Check Inn is a blend of a few different themes. At its core, it’s a builder/management game where you build up a hotel, room by room, with various different room sizes and community rooms. But, after level one, I found that there were elements of Tetris thrown in there.
The rooms come in all different shapes and fit together like puzzle pieces, but each level seems to change the configuration of the rooms. In the second level, I had to constantly build rooms that I didn’t need in hopes of being able to put down a room that someone was actively asking for.
Check Inn is in Early Access currently and this is one of those games where the frayed edges show. So, let’s rewind a bit and try to break it down.
You have a series of cities in which you want to build your hotels that range from cheap motel-types to skyscraping luxury hotels. Your rooms vary in size in each city ranging from taking up 1 block to multiple and your area to build in is a pre-determined size. There is no rhyme or reason to how they stack; some go vertical, horizontal, or a combination of the two. It’s the latter blocks that make accommodation a puzzling experience.
Your guests will show up to your hotel requesting a room of their choosing regardless of whether you have that room type available or not. They’ll stay for a period of 1-10+ days which means that that room won’t be available for half your gameplay. And, your guests won’t wait indefinitely, so you’re working against the clock.
Check Inn feels like a constant struggle to get rooms built.
Among the amalgamation of rooms, you’ll have to find space for accommodations like a restaurant, sauna, and laundry. The guests will take themselves to the sauna, but you need a porter to deliver food or take and return clothes. This will always be a struggle because porters are expensive and everything is slow.
As an example, let’s say that a guest orders a burger. Your porter has to ride the elevator which needs to be upgraded to hold more people and move faster. And then, they need to grab the burger which could take as much as 120 seconds to prepare, then they have to ride the same slow elevator down to deliver it.
Your elevator will be clogged up and if your restaurant is only making one burger at a time, you’re likely sitting on a game where multiple people just aren’t getting fed leading to bad reviews.
Everything requires money and money isn’t exactly plentiful. Especially not when you’re trying to race against the clock to accommodate your ever-demanding room needs.
Unfortunately, Check Inn feels a little stacked in the wrong direction and this isn’t even taking into account that some locations will have a heating issue that needs special insulation for rooms or bug infestations that require exterminators.
This is a game of juggling and while it is fun, this is the sort of game that can very quickly spiral into something that’s just grueling.
Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, there is a way to demolish your rooms, which would be invaluable if it weren’t completely and utterly useless. Seriously, don’t even consider using it unless you’re trying to demolish something on the top floor.
Remember how I said the shapes of rooms are all different? You have to build things you don’t need to build the things you do need. It’s because rooms need to be connected to the elevator. So, in trying to get the one room you need to be connected, you usually have to build whatever fits in the space left.
If you build it, they will come… with extra, unneeded rooms.
The cities are dealt with in waves of customers. In the beginning, most of your customers will prefer the smaller rooms, but after each wave, their demand for the more expensive, more wonky-shaped rooms increases. So, I had this idea that I would get rid of three single rooms in a row and install one of the rooms that takes up three spaces.
I had an abundance of single rooms from trying to get things built and customers were backing up asking for this particular room shape. By this point, I had built up to floor 20 and this was floor 4 that I wanted to adjust.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t demolish those rooms to slot this in, despite being told I could change out rooms by the tutorial, because those rooms were required to make other rooms function. You cannot change things that aren’t on the top level. Not without tearing all the way down from the top.
I get infrastructure, but why even offer it? This game relies on sporadic building and then seems to punish you for it.
It’s in early access, so they are actively making changes and listening to feedback. So, while the game is on a shaky foundation at the moment, I think there’s some serious potential here for puzzle and management game lovers.
In my opinion, this game either needs more forgiving room shapes or a bit more balancing with funds. Either way, I look forward to seeing how the game progresses and I’m optimistic that, by full release, it’ll be a sturdier, more solid game.
If you want to give Check Inn a try, you can get it on Steam for $11.99. Otherwise, you can check out one of our other reviews; A Game About Digging A Hole.
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