Early Access key provided for free by the developer.
Because Why Not?
If you’ve ever said to yourself, “Self, I really wish there was some way I could manage a hotel in some far-flung corner of the cosmos, waiting on Studio Ghibli rejects while doing all the micromanagement as they leave me a two-star rating on Cosmo-Yelp.”, then Ancient Forge’s new management sim, Hotel Galactic, might be the game you’ve been jonesing for. Anyone who’s interested in easy-going management sims with cutesy-looking characters might find HG enjoyable, if the game ever gets the dozens upon dozens of bugs fixed.
Getting Started.
The game comes with a sandbox mode I didn’t really mess with and the story mode. In story mode, the player pilgrim meanders into a run-down hotel on a floating island once managed by a grumpy, melancholic ghost named Gustav—now reduced to haunting his old job site while complaining about the good old days alongside his non-deceased friends. So begins a lengthy tutorial showing you all of the controls bit by bit.
Still Starting. Expect to see this screen a lot later on when you have to reload your game to fix things.
Hotel Galactic bills itself as a “cozy management sim with a heartfelt tale.” The player takes on the role of an ageless, faceless, gender-neutral, culturally ambiguous hotel management spirit. The game opens with a difficult-to-follow backstory about weird spirit beings called pilgrims (you) and an animated fly-through of space that probably took most of Ancient Forge’s budget and might explain why they’re charging so much for a game so unfinished. The whole thing is in Japanese with English subtitles, but the subtitles ended up out of sync—when they bothered to show up at all—so I was left in the dark about the bigger picture. Let’s just say that the player is a meddlesome spirit who’s decided to get into the hospitality business.
Part of the intro. This cat girl features in so much of the promo art that you'd swear the game was about her, but she's actually a bit character. And yeah, she looks like a dude in the loading screen, but she looks like a girl in-game. I think she suffers from "drawn-at-different-conceptual-stages" disease.
Mechanics are introduced through the plot, along with the generic bad guys, the Galactic Peace Corps, which is some kind of government/police/bureaucracy that is never clearly defined and has nothing better to do but harass and extort you as the hotel gets off the ground. I only got visited by them one time before my game became ruined beyond repair, but I imagine they become a major thorn in your side later on.
The God of Hotels
Cleaning up.
Everything is presented in a cutaway side perspective, giving you a pseudo-2D view of the world that doesn’t rotate. The WASD keys let you move in four cardinal directions, and the middle mouse lets you scroll awkwardly at ludicrous speed. The upper left-hand side of the UI shows your current number of staff, rooms, and guests. The right keeps track of time and when the different kinds of ships are due.
You can pick up your little minions and drop them into various rooms to force them to change priorities. You can also view your staff’s various skills and adjust their priority levels accordingly from the roster; then you hope everyone does what you want them to do.
The guest ship. Most of the guests don't get off due to some weird bug that only rights itself after you save and reload.
Guests arrive nightly on a ship and check out in the morning after a certain number of days (featured above their heads or highlighted in their rooms). Once a week, a workers' ship arrives carrying new hirelings from various species, with additional ones introduced as the plot unfolds. I assume each species favors different skill types. In the end I hired every single one I had room for because I needed every warm body I could get, and beyond the hiring fee you never pay them a dime. Staff can gain skills over time, or at least certain skills. Several of my galley slaves gained research, but not much else. Staff also age up, but I didn't play long enough to see this in action because it takes a lot of time, so I don't know if they go to the old folks home or something like that. The named NPCs on the employee roll don't age, though, so I assume your regular staff eventually retire. A merchant ship also shows up twice a week with a random assortment of goods: ingredients, seeds for produce, furniture, blueprints, etc. — giving you something to spend your hard-earned money on to stay afloat.
Sometimes you'll be asked questions that have some sort of moral compass (the little symbol) attached. The consequences of these choices aren't clear right now.
It’s tough to be a god, since most menial tasks aren’t automated. Cleaning beds, delivering meals to guests, and watering produce have to be commanded from on high. You’d think that a trained staff would know when it’s time to bring food to a guest from the kitchen, but no, these tasks require your divine intervention. That's all in addition to watering crops, cutting down trees, mining stone, taking food orders, crafting junk, and anything else that needs doing. I suppose this constitutes part of the fun and interaction. Nevertheless, I’m hoping that there’s a way to automate some of this later.
Tote that barge! Lift that bale!
If things get too busy, you can temporarily close the hotel, though this doesn’t work the way you’d expect. Instead of closing the building off to new guests, it puts everything into suspended animation. Time stops moving, and any guests currently in your hotel become stuck there. Trapped guests don’t eat your food (which would be an exploitable form of income), but they do dirty up your sheets. The main reason to close the hotel is to gather up available resources, clean things, and do other prep work that needs to be done before facing the next wave of guests.
No Wonder This Place Failed
Choose your expansions very carefully.
The hotel is puny to start with. Rooms are unlocked as the plot dictates, and each room has a minimum and maximum size (some of them can be increased through research). There’s not much space to work with, especially since the trees out back take up a lot of it. Trees can be uprooted, but only after the technology is researched. So the only way to go is up, and even that is limited, since you can’t build any new elevators until those get researched too. I’m going to mention this again later, but I’d like to point out the disastrous layout of the hotel. Your first kitchen is in the basement, so whatever dining room you make has to be at least one floor up, and elevators move slowly considering how much foot traffic the place gets. Rooms get unlocked one-by-one. In construction mode you map out where you want it and wait for your not-wagies to bring the materials. Several new rooms and mechanics are introduced through dialogue segments. One of Gustav's friends will want to speak to you (usually from a very specific place that they'll walk to before you can actually start the chat) and then you'll get a new quest to do whatever it is they want.
Can We Have Something Without Peaches In It?
Boil em', chop em', stick em' in a stew.
Cooking is one of the other big features in Hotel Galactic. The menu consists of whatever you toss together in the hopes of pleasing guests. Different species have likes and dislikes, though I noticed that they tended to go for the newest item on the menu. Since I was at the mercy of whatever came in on the merchant ship and my limitless supply of peach trees, everything on the menu had peaches in it. At the start, you can only have three active items on the menu, but this can be expanded through research.
Ingredients can be prepared in different ways. Boiling and chopping are the only options to start with, which I assume affects the quality in some way. It also changes the cooking time for each dish. You can adjust the price for each menu item, but I didn’t mess with that since guests never complained about prices and I wasn’t hurting for money. Staff need to eat as well, but they require bento rations from a ration station. The game starts you off with one station, which can hold up to ten meals at a time. Keeping it stocked will turn into a full-time job as you get more employees.
Star Stuff
I'm pretty sure this falls under unethical experimentation and a violation of privacy.
Keeping guests happy is the path forward in Hotel Galactic, since it’s the only way to harvest alien goo. This goo consists the residual happy feelings guests have when they receive good service, and it all gets siphoned into your research station. You get it from serving meals and when they check out, but there might be some other places as well that I didn’t notice. Each species provides a different color of goo, and you’ll need loads of it. Guests have a full range of needs, though at the start you’ll only be able to take care of the most basic: food, bladder, and sleep. Later on, you’ll be able to build bathhouses and, presumably, spas, arcades, and a range of other facilities to handle other wants to get your hotel rating higher. As guests check out, they leave a rating and a tip; the happier the guest, the higher the rating, and the bigger the tip. Also, the more goo you secretly absorb for your diabolical experiments. Once you have enough, you can start researching new technologies to improve things; just try not to think about where it came from.
The research tree. Note some content isn't in the game yet.
Each tier of progress is gated behind a certain number of research projects. Once you research enough stuff in one era, you click on the big padlock icon to unlock the next one and continue the story. The problem with this method of progress is that you’re at the mercy of the RNG gods. Need a certain color of goo, but the wrong species is getting off the boat? Tough luck. Staff also have their own needs and wants, though right now it doesn’t seem to matter much. Employees get happy and unhappy, but work all the same. I have no idea if they can eventually break or walk off the job. I did have several of them fall asleep on the floor, but I chalked that up to bad pathing. I’m just grateful you don’t have to pay them.
It’s Almost Harvesting Season
Watering crops, and if I'm lucky I might even get to harvest some of them.
Everything takes some kind of resource. Food needs ingredients, furniture needs raw materials, and workers need tools. It’s all part of the circle of life, or in the case of Hotel Galactic, one long, big strip of land. HG starts you off with trees, rocks, and fiber. Trees produce wood and peaches. Rocks produce stone (duh). The grass that provides fiber needs research first, though, in order to get sickles. Over time, you’ll get better tools and craft stations and process your materials into better forms. From time to time, the island will get pelted with meteors and space wrecks, providing additional iron and scrap. When the plot progresses far enough, you’ll rejoin another segment of the island to your own and start farming. With farming unlocked, you get access to four seedbeds that need to be watered once per day and occasionally weeded. They can also be fertilized, but I never got my hands on any. Eventually, you’ll get a nice healthy plant of some kind and a chance to harvest produce—at least in theory.
Music
The restroom. If you get the reference then you are a man of culture and taste.
Nothing in particular stands out amidst the generic, Eastern-centric soundtrack. Bouncy, cheery tunes carry most of the action, and specific musical cues herald the arrival of the guest ship. All of it is pleasant, but none of it is memorable.
Hotel Hell
A crafting machine got lost in transit, so the ghost image took up space. Later on, I found it in the hands of a staff member, stuck at the bottom of the elevator for no reason.
The side perspective causes its own share of woes. Furniture has a nasty tendency of not stacking properly from any other position except the back wall. For example, food and storage crates will line up perfectly fine when lined up against the back of a room, but end up haphazardly piled when put on the left or right, or even end up all over the middle of the floor. Objects in the foreground block your view with no guarantee that the cursor will pick up on any object behind it. I had to move things multiple times to make sure there wasn’t anything sitting on the ground obscured. There were multiple instances where no earthly (spiritual?) force could compel my workers to do what I wanted, so all manner of inconvenience befell my hotel, such as guests waiting over nine hours for their meals, the laundry going undone for days, and machinery going missing in transit. Worst of all, you can’t slap them to make them work faster.
All those little circles in the background are resources that can never be harvested. They sit there, taking up space, forever.
Sometimes resources would fall “out of range” and remain on the playing field forever. Other objects would become “cursed”, lying in plain sight, but put away. My produce often needed to be rooted out because they could no longer be watered due to a perpetual watering order that I’d never actually given and couldn’t cancel. Quests constantly stalled out, and sometimes, when I moved staff, they’d fall through the world; fortunately, the developers had some kind of catch for that, and they’d reappear eventually. The hotel layout itself is abysmal. Whose idea was it to have the kitchen in the basement? You can build another kitchen later on, but by that time you’ll already be pressed for space, and I wasn’t able to rezone preexisting rooms, only demolish. That’s when my game came to a tragic end. See, I’d reached the end of my actual building range without realizing it, so I decided to demolish two rooms I’d made so I could install a new elevator to speed things up, but the two demolished rooms never went away; I got stuck with two unusable ghost rooms instead. Elevators themselves are terribly slow, and there are no stairs or ladders, so there are no alternatives for getting people up and down the hotel (as far as I know).
Ruined.
Many guests will often not get off the ship until you save and reload the game. If you don’t do this, they’ll happily stay there and take all of their profits and goo with them. In fact, most bugs can only be fixed this way, so I wound up with a massive save list.
Item crafting can stall if you run out of resources and the game even warns you about this issue in the tutorial. An unfinished item will clog up the crafting queue, and you’d never know about it unless you checked the problem yourself. This is especially bad if you have some of those “cursed” resources I mentioned lying around because the game counts those among your inventory, but your staff will never collect them.
Closed Due to Infestation
The red exclamation point on the order board means I've ran out of ingredients for a dish. Strangely enough, you can suggest another meal to a guest while they're ordering, but not after the meal is ordered. The only things I can do here are wait for more ingredients or cancel the order.
In other words, Hotel Galactic is a buggy mess, and there’s no way Ancient Forge didn’t know before shoving it out into the wild, using Early Access as a shield; the gaming public hasn’t been very forgiving, and the title currently sits at 41% (mixed) on Steam. This isn’t the first game Ancient Forge has released in a poor state. Their tactical RPG Glorious Companions sat in limbo for six years before being released with showstopper bugs. Said bugs were allegedly fixed, but then the game was abandoned with no further content updates. According to Ancient Forge, Glorious Companions was always a side project. I have no problems with this excuse, except that they were selling an unfinished game the entire time.
The developers have released a repair roadmap for Hotel Galactic to try and win back goodwill and confidence. The first week of this repair has already passed, but I can say the game has a long way to go to be in a playable state. It’s understandable that there will be bugs in any early access title, but this is blatantly unplayable and in pieces, and I’m not talking about placeholders or missing content.
What About Fun?
Not the best of starts.
I was dangerously close to being entertained when things weren’t breaking down, but I can’t comment on how long that would last since the gameplay loop was constantly disrupted by bugs. As previously mentioned, the research method can be a major bottleneck to progress because you can’t force a desired species to stay at the hotel (at far as I know). Some elements of Hotel Galactic aren’t in yet, which is to be expected. If everything gets fixed, then the game will probably be a lot more fun, probably. As of right now, though, I couldn’t recommend this to anyone, especially at the price they’re charging. Put your vacation on hold for at least six months to a year and wait for a discount to see how this pans out.
https://game.page/hotelgalactic-earlyaccess/RPGHQ
