If you’ve ever had a vacation that didn’t go according to plan, you know how frustrating it can be. You plan your dream destination, buy the tickets, make all the arrangements, and… bam! Something falls apart. Take, for example, a bad hotel. You know the kind…the one that’s dirty, poorly staffed, full of rotating blocks that fire projectiles at massive airships and crabs. Wait, what?
If you’ve ever had a vacation that didn’t go according to plan, you know how frustrating it can be. You plan your dream destination, buy the tickets, make all the arrangements, and… bam! Something falls apart. Take, for example, a bad hotel. You know the kind…the one that’s dirty, poorly staffed, full of rotating blocks that fire projectiles at massive airships and crabs. Wait, what?
Okay, you got me. I’m not talking about a bad hotel so much as I am developer Lucky Frame’s Bad Hotel, an upcoming take on tower defense that is both self-admittedly “insane” and, from the looks of it, completely awesome. I mean, when the full description for your game is a mash-up between a “tower defense and a procedural music toy, with beautiful art and tons of bullets,” how can you go wrong?
If your hotel is located in the middle of an evil dictator’s territory, that’s how. In Bad Hotel, you play the role of a plucky business owner who is “rather unfortunately” located in Tarnation Tadstock, turf of the evil Texas Tyrant. As a result, you spend most of the time you would wooing customers warding off the Tyrant’s “army of seagulls, rats, yetis, and more.” And by ward off, I mean serenade… sort of.
Core to the gameplay of Bad Hotel is a “generative music system,” in which the player creates tunes based on how the play fires, and the way they handle incoming enemies. To that end, each level is as much composed as it is played, which more complex musical structures needed to defend your booming and beleaguered business. According to Lucky Frame, musical stylings range from “delicate beach chillout to country banjo techno.”
And if all of this sounds a bit wacky, you obviously haven’t played enough Lucky Frame shenanigans. This is the studio that brought us Pugs Luv Beats, the adorable, canine-infused strategy title equally rooted in musical playfulness. For Lucky Frame founder Yann Seznec, Bad Hotel represents an exciting step towards releasing yet one more game for which he “can definitely say it’s like [nothing] on the market today.” For our part, we say, Lucky Frame, keep this kind of stuff coming.
