Hotel Hustle: Overcooked With Dirty Brooms

Have you ever wanted to mop the floor, take out the trash, and refresh bed linen while on a very tight time limit, preferably split-screen with a buddy? That’s the premise of Hotel Hustle, another small and weird game from RedDeerGames we previously knew from Freaky Trip. As soon as we booted the game, I knew I recognized the art look & feel from somewhere, but I couldn’t really place my finger on it, until I remembered Freaky Trip. Honestly, that moment was a painful one, as RedDeerGames failed to impress us with their earlier single screen adventure puzzle that was riddled with bugs. The question then becomes: will we encounter and mop up real bugs in this frantic hotel simulator, or will the digital bugs diminish the cleaning fun?

The best way to describe the game is to simply point to its biggest influencer: Overcooked. In Overcooked, you’re running around—preferably with a buddy or two or three—in a kitchen trying to complete one task after the other within a tight time frame. Usually, something goes wrong: the kitchen shifts, the vegetables get burned, the customers start pouring in more rapidly than you anticipated, … In Hotel Hustle, you’re basically doing the same: instead of cooking-oriented tasks, now you have to help run (or rather, clean up) a hotel and make its customers happy.

As soon as you finish a couple of levels and make your way up to the higher hotel floors of the seemingly endless building, you start to realize that this ain’t no Overcooked at all: compared to that popular couch co-op game, Hotel Hustle’s move set is very limited. There’s only vacuuming, plant watering, surface cleaning, linen work, and trash can cleaning to do. After a room has been completely cleaned up, a hotel guest is ready to occupy it. In later levels, they will demand water or various forms of food dropped on the doormat. If tasks aren’t completed within a certain time frame, star points are subtracted, and those points are needed to unlock the later levels.

While the scenery does change somewhat—some floors offer cosy oriental chambers to rest in while others look more like tropical cabanas—the game remains exactly the same: vacuum the rugs, water the plants, clean the sinks, replace linen, throw away the trash. Unlike in Overcooked, where levels offer much more variation such as having to cook in the back of a giant truck, more or less ingredients, other recipes, and more, Hotel Hustle offers nothing like that: what you’ll be doing in level 1 is what you’ll be doing in level 100. That means that unless you and your buddies manage to change up things by playing upside-down or by throwing controllers at each other, the game will get incredibly boring incredibly quick.

That’s not to say that there is no fun at all to be had whilst playing the game. The automatic split screen functionality just works the way it’s supposed to, it’s fun to try and work out optimal positions to admit new customers while running in and out hotel rooms to do the cleaning jobs while your partner is standing next to the food tray to try and keep the existing customers happy. And dare I say it: we have yet to encounter serious bugs—real or digital.

Another perhaps minor but still irritating nitpick: the controls could be better optimized to work for such a frantic game. To switch tasks, say from vacuuming to watering the plants, you have to run back to your cleaning trolley to put back the vacuum and grab that water spray instead. This obviously requires the press of a button, but we frequently encountered misinterpretations in either which button or how close you should stand to the trolley in question. Oh, and you can’t move the trolley. And hey, if you happen to be dragging with that trash can, you’ll first need to empty it, but the game won’t tell you this: pressing the button simply won’t do anything. Considering you’re constantly swapping in and out your tools of the trade, that clunkiness shouldn’t be there.

If you do not plan to play this game together, you should definitely pass on Hotel Hustle—or Overcooked, for that matter. These kinds of games are clearly made with couch co-op play in mind, up to the point that the solo mode feels completely useless. I struggle to give this game a higher score than Freaky Trip, but to its credits, we had more fun playing this, and at least the game nor the Switch we played it on crashed?

Happy cleaning!