What does the renowned scientist, who was stripped of her laboratory in the middle of an economic crisis, do? Of course, she spends her last savings on a change of scenery—a vacation at a luxury hotel in the heart of a tropical paradise. Alas, the hotel has other plans: a spatial-temporal continuum anomaly raging within forces the guest to abandon the scientific method and ask only one question: will these insane holidays turn into a permanent sabbatical?
Explore a hotel where moving from one room to another through doors invariably leads you astray. To reach the correct room, you’ll have to do something completely unexpected—but perfectly logical.
A puzzle game with an estimated playthrough time of around 2 hours.
Price: $7.99 / 350 RUB
Core feature—the hotel lacks logic: behind every door is not the room that should be in that space, and each time it’s different. Movement is not governed by the player, incorporating an element of controlled, yet random, chance.
To move between rooms, you interact with pieces of interior design in a specific sequence, but no single interaction guarantees you will reach the desired location.
Example: you want to get to the pool, but when you open the door of a room, you see a boiler room instead of the foyer. If you go into the bathroom and turn on the faucet in the sink, the room door, which usually leads to the foyer, will open the path to the pool.
• Door control mechanics are present in Blue Prince, but there the player directly influences room layout and placement. • Due to the unpredictability of movement, the player has no control over the situation, which makes them resemble the main character. • To our knowledge, this mechanic has no direct parallels.
Trailer
Target Audience:
Players who lean toward creative nonconformity, aged 18 to 24.• Resonates with the game’s theme due to the popular Gen Z phenomenon of Backrooms.
• Attracted by the visuals, which blend the aesthetics of Frutiger Aero and Y2K with a Midcentury Modern twist, resonating with Zoomer taste.
• Tolerant of short-form projects that do not require long periods of intense focus.
• Reacts positively to themes adjacent to the project, such as ASMR and Vertical Shorts.
Niche Summary:
• Escape the Backrooms — 4,000,000 copies
• The Exit 8 — 3,000,000 copies, with 30,000 copies sold on release day.
• The Stanley Parable — 6,600,000 copies
• POOLS — 200,000 copies
• Frutiger Home— ~ 5,000 copies
Traction
Hotel Reverie is part of the main lineup of the waldzell/tempest startup accelerator and is supported by two game development studios for PC and consoles.
In addition, the game has achieved particular success on the deziiign.com platform—the presentations detailing the project’s development stages garnered over 120 likes from the audience and received a rating of 1191 from the platform’s experts. One of the long-form articles dedicated to the project was selected as a finalist in the «DAFES Choice. March 2026» competition.
Traditionally, for projects of this nature, the game is developed by one person, with external participants brought in for specific roles.
Polina Dvoryankina
3D Artist, Game Designer. I am drawn to games with tranquil yet eerie environments, so I am currently working on my own.
The games I prototyped and implemented, both individually and within small teams, have repeatedly placed in competitions and hackathons.
CRYSTALLINE:
Best game at the GAME FUTURE FEST 2025 festival;
2nd place in the GameDevFest FKN 2026 competition;
Finalist in the DAFES Selection Contest. December 2024.
Distant Suns:
Finalist in the Game Festival: «HORIZON OF INDIE CULTURE»
AmpFunk:
One of the highest-rated projects on deziiign.com (rating 1091).
A complete list of projects will be provided upon request.
Development Roadmap:
December 2026 — Closed Playtest Build
Implementation of door logic, creation of dependencies, detailing, and polishing of locations. Internal prototype testing.March 2027 — Open Playtest Build
Creation of additional rooms, finalization of logic and dependencies, debugging of the in-game camera. External testing of the demo version, project promotion.June 2027 — Public Demo Release
Launch of the demo on Steam, project promotion. Planning for the development of the full version.July 2027 — April 2028 — Full Game Development
Creation of additional rooms, implementation of logic and dependencies throughout the hotel. Creation of cutscenes. Active project promotion, community engagement.May 2028 — Game Launch
Release of the fully completed game on PC (Steam platform), as well as Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Switch.
Development budget—2,000,000 rubles.
• Content expansion, design, and implementation of new hotel spaces
• Programming hotel logic
• Programming inter-room navigation systems
• Game interface design
• Cutscene creation
• Sound design, including outsourcing of the original soundtrack
• Promotion and associated expenses
