Wow, this game was not at all what I expected -- but in a very good way!
When I first put Propagation: Paradise Hotel on my PSVR2 wishlist, I expected it would be more of a point-and-click puzzle-based walking-sim kind of game with some rudimentary zombie shooting. I was not expecting a full-fledged survival horror game with robust, immersive combat mechanics and open-ended exploration. And I sure as hell was not expecting the game to be nearly as intense or difficult as it proved to be. If you're squeamish about horror in the slightest, you probably want to stay far away from this game.
And when I say that Paradise Hotel is a "full-fledged survival horror game", I mean that it very blatantly evokes old school, classic survival horror design philosophies. Honestly, if somebody caught glimpses of you playing bits and pieces of this game, they could be forgiven for thinking that you were playing a VR adaptation of Resident Evil. Paradise Hotel draws very clear inspirations from the first Resident Evil game on the original PlayStation. From the hotel lobby that looks strikingly like the foyer of the Spencer Mansion, to the use and placement of save rooms, to the use of a first aid spray can for healing, to one particular enemy type that is the spitting image of a Tyrant, to the pacing of early-game exploration and puzzle-solving, Propagation: Paradise Hotel really does feel like a modern-day VR homage to the classic Resident Evil. And for the most part, I think the developers and designers at Wanadev Studio nailed all of it!
Paradise Hotel is deliberately evocative of the original Resident Evil.
At least, they nail the first half of the game or so. The second half of this short horror VR title is a little bit more shaky and uneven. It's still good! Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I think the game falls apart in the second half and becomes bad. It's good all the way through. The second half just diverges from the slower, methodical, exploratory play that perfectly captures the essence of retro survival horror, and starts to feel more like a borderline-unfairly-hard corridor-crawling action shooter.
Oh, and I want to apologize in advance for the poor quality of most of my screenshots. This game is incredibly dark. It looks fine in the VR headset, and the darkness makes the flashlight into a legitimately necessary tool. But all the streaming footage and screenshots that I captured are almost completely illegible. I couldn't find an in-game brightness setting, and the PSVR2's system brightness was at max, so I'm not sure what to do to get better screenshots and video capture. I tried increasing the brightness of the screenshots in Photoshop, but this left the screenshots looking washed out. So I promise you, the actual game looks a lot better than the screenshots in this review make it look. Maybe I need to disable HDR if I want screenshots and captured video to be legible?
Undead hotel
The first couple hours of Propagation: Paradise Hotel represent a near pitch-perfect, textbook adaptation of classic survival horror into an immersive VR setting. It's slow, and methodical, with an ever-building sense of creeping tension and dread.
The game makes it very clear right from the start that any corpse can rise up at any moment and attack, but it also suggests that not all corpses turn into zombies. This creates an unbelievably effective sense of uncertainty and tension as I walk down a hallway littered with dead bodies, lying in pools of blood and viscera, and with flies swarming above. These corpses have been here for a while. Does that mean they are just corpses? Or are they zombies, just waiting for the right moment to rise up and attack?
Any corpse can rise up and attack you at any moment.
I want to start popping them in the head with my handgun as I walk by, but the game has effectively deterred me from that course of action too. I've been warned that the sound of a gunshot (or of loud footsteps or the slamming of a door) can wake up the zombies, or alert nearby zombies to my presence. I don't dare risk firing off a single shot at any one zombie and risk the other 2 or 3 in the hallway rising up to murder me -- let alone have to deal with more zombies coming in from nearby rooms. Furthermore, I'm not exactly swimming in bullets. Every round that I might waste verifying that a corpse is, in fact, just a corpse, is one less bullet that I'll have to deal with the inevitable actual zombies.
Worse yet, I've also been warned that "dead" zombies don't stay dead. If I kill these zombies now, only to have them wake back up again later, then any bullets I spend now will be in vain. So maybe it is better to just step over them, hope they don't grab me, and deal with them if and when the time comes.
Besides, the game doesn't actually let the player shoot a corpse. Even if it is a zombie that will wake up later, shooting it before it wakes up will neither cause it to wake up, nor prevent it from waking up later. Shooting a body on the ground is, literally, just a waste of bullets.
Early game exploration is slow, methodical, and tense.
This first hour or so is everything I've ever hoped for in a virtual reality survival horror game. It starts out relatively peaceful, allowing the player to explore a little, collect a starting buffer of resources, and giving the game time to sett a mood. Like with any great survival horror game, just as I started to get comfortable that the corpses might just be corpses, that was when they started rising up against me. Places that I thought were safe became borderline un-passable, forcing me to have to find alternative routes into the unknown corridors and rooms of the hotel. The desire to horde and conserve resources was in overdrive. Every bullet fired becomes a liability. You don't get that bullet back, but the zombie might get back up, or the gunshot might attract more zombies, forcing you to expend more bullets. Similarly, every healing resource that you use to heal damage from zombies won't be coming back. But that zombie will still be there waiting to damage you again, whether you have healing items left or not.
The second half of the game, however, degrades a bit into more of a high-octane action corridor crawl. By that time, I was absolutely swimming in ammo and healing items, but was still repeatedly dying at almost every enemy encounter, simply because the game kept ambushing and surrounding me. And that was on the "normal" difficulty setting!
The short nature of the game means that the difficulty curve is a bit steep. I barely had time to get comfortable with the shooting controls and strategy before the game started surrounding me with 3 zombies at a time. Heck, the game didn't even bother tutorializing the fact that is has a dodge mechanic until more than halfway through. It also introduces tough new enemy types in mob situations that I thought felt borderline unfair. Most games would introduce a new enemy type in a controlled, one-on-one encounter, so that the player can learn the new enemy's movements and attack patterns. Paradise Hotel apparently thinks that easing the player into learning how to deal with a new enemy type is for pussies. So on (no fewer than) three separate occaisons, when it introduces a new enemy type, it forces the player to confront these new monsters either in pairs, or accompanied by 1 or more regular zombies. And that's not counting the chase sequence in which the player has to run through hallways and avoid zombies while running from a larger, more threatening monster.
Difficult new enemies get introduced in pairs, or accompanied by zombie mobs.
There's also a frustrating boss gauntlet going into the final act of the game. It's literally 3 or 4 boss and mini-boss encounters almost consecutively, with only 1 (easily-missed) opportunity to stop at a save point in between. Thankfully, there are forgiving checkpoints just before each boss encounter.
All this combined to cause a lot of deaths and a lot of save-scumming in the second half of the game.
Maybe Wanadev could have given the player an opportunity to explore a little bit of the second floor, and throw in 1 more major puzzle, before sending us down to the basement? Then they could have taken that opportunity to maybe introduce 1 or 2 of those harder enemy types in the form of a 1-on-1 mini-boss kind of situation. It would also give the player more opportunity to get comfortable with the combat mechanics before being forced into that combat gauntlet.
Master key
The puzzles and progress gates are also pretty good for an indie VR title, and also very much in keeping with classic survival horror standards. Unlocking a door or progress blocker is rarely (if ever) a simple process of just picking up a key from a drawer in the same room, or reading a combination code off a post-it. Unlocking a door is usually a lengthy, multi-step process of exploring multiple rooms and finding intermediate keys.
For example, 1 locked door in the early game requires restoring power to an electronic card reader. The circuit breaker for the card reader is right next to the door, but resetting the circuit breaker requires finding another key, and also finding instructions for how to actually reset the circuit breaker. Finding that key requires figuring out where the maintenance person is, because he holds the key. But getting to the maintenance person requires finding bolt cutters to open a chained door. But getting to the bolt cutters requires first finding a power drill in order to open ventilation ducts to crawl to inaccessible areas. This entire process of figuring out how to open this one door, and collecting all of the intermediate keys and tools, makes up about one-third of the entire game's playtime.
Puzzles and progress gates are complex, and require multiple steps to solve.
Another puzzle later in the game involves trying to figure out a character's combination code to access a locked room. The person happens to be a baseball fan, and plays in an amateur league. The code itself is a combination of numbers from certain baseball jerseys, one of which is actually being worn by a zombie that you may or may not have encountered already. Identifying this zombie, and learning the number on its jersey (whether you fight the zombie or not) is necessary for completing the access code and solving the puzzle.
Yes, the documents in the area do give away all the steps that you need to do to solve this puzzle, but you still have to perform all the steps yourself. This puzzle probably could have been a bit more subtle, such as forcing the player to have to infer one of the clues, instead of explicitly giving away the clue. But the developers have to be careful not to make any given puzzle too difficult, since (as mentioned before) zombies do not permanently die. So there's a ticking clock element to solving puzzles, and wandering back and forth trying to figure out the solution, or searching and re-searching for clues could lead to the zombies reviving.
Generally, solving puzzles is necessary for exploration, but exploration also helps to solve puzzles. Very few puzzles place all their clues or tools in close vicinity to the puzzle itself. You have to explore to find those clues or tools. In fact, at one point, you can even find a Master Key, which unlocks almost any hotel room door, as well as many other rooms. This opens up a ton of new places to explore for more resources and for some puzzle items and clues. Puzzles and exploration tie in very well together, and the puzzles and progress gates usually feel organic instead of overly "video-game-y".
None of the puzzles felt too obvious, but they were also all intuitive enough to solve. I never had to stop and look any puzzle solutions up online, which would be all the more inconvenient given the headset strapped to my face.
Left me wanting more, for better and worse
I think my biggest complaint is that Propagation: Paradise Hotel is just too short. I usually am not one to complain about a game being too short. I'm perfectly fine with a game that is tightly-designed and knows not to overstay its welcome. The problem for Paradise Hotel is that the shorter length causes the pacing in the second half of the game to feel a bit rushed, and it ends on an un-satisfying cliff-hanger. When the credits rolled, I just didn't feel completely satisfied with what I had played.
The very same rules that make the game so tense and threatening also bite it in the butt a bit. As I've said, it starts off slow and methodical, feeling just like those classic survival horror games of the late 90's and early 2000's. It's short length means its difficulty curve is very steep, and it quickly gives way to "GOTCHA!" ambushes that actively undercut the slow and methodical pace of play that the game was initially encouraging. Zombies being able to get back up again after being downed actively punishes slowly scouring a room for resources and collectibles.
I wish Paradise Hotel had more time to build up its atmosphere and even out its pacing and difficulty.
Being ambushed isn't a punishment for sloppy or careless play; it's just what happens if you stay in a room or hallway too long. There's no amount of planning or careful strategizing that will let you avoid those ambushes. Contrast this with the Crimson Head zombies of the Resident Evil REmake, which don't wake back up until certain progress milestones have been met. You can walk back and forth through the REmake mansion all you want looking for missing puzzle items or resources, and the Crimson Heads won't punish you for it unless you actually progressed the story in doing so.
This wouldn't be so bad if there were just more permanent (or at least long-term) ways of dealing with defeated zombies. If I could burn the corpses (like in Resident Evil REmake), or lock them in a bathroom or locker (like with unconscious guards in Metal Gear Solid), or waste an extra bullet to "double tap" them in the head (just in case), then it wouldn't feel as unfair. Or heck, let me break the unconscious zombie's legs with a wrench or crowbar, or even by shooting it and wasting more bullets. But of course, there are no melee weapons at all. Even if the zombie would eventually wake back up, I would still feel like my careful, methodical play had been rewarded because it would at least be restrained or immobilized, and I would have more of a buffer to finish exploring.
If Propagation: Paradis Hotel were maybe like and hour or 2 longer, spent that time pacing out its difficulty escalation a little better, and also included a more satisfying conclusion, I would be giving this game an easy A, and maybe even an A+! Perhaps, after the inevitable sequel releases, the developers might create a "complete" edition that packages both games together into 1 seamless experience. If that happens, then that definitive version of Propagation: Paradise Hotel might very well be a must-play VR horror classic, standing almost neck-and-neck with Resident Evil 7!