[Review] Tasokare Hotel
“The ‘Tasokare Hotel’ is bathed in twilight all day long. It is a place where souls wandering between life and death can rest. One day, a girl who wanders into the hotel ends up changing her destiny through a series of encounters and events. An extremely strange otherworldly escape adventure begins, where you must solve puzzles in the space between life and death!”
I haven't finished it yet, but I wanted to talk about Tasokare Hotel. It's a free Android/iOS game developed by SEEC. There is a remake available on Steam called "Tasokare Hotel Re:newal", but is not available in English, only in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. It contains new things like voice acting.
I'm playing the free Android version in English. There are 8 total chapters, each chapter is split into small stories, and you spend one ticket to unlock each story. You need to work a little to get tickets, each day you get 5, and you can earn bonus tickets (they accumulate, so you won't lose them) by playing a minigame, getting lucky with the gacha, or sometimes as a login bonus. Be aware you can't reread the stories without spending tickets again, which I'm not a fan of, since we have to replay some stories to unlock bad ending routes. Because of this, I recommend buying the game on Steam if you can afford it and know Japanese.
This game is a mix of escape games with Ace Attorney (no trials, though). You have to investigate rooms and solve puzzles. There is a narrative and it progresses every chapter, it isn't very episodic despite having "cases" to solve. The main protagonist is the eccentric Tsukahara Neko, and you will see the story solely from her POV. The cast is charismatic enough, with pleasant designs and dialogues. As for now, I would say it doesn't have anything special, deep, or groundbreaking, it just has a good flavor of safeness. It's that type of more light-hearted story with more silly writing despite having "mature" topics. Kind of similar to Ace Attorney.
The atmosphere is very immersive, and the colors are very beautiful and comfy. Depending on your background, you might find this premise familiar: the story takes place in a hotel between life and death, where the amnesiac protagonist becomes a worker, serves guests, helps them, and solves puzzles, while still trying to find clues about her life and recover her memories. It has been my cozy game recently, the only thing that isn't very cozy is collecting tickets...sometimes it gets a bit tiring, and some stories are so short that looks like the company is mocking you... Well, maybe they are. Who doesn't want to earn money? ¬_¬
In 2025, PRA produced a 12-episode anime available on Amazon Prime Video. I haven't watched it, so I don't know if it's the same story.
There is a sequel, "Tasokare Hotel: Tsubomi", but it is only available in Japanese. Aside from the Tasokare Hotel series, SEEC also has "Yotsume God -Reunion-", an adventure game with the same gameplay and similar paranormal/folklore themes, but it is set in a rural area in Japan. It is on Steam and has English localization.