Played on weekly Sunday streams. Since the game can go on indefinitely, I defined "completion" as the end of the story quests.
!! Spoilers below !!
It's a very chill game! I know this is a building/interior decoration game but I mostly enjoyed exploring the various maps and searching for hidden secrets. I'm not huge on interior decoration (most of the entertainment I got out of Animal Crossing was collecting/trading rare and desirable items) so most of my rooms and hotels turned out to be quite cookie-cutter.
I suppose that's my main critique of it as an interior decoration game, though - since certain items give you more comfort and decoration points, if you want to drive up your earnings you're basically required to use the higher levelled items, so there isn't that much variety. At the highest level you have just one craftable item of each furniture type for bedrooms (these give comfort points and some decoration points), and most of the customisation just comes down to the room layout, location, and decoration items (which don't give comfort points, just decoration). I guess it's not REALLY an interior decoration game in that case? It's somewhere in between a sandbox and a micromanagement game I think.
On the management side of things - it isn't made totally clear that you HAVE to rely on the friends that you can hire for your hotels. Maybe that's intended, so that you discover it for yourself...so I'm not making that a strike against, but for a long time I was manually assigning guests per day and it was very tedious. Also I didn't have enough valuables all the time, and had to keep running back and forth to stock food and fuel. It became dramatically easier after I paid to have those done automatically, but Wade specifically costs so much to maintain that I have his services turned off for all but one location.
This isn't to say that it's bad and I didn't enjoy it - I did actually! It scratched my itch to do things in a smart way once I figured it out. I didn't really have issues with the hotel building/management part of the game. Maybe some balancing might've been good as far as resource availability/usage in recipes is concerned...but even then maybe it's just that I wasn't gathering resources until I really needed them.
As for miscellaneous other things - inventory management was a bit of a bother because I kept picking up excess amounts of common items, travelling between areas without a bus stop was tedious...but I think my main gripe would probably be that the story quests (especially near the end) sometimes just stopped giving hints for where to go next. You had an item and then had to go somewhere with it...or find a certain person...without even any suggestions for which map to check, or anything. This was a bit of a problem when the story ended, because it ended without any particular indication that the story was done, so I thought for a while that maybe I was supposed to go somewhere or talk to someone to continue...
Most of my dissatisfaction really comes from the story...but I also have to say that I didn't HATE it, it was just somewhat poorly paced and set up a lot of things that were never talked about (possibly unintentionally).
Especially the latter! The story introduced a bunch of characters and placed a lot of mysterious objects that felt like they should've been at least referred to. Hank's friends Anni and Will seem to be partners in his hotel business at the start, but eventually just fade out and don't have that much of a presence, except for briefly when Barbara leaves. Barbara's presence in the story is a weird one, because even though the game frames her as someone important, it turns out that she doesn't have much relevance to the overall plot. Hank has been helping many different characters in the time that Barbara has a prominent role in the story, so it seems a bit overblown for him to be especially shocked that she left - I don't know though, maybe he thought Barbara was a good friend or he just gets very attached to people he meets. And then the gods are briefly talked about, and it seems like maybe the secrets of the ruins and statues scattered around the maps might become relevant - but the story ends there. That is to say...there were a TON of loose ends. I wouldn't examine it too closely if the management sim part of the game was more robust, but it's casual enough that it feels like the plot was intended to be a larger part of the game experience.
I can't quite tell the writer's intentions either - it makes numerous jabs at capitalism through the Pawn Shark operators, but has Hank obey the Shark uncritically in order to progress. Like...it's possible to rack up money and valuables entirely hands-off if you've built enough bedrooms and facilities, which feels...wrong? I also had the constant sense of this...development and introduction of human tourists into natural areas being "wrong" but it's never actually addressed. And while this is fine if ecological destruction isn't a theme, multiple characters suffer from destruction caused by humans/were taken from their natural environments by humans, so it's not completely irrelevant either. It suggests that perhaps maybe it's a bad thing to allow humans to set foot in this place now that it's a haven for animals, but at the same time, explicitly says that some humans may be good and some may be bad, so what are we to do. Nothing really is resolved - we met the dream bird who is free now and we don't know where his archnemesis is either.
I'll say the characters are great though - I was very endeared to all of them. Sabine is my favourite I love her a lot.
It's a cute hotel management sim game. I was expecting a casual experience and got a casual experience, and also I played this for my friend Bear who likes bears, so I'm not too frustrated about all the loose ends (as opposed to Ori, for which I actually had expectations). Would still recommend to anyone looking for a chill and funny experience, and I might boot it up again sometime for completionism's sake.