Hotel Architect PC Review
Summary: Hotel Architect is a charming, addictive, and occasionally chaotic hotel‑building sim that offers a great mix of creativity and management.
4
Checking In
I do a fair bit of travelling and, for the most part, I’m pretty easily pleased when it comes to where I lay my head at night. In fact, I’m yet to find a hotel abhorrent enough to send me running for the door. On the flip side, I feel like I have a decent understanding of what makes for quality accommodation, so why, dear readers, are my guests so picky in Hotel Architect? I’m out here, creating rooms nicer than most five-star accommodations (and for a fraction of the price, mind), and all I hear is moaning – and don’t get me started on my staff.
Alas, it turns out hotel management isn’t quite as easy as I thought it might be, but luckily, Hotel Architect is a well-crafted management sim that keeps the experience bucket loads of fun, regardless of what your guests think. If you’ve played the likes of Two Point Hospital, you’ll recognise the structure immediately; you have your funds, your hotel, your staff, and your guests – now it’s up to you to keep it ticking over. Just like the Two Point franchise, Hotel Architect does the whole sim thing with a sense of whimsy and gleeful silliness that kept me smiling constantly, even during the rare occasions it doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of some of its contemporaries.
But those moments are, indeed, fleeting. Regardless of whether you opt for the freedom of sandbox mode or pay a visit to one of the six locations in the Hotel Architect‘s campaign, you’ll notice just how well-crafted the building tools are. It’s a phenomenally intuitive experience, built on maximum flexibility, allowing you to build and decorate entire floors with ease. Want to change all the wallpaper on the same floor, for example? Just pick a new one, hold shift and watch as your builders get to work redecorating the whole lot in one go, no messing around selecting each wall individually. It’s just as quick to upgrade things, too. For example, unlock fancy new furniture, and you’ll find a handy ‘upgrade all’ option that automatically swaps out old stuff for their newer counterparts, saving you from the busywork. It might not sound like much, but the game is brimming with helpful little tricks that make Hotel Architect an absolute breeze to play.
And decorating your hotel is far from inconsequential, as ensuring both the rooms and communal areas look their part is key to keeping each guest type happy. From sunworshippers to high society, your hotels will need to cater for people from all walks of life, which is good, because Hotel Architect is brimming with a solid variety of items and styles that allow you to create anything from budget-friendly rooms to sleek, sprawling penthouses. The more I played, the more I discovered I could do too. While some of my early builds were overly simple one-beds that lacked an en-suite, it wasn’t long before I was building third-floor luxury apartments, complete with their very own balconies with hot tubs, and top-floor bars overlooking the New York skyline. There’s something deeply satisfying about placing furniture, adjusting layouts, and watching your hotel evolve from a bare concrete shell into something that might actually earn a five‑star review, and equally, watching your guests give feedback that shows your hard work is paying off.
That said, of course, guests have needs and opinions – and they love to share both. If you’ve worked in hospitality, you’ll feel a deep, painful recognition with much of the feedback you’ll receive, from guests not being happy with hotel amenities, or having the very fair complaint that their sleep has been interrupted by a worker letting themselves into their room. You’re constantly adjusting, improving, and occasionally questioning your life choices as you try to keep everyone happy. Staff are equally needy, constantly complaining about pay, their lack of training, and tiredness. If you’re familiar with management-type sims, none of this will be new to you, and thankfully, Hotel Architect is relatively forgiving when someone kicks up a stink because they have to walk marginally further to access a vending machine, and I never found managing people particularly taxing or overly frustrating.
In fact, Hotel Architect rarely fumbles. Yes, it’s not a bug-free experience, with the occasional clipping and stuck staff member, but nothing that can’t be quickly remedied with a little intervention. There are perhaps a few areas of the game that still need a little more love – the restaurant, for example, could do with a little more work, as right now you’re very limited with what dishes you can serve – but mostly, this is actually an impressive offering from a small development team.
And that’s perhaps my biggest takeaway from my time with Hotel Architect; developers Pathos Interactive are absolutely committed to their passionate fan base. The game has only recently left early access, but it did so with additional features such as fan-requested casinos, and you only have to look back at older comments about the game UI and building tools to see how far the game has come over the last couple of years, as the tools in particular are some of the best I’ve personally had the pleasure of using in a management sim. It’s great to see a small-team indie developer really listening to player feedback, and it’s genuinely exciting to see how big Hotel Architect could potentially be. My input? Pools next, please.
Hotel Architect is a charming, addictive, and occasionally chaotic hotel‑building sim that offers a great mix of creativity and management. It’s an easy-going, relatively stress-free experience that allows you to flex your creative muscles within a genuinely impressive built system that allows for mistakes while keeping punishment to a minimum when you get things wrong. It’s not the perfect management sim, but really, it’s not far off.
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