Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel

The puzzles are challenging but satisfying, the spooks are wonderful, and the story draws you in from the very start—Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel has all the right elements, just may need a couple of gameplay tweaks for the console. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a horror game with all the puzzles you could ever need, look no further.

If you enjoy modern Resident Evil titles such as Resident Evil 7 and Village, then you will feel right at home with Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel. It's an obvious love letter to the franchise that contains plenty of lore, mystery, horror, and puzzles. Unfortunately, the janky controls take away from what otherwise is an indie game with lots of heart and promise.

Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is not a terrible game. While it has its flaws, horror fans will find plenty to like about it and will likely love the majority of their time spent with it.

Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel is a gorgeous game with awesome puzzles and a cinematic experience. It just won't be the game for you if combat is essential to you.

Fobia St. Dinfna Hotel does a lot of things right but it falls just a tad short of matching the greatness of many other games in the genre. I loved exploring the Hotel and solving puzzles that are reminiscent of classic titles like Silent Hill and Resident Evil. It's just a shame that combat is not only boring but lacks any real challenge, and the story doesn't provide much resolution or explanation to what's really going on.

With an interesting environment packed with puzzles and mysteries but a distinct lack of enemy variety and scares, Fobia should only be checked into if you can overlook its detriments.

As a sucker for horror games, I’m always looking for that next fix. Luckily, I’ve been able to play a few somewhat recently, from the fantastic new Resident Evil titles to the terrifying Visage. When I first noticed Fobia – St. Findna Hotel from Pulsatrix Studios, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. However, what we got is a pretty surprising survival horror title that is a glorious love letter to the genre’s past, but it’s not without its issues.

Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel is worth playing for patient survival horror fans who want something lighter on combat, and can handle budget-constrained rough edges. Monsters wander around in an effort to raise the stakes, but the focus is on meticulous exploration, just-cryptic-enough puzzle-solving, and mentally mapping out the many, many hotel halls.

Ultimately, Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel is a bit rough around the edges. Its voice acting isn’t great, which ruins the tension at times, as do its poor enemy animations and sub-par combat. But in an age where new, half-decent survival horror games are few and far between, this isn’t worth writing off completely. Its puzzles are enjoyable, and it does a good job of creating an eerie atmosphere. Particularly if you’re a fan of the classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, it’s worth checking into St. Dinfna Hotel.

Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel offers an embarrassment of riches for horror game fans, but throwing all of the best scary game mechanics into one title and hoping they make for a great game doesn’t quite pan out. Still, this hotel should satisfy those players looking for some old-school scares, even if others may want to consider spending the night elsewhere.

Survival horror fans have been enjoying a relative renaissance these past few years in gaming. With Resident Evil remakes dominating the landscape, and a new Dead Space (and Calisto Protocol) on the horizon, there hasn’t been a better time to get that terrifying adrenaline rush. From Pulsatrix Studios, Fobia: St Dinfna Hotel enters the fray and wears its genre on its sleeve.

Fobia isn’t bad, but I found it rudimentary to the point of being mostly boring. While it has some fun puzzles and a few good scares, the majority of my ten-and-a-half-hour playthrough was dull. Every new story reveal failed to pay off in an interesting way, monster encounters felt basic, and wandering through the environment was disorienting. But if you’re interested in a new game trying to recapture the bizarre logic, unpredictability, and difficulty of old survival horror games, it might scratch that itch.