Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel
Review
An overnight stay you won’t soon forget…
by Dan Lenois
reviewed on PC
An overnight stay you won’t soon forget…
Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel, developed by Pulsatrix Studios and published by Maximum Games, is a narrative-driven survival horror game, set in the aforementioned fictitious St. Dinfna Hotel. The player takes the role of Roberto Leite Lopes, an investigative journalist who sets out to expose the mysterious and increasingly-grisly story behind the hotel and the surrounding area. The more you uncover, the more danger you put yourself in. You’re not the only occupant of this hotel, and your neighbours aren’t all that sociable.
Always bring the right tools for the job…
While Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is, in every aesthetical sense, a survival-horror game, with an unsettling environment, prone to unexpected sounds and sights that can easily induce a constant underlying sense of tension, it would be dishonest to suggest that it has the capacity to be truly scary. While there are a number of potentially scary moments scattered throughout the game, they're generally confined to specific scripted instances, usually prefaced by a short in-game rendered cutscene, and usually don’t last long enough or provide enough intensity to truly scare players to the bone.
If you're interested in a sprinkling of survival mechanics, however, that's one area Fobia has you covered. Anyone remotely familiar with the Resident Evil game franchise should find much in the vein of common ground here. Players will have to keep a wary eye on their inventory, as one can easily fill up the limited number of inventory slots. Players can gradually expand their maximum carry capacity by finding additional backpacks that each act as upgrades to your storage, expanding it by a few slots each time. While I started with a tiny inventory space, arguably no more than someone could realistically hold in their hands, this rapidly changed over time. Within my first few hours, I was already carrying more on my back than a deployed soldier in a combat zone. I could even carry items that no longer had any value, like used medical bandages, simply because I was too lazy to discard them, choosing instead to parade them around with me, for reasons beyond meagre human understanding.
Smile for the camera…
Players navigate the world not only using keys and other limited-use items, but also their camera. The camera does more than just take polaroid photographs. It provides the player night vision, which is crucial to safely navigating many of the unlit or poorly-lit sections of the map. The camera's powers extend beyond being an illuminator, however. It also functions as a portal, of sorts, allowing the player to travel back into the past, and again back to the present, in order to manipulate objects, discover hidden information, and remove barriers in the player’s path. Players will often find themselves relying on the camera far more than any other equipped item in the game. This mechanic is by far the most interesting, of those presented in Fobia, and it is one aspect that Fobia doesn't capitalize enough on. The narrative and gameplay implications of hopping back and forth between two separate-but-interconnected dimensions, as the player tries desperately to stay alive from dangers on both sides, sounds like a great premise for any horror game. But instead, the camera is more often than not treated as a tactical night vision headset, with only the occasional dimensional-tearing side benefit.
While it would be unfair to spoil the game's narrative beats, it goes without saying that the player's ultimate goal is to escape the hotel they find themselves trapped in. And to do that, you follow the standard Resident Evil playbook of "open every door in the building in nonsensical order". Most of the player's time will be spent running back and forth to open doors, and once the door is open, run around the room gathering room keys, cassette tapes, and other items to equip.
Ready, fire, aim…
Combat here is another area where Fobia comes across as very similar to older horror games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, where the objective, more often than not, isn't to outright eliminate every enemy in sight, but rather as a defensive tool. Even the weakest enemy type, something strongly akin to a generic zombie, will often take several shots before dying. Combining this fact with the other inconvenience, being a limited supply of discoverable ammo, players would be best served to avoid outright combat wherever possible.
Getting into character…
There's no other way to say it - the best parts of the game include any moment when the playable character isn't speaking. The voice acting involved ranges from mediocre at best, to unbearably horrendous at worst. Luckily, there are lengthy portions of the game where, aside from heavy breathing and pounding footsteps, you can enjoy a reprieve from the text-to-speech quality voice acting on display. While it's highly unlikely an AA-budget game like this would feature experienced voice actors with a wide palette of instinctive and trained skills, the normal assumption one would normally make would be that the voice acting wouldn't be memorable enough to mention, either for positive or negative reasons. And for the other speaking roles here in Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel, the former consistently proves true. But for its protagonist, the latter is most certainly the case.
Ironing out the kinks…
There are a number of minor but noteworthy issues that currently plague Fobia. The first of which is the insanely-low field-of-view setting. While this can be reversed in the options menu, the default FoV setting appears to be 45, which creates a tunnel vision-like effect that is unbearably extreme. There's a reason that nearly all games set their default FoV in the 60-70 range, if not higher. However, when you combine this with the game's heavy-footed approach to head-bobbing and swaying movements, this can easily inspire motion sickness, even for those not normally sensitive to such.
Regarding performance, Fobia was very well optimized. While running this game off a Nvidia 2070 RTX, there were no noticeable instances of framerate drops, screen-tearing, or fatal crashes. For the purposes of performance testing, the game was run on medium, high, and max settings, respectively, even with ray tracing enabled. The gameplay might be a bit spotty, but the optimization here is beyond reproach.
Overall:
Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is at its best during those infrequent moments where it dares to be innovative, rather than iterative. Its camera mechanic, allowing you to manipulate the space around you in small, specific ways, has so much potential, which is only ever tapped into superficially. Fobia absolutely nails the general atmosphere one would expect from any good horror game. What it misses is those terrifying high-adrenaline moments that would cause any unwary player to leap out of their chair in fight-or-flight alarm. Playing Fobia is like playing Alien Isolation, except if the xenomorph never showed up.
While there was never a moment where the gameplay or story came across as badly-designed in any way, neither were there any moments where they were overtly mind-blowing either. Many of the best horror games share a single commonality: their relative simplicity. Providing only a limited number of mechanics to the player frees the player up to be more receptive to the horror elements. By inundating the player with a large slew of mechanics to memorize and cycle between, while undercutting the horror elements in order to make room, Fobia seems uncertain what kind of game it wants to be. A jack-of-all-trades, but a master of none.
Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is a perfectly tolerable survival-horror game. You won't regret playing it. But likely because a month from now, you won't recall ever having played it.
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6.5
fun score
Pros
Impressive visual style, attention-to-detail within the environment, enemies are visually and mechanically interesting to combat, the time-travel mechanic adds an interesting twist to exploration, wide variety of interesting collectable lore items.
Cons
Puzzles are almost always easy to solve, Disappointing narrative elements, with poor pacing and voice acting, Lacklustre horror elements - knows how to establish tension, but not how to build it further.
