Dead Mountaineer's Hotel

This game for me started out strong, I was loving the scenery and building tension and puzzles. The accents are pretty bad but no worse than Black Mirror. The second half the puzzles seemed to disappear and be more about having a conversation with one character and then unlocking another conversation with another.

The ending was a bit out there but I was more disappointed as I felt the game was too short, left out a lot of plot and didn't allow for enough investigating.

I played this game on Windows 7 so my experience might be different to some.
I actually enjoyed it, in spite of all it's quirks. The scenery and the hotel were beautiful , even though a bit empty, with very little with which to interact . The characters are all very different . They modernly included a gender ambivalent character but then made the female characters absurdly massively bosomed(this latter, I guess, to entertain the stereotypical male player) It's a classic point and click game which is something many people don't take into account. Yes some puzzles were annoying; for example, the pool/snooker game . I, like many others players, could NOT win this (which one has to, the obtain a certain ending)in spite of trying over and over and over...lol However it was possible to play on, to an ending which was ok. I do recommend it if you can get it to play on your computer... Ohh meant to add, there is a VERY helpful notebook, map(very valuable...one gets it from looking at the map on the wall behind the check in desk) and character ID

This hasn't got the reputation as the 'worst point and click game ever created' for nothing you know. It really is that bad. The voice acting is atrocious and the music is completely at odds with what's happening on-screen (for instance you may be at a point where you're 'supposed to be' feeling sad, but then some rock tune will start blasting out thus breaking the illusion). What isn't an illusion however is that you avoid at all costs!

After reading all the bad reviews here, I had my doubt about this game and it took me quite a while to finally play it. The English voice acting is terrible, that's for sure. But if you speak Russian or German, there are very good voiceovers there!

The game has an ambience similar to the Agatha Christie games by The Adventure Company, so I felt immediately at home in the creepy mountain hotel. The graphics are amazing and leave an impression.

The only thing i can really criticise on this one is that it could be longer and the story better developed. However, I think the bad reviews are unjust, it is definitely worth your time if you are into classic adventure games.

Information / Review English

Gameplay / Story

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Information / Review Deutsch

Gameplay / Geschichte

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Yes this game has some of the worst voice acting you will ever hear. Yes the movement is clunky. Yes it's often difficult to exit from screen to screen. Yes you will sometimes have music suddenly kick in with no explanation, reason or context.
And YES I BLOODY LOVE THIS GAME!!!!
So sorry if you think every game should look like Call of Duty, or be as slick as Life Is Strange. Maybe stick to a handful of very limited AAA titles, yeah? Leave the gaming to actual gamers. Dead Mountaineer's Hotel has a great story, often great atmosphere and is just plain weird. What's not to love. Sit yourself down, grab a cuppa and let the story wash over you as you play through some glorious clunkiness.

Played this game through and it was a total unenjoyment. It could have been better, but it was a terrible adaptation.

Pros:
+ Good ambient graphics.
+ Some musical tracks were good.

Cons:
- Voice acting was terrible.
- Occasionally the music crossovered with other music - and some tracks didn't were suitable for the situation.
- Some puzzles were unnecessary and didn't have anything to do with the plot. (For example one with dining.)
- Ending was a disappointment.
- Sometimes clicking didn't work with the objects.
- A lot of backtracking and sometimes even unnecessary backtracking.
- I had to use walkthrough more than I had wanted.
- Some items weren't available - which seemed like a bug.

*/*****
[ 1/5 ]

I enjoy weird and unpopular games often enough, this is one of them without a doubt. I actually did enjoy the game itself. But I don't recommend buying it at full price.

Voice acting was funny (and yes, bad). Storyline ended up being really crappy, and I am left like "???" now that it's over. Game isn't very clear with what you should do next... many times I was wondering around for a while unsure of what to do. Plenty of things I saw in a video walkthrough, I wasn't able to do, but it didn't seem to matter because we both completed the game with/without certain things being done. Some things you have to get are not obvious, you will spend a lot of time slowly moving the cursor over every centimeter of the game trying to click everything to pick something up hopefully... but then again, you didn't have to anyway because it wasn't required to complete the game! Uhg!

This game could had been really awesome, despite the flaws, if they actually gave it a conclusive ending. But they did not. Womp womp.

Started off good but went awful towards the end due to game breaking bugs and glitches. The game builds up a story in suspense for a while, then it just ends abruptly with an awful ending that doesn't explain what happened in the game. Don't buy, would not recommend. 3/10

Pros:
Nice music
Nice graphics for when the game was made
The suspense
Some of the puzzles

Cons:
The awful voice acting
Bugs/glitches later on in the game
The dialogue
Slow movement
Some objects being almost impossible to find
The amount of walking around to advance to the next part of the game
The unrealistic physics in one of the puzzles will make you want to pull your hair out
The ending

Ok, so after lots and lots of hours I basically just gave up. I liked the solving puzzles and figuring things out, but it was like the old days of the game Mist where you just didn't know what the heck to do next. Basically just guess your way through stuff. I mean, I guess it would recommend it since it actually was a challenge at times and pretty fun looking around. I never beat the game and wish the clues were a little more obvious. This game would be awesome if it had seamless loading. But I guess they decided to made every room a scene or something.

One more thing though. I thought the voice acting was trolling the player at time especially the voice acting of the main hotel manager guy. It was pretty weird how they did the voice acting, not really sure what to ever say about it.

Give it a shot and maybe you'll get farther than I did.

Nice, old-scool graphics, reminded me a bit of Syberia. However, story-wise it was a complete blah with no ground for anything and tons of mistakes:
You have tons of locaions (rooms) and such, most of which you never need in the game. It makes reacing places so difficult!
You have tons of actions which bring nothing to the story.
A number of items which you can view, say what they are and that's it. Usually, this cancels the "view" action in such games. Once you see it and know what it is, if it's uselss otherwise.. it just mustn't stay active. Here, it's the opposite.
You have a generator and a room which you may never "see".
Collecting stuff with no need for it.
Tons of useless mini-quests (like seeking for the same item twice).

Idiotic ending.

Dead Mountaineer's Hotel is a game based on the novel of the same name by the Strugatsky brothers, the generally pretty great Russian sci-fi authors who also wrote books like Roadside Picnic, which was the basis of the movie which was in turn the basis of the STALKER series. I've never read this particular book, but I figured anything related to them couldn't possibly turn out that bad. I was horribly wrong, but I don't need to tell you that, because I doubt anyone was actually planning on buying this game to begin with. But I'm going to go over it anyways because I need a therapeutic rant session to recover from playing it.

The first thing you'll notice within five seconds of starting the game is that the voice acting is absolutely terrible. Just listen to the opening dialogue of the game, and you'll see what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRYvubs4MQs . Well, actually the first thing you'll notice is that despite originally releasing in 2007 the game only runs in one resolution, and it's 1024 x 768 and cannot be changed, but still. There are one or two actors who border on decent, but for the most part the game sounds as if they hired a bunch of bums off the street and paid them in bread to do the voice acting for the game. It's kind of hilarious, and was mainly what kept me playing through the game, but it also made the story impossible to take seriously.

Luckily, there really isn't much story. Again, I've never read the novel this was based off of, but I highly doubt it went quite like this. You spent the first four or five hours of the game doing absolutely nothing relevant to the plot, mainly involving stupid puzzles like helping the hotel owner fix the room service call system that never gets used again, or choosing a dinner from various categories that doesn't cause the other guests to laugh at your choice (I don't know why having too many vegetables in your meal is grounds for making you redo a "puzzle", but what do I know?), or playing billiards with another character that isn't even really a puzzle so much as just a billiards flash game implanted into the game. Then in the last 20 minutes or so of the game the story finally starts, you talk to each of the hotel's residents, and then it ends, and the game explains the story to you.

As you might have gathered from that last bit, the store page is pretty misleading. It mentions "15+ hours of gameplay", but I finished it in less than 6 and I can't imagine it taking 15 hours unless you just get lost in the unnecessarily large hotel. The store page also makes it seem as if the hotel guests have AI routines and go about their own lives, hinting at a system something like how Deadly Premonition's characters go about their day, but the game doesn't have any sort of time system and the characters just move from place to place as you solve the puzzles like in any adventure game. I used to think RunAway was the worst point-and-click adventure game I'd ever played, but I'm not sure if anything will ever top this one.

Overall I enjoyed the game enough to make it worth a play through. The game was made in 2007 so the graphics by now are pretty dated. Though still decent enough that it shouldn't be a bother.

The game plays like a typical point'n'click adventure game, about a detective investigate what appears to be a murder and the strange going ons inside the hotel. For the most part the game is pretty cliched and honestly lacking in story development until towards the end and then BAM!

The game took me about 6hrs to play through all the way. There are some large negatives though. The voice acting is really quite terrible. It wouldn't surprise me if whoever localized it into English also provided the voices themselves.

There's some good stuff here, interesting characters, and setting thanks to the novel it's based. I would say it's better than the film of that novel, which can be seen on youtube, but it's all so very slow, the hotel is quite large and as soon as your character gets to one end of it, he's sent back to the other. Also there are too many puzzles and tasks which don't actually require any puzzling. I would recommend it if you're interested in the Strugatsky brothers (of Stalker(aka Roadside Picnic) the Inhabited Island, and Hard to Be a God) but not to anyone else.

A game that covers the spectrum.

I had read the reviews and wasn't expecting much, but when I saw the game on sale for less than 4 dollars I thought I would give it a go. I am glad I did.

Some aspects of this game are really great, others are awful.

The artwork is fabulous and it helps the game exude atmosphere. It reminded me of 'Evil Under the Sun' with a bit of 'Black Mirror 1' and 'Syberia' thrown in, but in the mountains. The hotel was a dream to explore as it is huge and would be a fantastic place to stay. I loved the short sections outside, with the snow falling. The artists did a fab job.

Difficulty is not too tough. I only needed to check a walkthrough once, when I couldn't fathom how to lure the owner out of his office.

Kaisa is certainly very cute.

The music is lovely for the most part, though a couple of horrendous rock pieces come in at odd moments and not just when entering the room of a particular character.

Gameplay is ok, with a clear changing cursor.

Now for the bad. The story is a real slow boiler, which is a good thing as it sets the scen beautifully and allows us to get to know the characters. However, when the main events finally happen, the story just ends. I had the most nonsensical ending to a game ever and though there are different endings none make a lot of sense, with an absolutely ridiculous twist at the end. So the game takes a good few hours to brew and then when something big finally happens, it ends. Crazy. It is like the developers suddenly lost interest to continue the plot.

The translation is poor, though understandable. Sometimes it appears that characters give a comnpletely different answer to the question being asked. The voicees being better than the inaccurate subtitles. It's crazy that the developers didn't get someone who can understand proper English to check the translation. The character voices range from ok (the main character, Kaisa, and Olga) to horrendously bad (Alec, for instance). Also the voices are obviously done with the actor not having a clue as to the context in which they are supposed to be said. A basic error.

So, I am going to recommend this title as parts of this game are very enjoyable indeed, though the ridiculously abrupt and silly ending ruins the experience in the end.

I like point and click adventure games, but didn't like this one at all. The voice acting was very bland, like they read from a script and that's it. The hints of what to do or who to speak to were either vague or non existant. And the story wasn't that great to begin with, and got even weirder near the end. Even if you like adventure games, with no replayability, you would do well to avoid this one, and get something else instead.

There are a few negative moments with this game like, some of the voice acting. But If you do like puzzle solving and classic point a click games, than give this one a try. These classic type of games are few and between. I feel that some people weren't giving this one a better chance. Story line is pretty simply, you are a detective solving a possible murder. Characters in game are some what interesting, but will get boring after awhile talking to them. And the setting in game could have been worked on more. Breakdown - Graphics: 2/5, sound 3/5, fun factor 3/5, difficulty 3/5, controls 4/5.

Appallingly awful - spent ages setting things up, then ended abruptly in a ridiculous way that bore no relation to anything that had happened up to that point. Voice acting ranged from average (main character) to laughably bad (hotel manager).

I had initially planned to reserve this feature only for providing positive input on games that I truly felt deserved some attention that they might not generally get, but I've given this some thought and think people really need to be warned about how bad this game really is because the pictures can be deceiving.

The art is nice. I will give it that. However the atmosphere is ruined at literally the FIRST moment one of the two initial characters you see speaks, as their voice acting is some of the worst I have ever heard. These people's voices would not be out of place in a film like The Room. There is also absolutely no introductory exposition. The main character (whoever he is, I think he's a cop, could be wrong) immediately starts angrily grilling people on things with nothing to explain his motivation or why the player should care. Add on the terrible voice acting and things get very painful, very fast.

As well as no explanation of the story, there is also no explanation of the controls. I figured out the basics of moving and picking things up as that's as generic as can be, but upon reaching my first real puzzle I was completely at a loss as to how I should be manipulating the items in my inventory or making use of them in the environment. I poked and prodded, clicked and reclicked and what should've been a very, very simple task of just poking the end of a key to make it fall out of the lock on the other side of the door turned into an impossible task when nothing I did registered. This is where I gave up on the game in disgust.

I purchsed this game for $2.50. I do not feel it was worth that amount. You have all now been warned.

Dead Mountaineer's Hotel is a point and click adventure made in the same spirit as such classics as Syberia and Still Life . The Steam Overlay works, but unfortunately the game does not support widescreen, and the resulting image will be letterboxed, which is not uncommon for games of this era. The diaglogue and animation are servicable, and if you are a player who enjoys playing detective in a point and click adventure, Dead Mountaineer's Hotel certainly delivers.