some basic math and spatial awareness, these are hardly challenging for anyone with even a base intelligence for these sorts of titles. That’s not the point when taking in this space and discovering (or interpreting in your own terms) the secrets are more important.
For those who lack a 2×2 meter physical space, there is a stationary mode, but I strongly recommend finding the space to play Hotel Infinity how it’s designed to be played. Trust me, as someone living in a Japanese apartment that, while not small, did require a bit of reorganization to make work, I know how challenging this can be if you don’t live in a large place. But it’s worth it. Hotel Infinity is so clearly designed around having the space to make it work that without it, it feels lacking in the spark necessary to get into its many joys under the surface.
If you can find the space, the experience that Hotel Infinity delivers is magical. It’s like a bridge between home VR and the location-based spaces that take advantage of huge, expansive locations to offer a free-roaming experience enhanced by VR. Having experienced many of these in Japan, it’s hard not to see the wonders of being fully transported into a haunted house or location using the tech as you physically, carefully wander the eerie corridors one step at a time. There are many great at-home VR horror experiences or titles in other genres that can transport you to new worlds with more depth. Still, I won’t lie about occasionally wishing I could take that next step myself, and not with a thumbstick.
Hotel Infinity manages to find that happy medium by using impossible space to create the immersive exploratory feel of these commercial VR attractions with a longer adventure, puzzles, and greater possibilities than ever. It’s precisely what makes the roomscale mode of this game such a wonder. Within this 2×2 meter space, corridors are designed in such a way that you can fully walk and duck your way through every area in the game without needing the controllers for anything other than gripping, holding, and interacting with objects or levers in the environment. Walking through this hotel and turning each corridor not knowing what you’ll see next brings an added layer of fear and excitement, and before long you forget where you are. Sure, you don’t need to step over that gap or duck to get through the door; it doesn’t exist, but I bet you will anyhow.
It makes Hotel Infinity one of the most immersive VR games on the market, and a showcase of the technology that should become the standard for showing newcomers what’s possible in VR moving forward. This can also have the opposite effect, though, where every exciting and mind-blowing effect is coupled with moments of genuine terror that feel so much more real when you have to take a step towards them. For that reason, I can’t recommend the later moments of this game to anyone with a major fear of heights. I have a partial and circumstantial fear that manifests when I feel directly in control of whether I can fall from such a height, leaving me genuinely worried traversing some of these later areas.
But isn’t that a testament to just how well this game can transport you by virtue of its free-standing 360-degree movement? The core design of moving within this contained and transforming space is its biggest asset, making this idea possible and bringing the immersive free-roaming VR into the home in a way often impossible for setpiece-driven narrative works.
Sure, some of its puzzles can feel overly simplistic, and it’s a very short adventure that can be cleared in about 2 hours in a single sitting before the battery notification of your headset even buzzes. But when it’s this much of a wonder to explore, that hardly matters.
Hotel Infinity – Final Verdict
Hotel Infinity is a standout example of true room-scale VR, and a must-own for anyone interested in understanding the potential of this medium. Notably, the potential is not merely to be a new way to experience familiar ideas, but to offer experiences only possible in VR. What a revelation of a game this is.
UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.
