Should you check in or check out of this hotel?
Welcome to Pets Hotel, a place where you can start the business you always dreamed of! Pets Hotel gives you a unique opportunity to build, design, and run a place where pets can feel at home. Cats, dogs, turtles, and many other animals are waiting for you to take care of them!
Pets Hotel is a first-person pet management sim where you run a place for pet owners to leave their animals for a short stay. You can play it in free play and build the place to your own design or play a selection of scenarios in which you need to not go bankrupt.
It starts out promising enough, though the tutorial isn’t the best in explaining everything you need to do. Despite the low-budget visuals, I was hopeful that it could still provide an enjoyable simulator experience. In some ways it is and in some ways, it can be incredibly frustrating.
What the game won’t tell you is that when you book in pets, they won’t arrive until the next day for check-in. This is a problem as 1) you need to wait or fast-forward to the next day before you can accept them and 2) you could needlessly take in too many pets than you have rooms for. I thought they would come after a few hours, but I had accepted a huge chunk of animals to arrive the next morning….
Which was amusing when I turned up to see a queue going on for ages. You will need to take the pets to their respective rooms and be looked after during their stay, you will need to look and see if they have any allergies or preferences to make them happy. A big problem is that you are essentially running this place all by yourself, so while you’re trying to cater to what pets you have, you’ll be running back and forth to the phone to book in new pets. In other words, it can be total chaos.
It doesn’t help that the UI isn’t the most user-friendly. Having to manually input pets names each time is frustrating and clunky, while selecting options in the menu such as buying food can be glitchy. I accidentally purchased 30 of the same type of food, which is problematic when trying to select a different one as you need to scroll all the way down to choose it.
I already said that the visuals are low-budget, and while that might sound harsh…it’s really not. There are a few weird lighting glitches in the ceilings sometimes and the area outside the hotel has some really bad draw distance issues. Character models look dated, but the pets aren’t too bad.
The Verdict
Pets Hotel has some nice ideas and can be fun at times, but others it can become too stressful as you try and run everything singlehanded. Combine that with a frustrating UI, visual and gameplay glitches throughout and you have an experience that will make you wanting to check out sooner rather than later.