Version Reviewed: v1.0
Overview: You are trapped in a hotel with perverts. Can you escape? Do you even want to?
Story: Your characters start off discovering the people pods from the Matrix, and then suddenly find themselves in a strange hotel where nothing is real. You can then take jobs as the hotel or wander around looking for other people to interact with. If there is an overarching storyline it is a bit hard to find. Mostly the game is a large number of vignettes about 3-4 pages long that are at most loosely connected. There are some story arcs that are a handful of those vignettes strung together.
Gameplay: Frustrating. Maybe it is genius to immerse the player in this horrific world by leaving them lost, confused, and usually bored. You are trapped in the game as much as the characters are trapped in the hotel. The navigation is confusing and it always takes multiple screen loads to get where you want to go. There is no built-in hint system for finding quests, only an achievement tracker for giving you a rough idea of how much content you have discovered. Without a psychic link to the developer's mind or a walkthough (which doesn't exist as of yet) it will take dozens of hours of reading the same text over and over again looking for something new that can be done in this hotel with literally hundreds of locations. Most content seems to be time gated (must be in the right place at the right time, and you don't have a watch) and much of it is probably running on RNGs so you may need to try multiple times before it shows up.
There are a few missions that are fairly easy to find, like working for the manager and "working" for the concierge. But once you run through those it's back to wandering around at all times to all locations to try to find something new.
There is a stat system where you have a few axes of character customization. I ended up with maxed out exhibitionism almost immediately and couldn't do much about it. Other stats are more controllable. There is one that is basically sluttiness and I found I could dial it back to 0 by interacting with a specific character that appeared regularly and saying no. Having it very low also unlocked interactions with another character. I suspect more interactions are tied to stats like this, so being able to move them back and forth is important in sussing out content.
I played for about 5 hours and got about a half dozen achievements and 2 endings, one of which was maybe good the other was definitely bad.
Sex content: Quite varied but also mostly text based. Most sex scenes are 3-4 pages of text with no accompanying graphic, just a big white void. Pretty much anything goes in Hotel Eleusis. Mind control is a big theme. Body modification happens frequenty, don't get attached to any part of your body.
Conclusion: This game needs a Wiki. I can't in good faith call it a good game in its current state because it frankly gets really boring wandering around the hotel for hours trying to find something new. I can't call it outright bad either because the game has acres of content and solid writing. One final note, this the least Ren'Py looking game I have ever seen on this engine. You would swear it is a HTML game from looking at it. Also, because the dev is kind of a dick they disabled rollback, so don't click through any of the dialogs too fast.
Overview: You are trapped in a hotel with perverts. Can you escape? Do you even want to?
Story: Your characters start off discovering the people pods from the Matrix, and then suddenly find themselves in a strange hotel where nothing is real. You can then take jobs as the hotel or wander around looking for other people to interact with. If there is an overarching storyline it is a bit hard to find. Mostly the game is a large number of vignettes about 3-4 pages long that are at most loosely connected. There are some story arcs that are a handful of those vignettes strung together.
Gameplay: Frustrating. Maybe it is genius to immerse the player in this horrific world by leaving them lost, confused, and usually bored. You are trapped in the game as much as the characters are trapped in the hotel. The navigation is confusing and it always takes multiple screen loads to get where you want to go. There is no built-in hint system for finding quests, only an achievement tracker for giving you a rough idea of how much content you have discovered. Without a psychic link to the developer's mind or a walkthough (which doesn't exist as of yet) it will take dozens of hours of reading the same text over and over again looking for something new that can be done in this hotel with literally hundreds of locations. Most content seems to be time gated (must be in the right place at the right time, and you don't have a watch) and much of it is probably running on RNGs so you may need to try multiple times before it shows up.
There are a few missions that are fairly easy to find, like working for the manager and "working" for the concierge. But once you run through those it's back to wandering around at all times to all locations to try to find something new.
There is a stat system where you have a few axes of character customization. I ended up with maxed out exhibitionism almost immediately and couldn't do much about it. Other stats are more controllable. There is one that is basically sluttiness and I found I could dial it back to 0 by interacting with a specific character that appeared regularly and saying no. Having it very low also unlocked interactions with another character. I suspect more interactions are tied to stats like this, so being able to move them back and forth is important in sussing out content.
I played for about 5 hours and got about a half dozen achievements and 2 endings, one of which was maybe good the other was definitely bad.
Sex content: Quite varied but also mostly text based. Most sex scenes are 3-4 pages of text with no accompanying graphic, just a big white void. Pretty much anything goes in Hotel Eleusis. Mind control is a big theme. Body modification happens frequenty, don't get attached to any part of your body.
Conclusion: This game needs a Wiki. I can't in good faith call it a good game in its current state because it frankly gets really boring wandering around the hotel for hours trying to find something new. I can't call it outright bad either because the game has acres of content and solid writing. One final note, this the least Ren'Py looking game I have ever seen on this engine. You would swear it is a HTML game from looking at it. Also, because the dev is kind of a dick they disabled rollback, so don't click through any of the dialogs too fast.