Pets Hotel from Ultimate Games is a casual sim in which you manage a hotel dedicated to pampering pets while their owners are away. Curious to see how it stacks up? Dive into our Pets Hotel review!
Take care of different types of animals.
All your little guests have different needs. The owners will tell you all about them, and it is your job to feed the pets according to their demands. Don’t forget about grooming and play-time! A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all!
One of the biggest challenges that await you in Pets Hotel is designing and running a place where your customers can stay assured that they are leaving their beloved pets in good hands. The competition never sleeps!
Developed by Ultimate Games, Pets Hotel offers three game modes: Tutorial (which is highly recommended for beginners), Challenge Mode, and Free Play, a sandbox-style experience.
Pets Hotel gives players the chance to manage a pet care facility, handling everything from creating rooms and taking reservations over the phone to tending to the animals. While the concept is engaging, execution issues degrade the experience on PlayStation. Unfortunately, the first impression is rocky. The tutorial, which most players will likely start with, is broken—rendering it impossible to complete. Early on, you’re required to build a room for your furry guests, but the game doesn’t allow you to place walls, making progress impossible. While this was the only game-breaking bug I encountered, facing such an issue within minutes of starting left the impression of a rushed port. Fortunately, in this case, players are not required to build a clinic from scratch, as preset options are available.
When it comes to controls, Pets Hotel deviates from PlayStation standards, which will require some time to get used to. The touchpad button is used to open a tablet menu, but the default cursor position lands on the background music selection instead of the actual menu. This means you must press left twice every time just to access the actual options.
Additionally, navigating text messages is inconsistent—sometimes requiring the R1 button, other times the Square or X buttons to progress. Since PlayStation usually uses the X button for advancing text, this lack of consistency makes navigation feel unintuitive and takes some time to get used to.
As for the gameplay, you’ll be responsible for caring for pets, answering phone calls to take reservations, and managing daily tasks. The pet care mechanics start off well—you can feed, leash, and clean the animals—but the novelty wears off quickly as the tasks become repetitive, even with five different types of pets to look after. Fortunately, additional management features, such as posting job ads and recruiting employees, add some depth to the experience. It also seems impossible to actually “lose” a pet. For example, if you neglect to feed one for an entire week, its satisfaction level will drop to red, and the customer will be angry—but there don’t seem to be real consequences beyond that.
For an indie game, the 3D world is fairly detailed, but the object geometry is rough. The pet models have a decent polygon count, but their textures appear low-resolution and upscaled, reminiscent of PlayStation 2 graphics. This makes the overall presentation feel outdated.
The game has a full trophy list with a Platinum trophy for you to add to your collection. The list is split into 40 Bronze trophies, 3 Silver trophies, and 5 Gold trophies. You’ll get a trophy once you receive your first guest. After that, you can get trophies for things such as petting a guest, having a guest take its first bath, hiring an employee to help you out, running your hotel for 10 days, playing 10 times with the fish in the bubble, working 7 days in a row without skipping a day, playing 10 times with the cat by using feathers on a stick, washing a dog in less than 45 seconds, digging 30 holes, upgrading 10 aquariums, have 10 dogs in the hotel, giving out 20 treats, and run your hotel for 100 days, to name some examples.
Pets Hotel gives players the chance to manage a pet care facility, handling everything from creating rooms and taking reservations over the phone to tending to the animals. This game is a bit rough on the PlayStation. The poor adaptation of mouse and keyboard controls to the DualSense is sometimes annoying, and I’ve met bugs that prevented progression. I did enjoy taking care of the pets, although it felt repetitive at some point, but that was expected. Pets Hotel is out on PlayStation 5 with a $21.99 price tag.
Disclaimer
This Pets Hotel review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by Ultimate Games.
