Fobia St. Dinfna Hotel for PC Reviews

A Fear of New Ideas

Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is one of the most frustrating games I’ve played in a long time. Instead, the game made me wish that the company that made it, Pulsatrix Studios, had come up with more original ideas and not relied so much on ideas and patterns from other franchises.

A Good Beginning

Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is an excellent start for the studio, and it holds up surprisingly well, considering that only a few people worked on each part of the game. Most of this is because the studio worked hard to make the game as simple as possible, letting the game’s main ideas and elements shine through.

It’s a standard setup for a horror game, but it works well enough to get the game going and put the player in the world they’ll be stuck in for the next 12 hours. This stays true as the story continues and more of the bigger plot is shown. Until the last third of the game, most things fit together well.

It’s all about the atmosphere.

The same can be said about the art and sound design of Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel.

Even though horror fans have seen the ruined corridors of the St. Dinfna Hotel in other survival horror games, there’s no denying that the game has made a great setting that makes it easy to get into. Each broken room or hidden library seems to have a story to tell, and the reason for its condition could be around any corner.

The voice acting was the only thing that took me out of the game. Even though it was a clear homage to horror shows like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, the cheesy lines often took away the drama and tension from scenes that were otherwise serious or sad.

How to Figure Out the Truth

The gameplay in Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is well-made primarily and easy to get into. Again, it takes clear ideas from games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The game is split into three parts: exploring, solving puzzles, and fighting. By far, the best parts of the game are the first two. Whenever I found a new hotel part, no matter how long I’d been playing, the game would pull me back into the experience.

Getting worse at the end

It would still have been a great game if this was the only problem with Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case, as the experience falls apart in the last third of its runtime.

Without giving away any spoilers, the story loses most of what made it exciting and turns into a bland copy of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Things that initially seemed exciting and unique are forced into a larger plot that feels rushed, poorly thought out, and like a cheap copy.

Fobia: Review of the St. Dinfna Hotel | Last Words

Fobia: The game St. Dinfna Hotel isn’t that bad. Even though it has some problems, horror fans will find a lot to like about it and probably enjoy most of the time they spend with it. I hope that Pulsatrix can find the confidence they need to fully embrace their ideas and stop copying other series in ways that hurt their work.