Hotel Hustle

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Hotel Hustle, released in 2024 on Nintendo Switch, is a multiplayer-focused Arcade-style game much in the same vein as games like the Overcooked series, where players take the role of one of a pair of anthropomorphic racoons cleaning and receiving guests for various hotels, with players trying to get as many rooms ready for guests as possible within a time limit.

Before going on, let’s take out the trash before we get to the rest of the housecleaning here. Like many games published by RedDeer.Games, this is one of those cases where the game at the center of this was cut up into pieces so those pieces could be offered to players as free DLC in order to justify releasing bundles of the base game and DLC on the eShop in as many configurations as possible. As of this writing, there are 11 different versions of this game on the eShop. Know that they are all identical, you just need to download whatever free DLC didn’t come with the version you got and you have all the content available for this game. Ugh.

However, despite this gross exploitative behavior, there is still at least potential for this game to be good, since some RedDeer games are… but it’s not. This game takes the Overcooked formula and removes anything fun and interesting from it.

Each time a guest stays in a hotel room, there are a random selection of multiple things wrong with it you must address before the room can be used again, most requiring a different tool. These tools are mostly kept on a janitor’s cart, but you’re not able to move this cart, nor can you carry multiple tools at a time, so you’re stuck just going back and forth from the room to the cart to the room to the cart, maybe occasionally making a stop-off at a chute to drop off garbage or dirty linens.

The game does later introduce other things into the mix like room service, but largely you’ll just be going back and forth to a room to tidy up its various problems, then once done heading over to the counter to give the room to a customer. Over and over and over again. No real choice, no creativity to tackle problems in your own way, no joy.

The game even does a bad job conveying information to the player – the camera is so zoomed-in you can’t see the whole level, and there’s no map, so you’ll need to waste one playthrough of a level just exploring it to see where everything is. And even then, it’s difficult to tell at a glance what rooms need what cleaning services (there’s a checklist at the bottom, but this isn’t the best for picturing where these things are spatially in the level).

What’s more, this game is poorly-balanced. After the first stage, it becomes virtually impossible to get three stars on rooms as a single player: there just isn’t enough time to get everything done before customer patience bars have depleted. With an extra player, you have a bit more ability to get things done in a timely manner, but then you’re making someone else join you for this tedious game… and why would you do that to them? Oh, and if you want to play with four players like in games like Overcooked… well, ya’ can’t, this game only supports two.

If there’s one area the game gets right, it’s the presentation, which uses a combination of 3D visuals and adorable hand-drawn 2D characters that looks quite nice, and it’s backed by a whimsical soundtrack that works well enough, though the main menu theme sounds suspiciously similar to Super Mario Odyssey’s excellent Steam Gardens theme. And even this nice element is soured by the absurdly-long loading screens this game has between each level, and even between the main menu and level select screen.

So there it is, even the one thing Hotel Hustle gets right, it’s partly because it copies another game, and even that is marred by nasty loading times. It has the core ideas of something like Overcooked, but lacks the player freedom to approach the goals creatively, the balance is off, and overall this game just feels tedious and frustrating, not fun. I do not recommend it.

tl;dr – Hotel Hustle is an Arcade-style game where players take the roles of anthropomorphic racoons cleaning and receiving guests at a hotel. The core formula here is similar to games like Overcooked, but this game is just tedious, lacking any meaningful player choice, poorly communicating information to the player, and lacking anything I would call “fun”. Don’t bother with this one.

Grade: D

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