The Haunted Hoard: Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel (Xbox Series X)

Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel is a puzzle heavy first-person survival horror experience, but the most impressive and memorable part of it has to be the hotel right there in the title. St. Dinfna clearly draws on its Resident Evil inspiration for some of its visual design, but more than any other part of the experience, it feels like the hotel is crafted with the most care and thought. Standard sections of the location look lovely and realistic and are disrupted by the destruction that takes place when horrors begin to lurk its halls, and when the game introduces the camera that lets you view parts of the hotel as they were in the past, the thoughtful design feels even more impressive. In a better game, this could have made for some superb story-telling opportunities or set up more meaningful encounters with enemies, but Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel’s other elements don’t feel quite as well considered as the look and layout of the hotel.

 

Roberto Lopes finds himself at St. Dinfna in Brazil when he follows stories of strange occurrences in the Treze Trilhas area, and right before the reporter is ready to consider the investigation a dead end, things go sour in a hurry. Now finding himself stuck in the hotel as parts of it have become littered with debris or outright coated in unusual flesh, Roberto’s first focus is to just leave the place alive only for him to get sucked deeper into the story of why things went so wrong. Unfortunately, the English voice acting is particularly weak, it not quite bad enough to be deliberately corny and instead just making it hard to get invested in the emotions of the few characters you do encounter. The plot in general is quite messy though even if you do manage to scrounge up the abundant notes around the hotel. While it does include some flashback sections outside of the hotel to better set-up certain important elements for understanding the game’s main adversary, it also doesn’t dig too deeply into the ideology of the cult who has its fingers in the paranormal situation you find yourself in. While some token statements are made about ideas like free will and determinism, characters don’t seem to ponder these beyond the surface level despite the awful acts they’re willing to commit in its name. This also leads to a baffling boss battle where you fight a mutated pianist who feels like she is meant to have some significance or reasoning for ending up in such a state but the game rarely musters up the energy to explore motivations or really give the central conflict much more depth than disagreeing with the group that has ties to the mutants that are going around killing people.

The weak story does let down the work put into realizing St. Dinfna Hotel as an almost effective setting for this horror game. The atmosphere is unnerving, the once luxury hotel worn down in quite a few different ways. At one point you’re working your way around burning debris in a hall, then wading through nasty water in another. Simple offices and other rooms are in disarray as other guests who had been there had tried to turn them into safe havens against the encroaching horrors, and the camera that lets you step into the past allows for even greater destruction and disruption. A whole floor might barely be intact, but pull up your supernatural camera and the piles of rubble are clear and openings can be found to help you navigate around properly. There are definitely parts of the hotel with strange mysteries tied to what you view in the past, like unusually advanced medical or scientific equipment in rooms that were apparently repurposed in the present to hide their dark history. It is unfortunate then that such environmental story-telling pays off with so little, what you thought might have been subtle clues not really necessary to understand a blunt and straightforward villainous organization.

 

 

The hotel can work as an important part of puzzle solving as well though, for better and worse. That camera you can pull up to see the past is heavily relied on for clues to puzzles you couldn’t otherwise solve, although sometimes not to interesting effect. It’s not uncommon to see a safe or keypad and not have the code, only to pull up the camera and see it written on a nearby wall. Code puzzles are fairly common and sometimes boil down to just finding the right paperwork laying around elsewhere, but at other points, Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel does whip up some more inspired challenges that require noting more subtle environmental clues. You might need to input a code but first crack a small cypher, the initial clue subtle but then looking around the nearby areas you start to see other hints of a similar manner and can start to figure out what they mean when considered together. A picture might technically include a direct puzzle solution but you must actually interpret what it’s saying first, a chess board will let you move its pieces but you aren’t sure why until you find an easily overlooked hint elsewhere, and some puzzles just work fine as a quick self-contained logic test like a metal box you carry with you but gradually unlock small gear placement or button pressing puzzles to get the useful items within. A lack of a map beyond a few simple ones on the walls do negatively impact puzzles that require broader area knowledge and navigation unfortunately.

Puzzles do feel like the major focus of Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel, deadly opposition not as common as you might expect, and there are in fact quite a few quiet periods where you’ll walk all about the hotel unopposed as you’re left to consider things like how a story ties to a set of paintings. Giving the room to think on the effective puzzles is appreciated and allows them to breathe better, but there are also ones that send you tromping around the hotel looking for the small thing that will actually let you continue onward. Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel does have a bit of a problem with placing items in the environment. While the visuals are excellent for their role in setting a tone, the debris also can look just like important items like the gauze squares used for healing bandages or the small clusters of pistol bullets that you’ll need for your most reliable firearm. It’s easy to overlook helpful pick-ups because they blend in with the environment or mistake trash or gore for something you can scoop up, leading to a lot of time poking around every part of the hotel to not miss anything. Even important things might not show up properly when you look at them, the indicator that an object is possible to pick up or interact with sometimes a little off and the accessibility option to make them more visible almost feels necessary if you don’t want to waste time wandering around because you accidentally overlooked a small metal object that is key to progression. At other times though, sometimes you feel you just grabbed an item that will help you progress as you revisit areas you remember from earlier you couldn’t interact with before, only to find this big discovery is actually solely for small optional rewards that aren’t even too helpful. Resource scarcity is enough of a factor that you do usually appreciate finding whatever you can, but as the hotel becomes more cumbersome to navigate and you have many unsolved puzzles still up in the air, it can become wearisome to find a paltry reward, especially since inventory space will be a constant concern so you can often need to trudge back to far off storage boxes to get what you need or your inventory gets cluttered trying to bring what you hope is relevant.

 

The actual dangers you face in Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel are uncommon but still fairly strong, but at the same time, rather limited. Throughout most of the game, you only have two things to worry about. The more manageable but also potentially scarier threat are the little bugs, these climbing on walls and ceilings and pretty hard to spot at times. An audio clue at least lets you know they’re around, but even if you think you got the ones nearby with a quick shot, there may be one or two still lurking. They work almost like jump scares, attacking you in a loud and quick manner if they’re close enough, but Roberto at least instantly kills them after they sink their teeth into him. In fact, you can just weather them if you feel they’re too hard to spot in the darkness, but the mutants are a more potent threat. Humans warped to have their fronts split open like a giant maw haunt the halls on occasion, their exposed hearts their weakness and it seems like it would be easier to shoot them than it truly is. Part of it is the mutants move in jerky ways, but even when you try to nail them with gunfire, the game gives your weapons deviation from where their crosshairs indicate by default. You can upgrade your firearms with optional collectibles, but even fully upgrading away the variance doesn’t seem to make a pistol aimed directly at the heart feel as reliable in killing them as it should be. Saving is done at clocks that can be spaced out quite a bit at the hotel, and with limited ammo, it can feel like mutant encounters can swing from being easier than expected to wastes of bullets that almost make you want to reload your last save. Taking them out does mean they’re gone for good, even though some areas are repopulated eventually, and there are at least a few times you might consider just running past. Others though are going to be a nuisance due to the need to traverse so much of St. Dinfna quite often, nearly necessitating the kills and running into accuracy issues. At the same time, sometimes the mutants struggle to even acknowledge your presence, maybe running against a wall or standing in place when you’re very close by, so you might have some luck on your side for clearing the peskier ones.

 

Boss battles are sadly not much of a step up, often about blasting a big baddie in the face as often as possible while they tend to just smash and crash about. Despite eventually getting new firearms like a shotgun or machine gun, gunplay isn’t given much room to be explored save that some weapons kill the raging boss better and if you’re low on ammo, you might want to use a different weapon for a bit. There is no melee option or the like though, meaning ammo reserves can be depleted and leave you with no recourse, so it might be for the best combat encounters aren’t so common. With so little variance between them, leaning on the puzzle-solving mostly was the right choice despite its sometimes tedious or unimpressive complications, but those don’t also feel strong enough to support a game that did come out of the gate with strong promise before you realize it doesn’t know where to take some of its ideas.

THE VERDICT: Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel knows what works visually in a horror game, the hotel excellent when it comes to atmosphere and a variety in how it’s fallen into disrepair or worse. The monsters can look fearsome and be quite dangerous when they work properly, but then the plot flounders as it can’t conceive of compelling payoffs to the mysteries and the camera into the past doesn’t lead to as much intriguing environmental story-telling as it seems to promise. The puzzles can be sharp at times and slogs at others or so basic that you’re poking around for a straightforward code or combination, so while it was wise for them to be the bigger focus when it came to gameplay, it also can’t quite save it from the missteps or lack of consideration elsewhere.

 

And so, I give Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel for Xbox Series X…

A BAD rating. Sometimes, an indie game can have a few people playing too many roles. While only working on the screenplay here didn’t lead to Will Jesus creating a compelling plot, the talents of Marco Majer, Thiago Matheus, and Fabio Martins de Lima seem to be split across many roles from art to programming to directing. A united vision can work in some projects’ favor, but a lot of the talent here seemed to be in regards to artistic design and conceptualizing the setting. St. Dinfna Hotel is well crafted to host a better horror story than the one presented and one deserving of better puzzles or enemies to inhabit it. Some inspired moments mean it’s not a total waste and the monsters can still effectively add to the horror at times since they can be quite dangerous, but it feels like taking on too many design responsibilities might have left certain areas underfed, simplistic, or prone to resorting to the same tricks. Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel can’t be as complex as some of the horror legends it takes inspiration from due to budget and perhaps a lack of experience, but it does have areas of promise that could have been better nourished to help effective imagery, concepts, and set-up work towards a more satisfying plot and more compelling activities.

 

I don’t single out specific people who worked on Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel to point to them as the clear cause of issues, but instead to encourage them to pursue whatever parts were their strengths. Developer Pulsatrix Studioes that they are a part of is currently working on a VR horror game called A.I.L.A that could conceivably make great use of their skills if applied properly, VR horror especially a good place for their strengths with atmospheric horror. Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel has the spirit of something that could be a better horror experience, individual stretches of it pulling you in before repetitive ideas pull you back out, the St. Dinfna Hotel almost worth the visit if a better plot and better creatures had pushed its effective horror elements to the next level.