Hotel Galactic shows the dangers of releasing an Early Access game too soon

This was originally supposed to be a preview for Hotel Galactic, an Early Access title released 24 July on Steam where you manage a floating hotel full of strange characters. However, the launch version is in a less-than-acceptable state, full of bugs and missing QoL features. So rather than giving a proper preview — I’ve only been able to play a few hours — I’ll instead go over some of the key problems and why this will likely end up hurting Hotel Galactic in the long run.

At the very least, Hotel Galactic’s main concept is neat. You play as a spectral being, giving you an in-universe reason for why you’re able to fly around and view the entire hotel at a moments notice. Said hotel was once run by Gustav, who now roams the floating island hosting Hotel Galactic as a ghost. Working with him to bring the hotel back to its glory days, you fix the place up and start welcoming in guests from across the universe.

Hotel management is similar to colony sims like Rimworld, just without the impending threat of death every few minutes. You build new rooms for guests and facilities to serve them, assigning workers tasks via a simple priority system. Different rooms require certain furniture to function, though you’re still allowed to add your own personal touches to the decor.

The general idea is to bring in guests, fulfil their needs (mostly food and a place to sleep), then use the money earned to spruce up the hotel further. With space on the island being somewhat limited, this usually means that you’ll build upwards rather than outwards without any need to worry about silly things like structural integrity.

Satisfying different types of intergalactic guests also nets you various other currencies that can be put towards skill tree unlocks. It’s a simple to understand loop that gives you a goal to work towards between story objectives, without railroading the player too hard into specific strategies.

While simple enough once you’ve put a few hours in, I will say that the menus and overall UI are a little lacking at times. Equipping workers with tools takes more clicks than needed (you can’t just assign them equipment directly from their worker info), and the camera often means that you’ll have a hard time targeting things further away from the camera.

However, things like that are something you come to expect during Early Access, with the user experience getting better over time as development continues. However, Hotel Galactic’s biggest roadblock isn’t an occasionally clunky system, it’s the fact that it launched far too early.

This isn’t just hyperbole (if you’ve ever seen the Steam forums, you’ll notice that people are quick to call something a scam at the most minor of inconveniences.) No, even the development team has admitted that Hotel Galactic “should have remained in production for a couple more months”.

As for why this is the case? Bugs, and lots of them.

Expect workers and quests to not function correctly, visual bugs, and many framerate issues. At launch, I even thought the game was completely broken on my system after it got stuck on a black screen during startup. Turns out that I just had to wait… for a long time.
At the time of writing there have been three patches to try and fix things up, with more on the way. While it’s good to see that work is being done to improve upon the rough launch build, it does lead into another key problem. If all hands are on deck to fix bugs, how long will it take for new content to arrive.

The “repair roadmap” (not usually the sort of roadmap you’d want to see after Early Access launch) implies that the focus for the next 4-5 weeks is solely to fix bugs. That’s over a month minimum before anything new can potentially be added, killing momentum completely.

And that’s my biggest worry for Hotel Galactic. After the first few patches it’s definitely in a better state, but the damage is already done. Most players are gone, with overall reviews hovering dangerously close to “Overly Negative”.

Even with developer Ancient Forge stating that “the future of Hotel Galactic is secured”, it still remains to be seen whether the game’s decent base can be build upon all the way. For now I’d recommend giving this a miss and check back in another year or two to see how things pan out.

---

A review key for Hotel Galactic was provided by the developer for this preview.

^{Disclosure: Some links in this article may be affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase after clicking on them. This is at no additional cost to you and helps support Rice Digital!}