Pets Hotel Review

Ever wanted to own your own bed and breakfast for animals? No, me neither, although I do have a soft spot for our four-legged friends, and I imagine they’d be a lot easier to deal with than humans. Nevertheless, developer Games Incubator is back with another simulator, this time in the form of Pets Hotel, in which, you guessed it, you run your own pet hotel. Originally launched on Steam back in 2023, this review will be focusing on the console version recently released. Let’s dig into it!

The premise of Pets Hotel is simple: potential clients will contact you and request that you look after their pet for a set period of time. Once in your care, you’ll need to keep them fed, watered, clean, and entertained throughout the day. Sounds simple enough, but when I jumped straight into the Free Play mode, I found myself at a loss with what to do. It’s definitely recommended to play through the tutorials first, as they did a good job of slowly teaching me each of the game's mechanics.

Once you’re comfortable with what Pets Hotel is all about, Challenge Mode is the other available mode that sees you completing a series of tasks in pre-built locations. These can range from earning enough reputation, playing with the animals, and returning pets to their owners in good condition. There is a set number of days in which to complete the challenges, but they were never too troublesome. The lack of variety was the main issue, as each of the four challenge maps had the same set of tasks to complete, with the only difference being a larger starting hotel or already having animals staying in them.

Pets Hotel won’t be impressing people with its graphical prowess, as it does look dated. Textures had a lack of polish, with some — particularly walls and floors — being very blurry and just overall not great to look at. Lighting is also rough, with constant flickering that is so prevalent you’d assume there was something wrong with the building's electricity. The animals themselves are rather endearing, I must admit, and their animations were relatively charming. If you’ve played these relatively low-budget sim games before, then you’ll know what to expect, just with a little added cuteness thanks to the pets!

Audio-wise, this is as generic as they come, with the music heard throughout being similar to that of what you’d hear in a lift. It’s not offensive, but certainly one you’d want to turn off and listen to your own music whilst playing. At least the sounds coming from the animals are more tolerable, but the constant yapping from some of the dogs did start to grate on me.

The overall presentation is lacking, from the poorly designed and unintuitive menus to the generic-looking UI. There were also all manner of bugs that ranged from slightly irritating to forcing restarts. One instance had a dog’s hygiene deteriorate because I couldn’t clean up its poo as it was “in use by somebody else”. Not sure who this ghostly faeces-loving somebody was, but it forced me to relocate the animal from that room in order to keep the dog happy.

Each day in Pets Hotel has the same basic loop: people will phone up to ask you to care for their pets (dogs, cats, rabbits, turtles, or fish) for a set number of days. From here, you’ll get them registered and await their arrival. The fact that once you put the phone down, though, any information given to you that needs to be registered isn’t shown again, and it can be tricky to remember every detail of a pet. Best to grab a notepad to ensure no mistakes are made, but it’s baffling that the developer decided not to allow players to review this information. You can eventually hire staff to do this and other tasks for you, which became essential the more my pet hotel grew.

After receiving some overnight guests, you’ll need to attend to their needs by petting, bathing, feeding, and playing with them. Some actions have their own mini-games to play, which — although not too taxing — do become a little repetitive after a while. Most tasks, though, involved watching a slow animation with zero interaction. There are then extra factors to take into consideration, such as certain pets not being allowed a specific food or that they vomit frequently. This does add some much-needed variety to the game, but again, these just add to the monotonous nature of interacting with things and watching the animations play out.

Aside from caring for pets, you can also expand your hotel by placing new rooms and decorating them as you see fit. The building mechanics are a little cumbersome, and your options are fairly limited, but by expanding your hotel, you can then take on more pets at once.

There really isn’t that much to Pets Hotel, and what is here is mostly mindless busywork and generic tasks. Sure, the animals are cute, but when the game itself is tedious and unintuitive, even puppy dog eyes can’t save it. Not a game I’d recommend, despite my love of animals, it’s just yet another generic simulator game with a lack of polish and not enough to keep players entertained.