‘Spread: Paradise Hotel’ Review A Pretty Decent Impression of ‘Resident Evil’

Spread: Paradise Hoteloffers some obviously terrifying moments of horror, but between the ever lingering danger of zombified attacks and a few giant bosses making for a veryResident Evil-inspired experience there is a bit of noise that tarnishes what could have been a more memorable and cohesive experience. Still, it’s functionally a pretty solid zombie adventure that clearly deviates from the franchise’s roots as a static wave shooter.

Spread: paradise hotel Details:

Available on:SteamVR, Quest
Release date:May 4, 2023
Price:$20
Ddeveloper: WanadevStudio
Revised on:Quest 2 via PC Link

Gameplay

It’s the zombie apocalypse, and you’re hanging out in the bowels of some hotel in some part of the world. However, you won’t have much time to spend with your paternal friend, as you have to pick up your sister, who has left for some reason. Alright, so the setup isn’t spectacular, but at least the zombie killing is pretty good, right? I’ll lead with an emphatic yeah, mostly!

Zombie rule number one: shoot them in the head. This is the ironclad directive you’re probably most familiar with, but there are a few caveats in Spread: Paradise Hotel. Shooting zombies multiple times in the head with a gun makes them very sleepy. Not really. Shoot a zombie three times in the head and it will lie quietly on the ground for a while. Some time later, usually when you’ve taken another swerve in the narrative, hell reappears at an obviously inopportune time to bother you again.

As clear as that might be a departure from zombie orthodoxy, the effect it had on me was something I can’t say I’ve felt in a zombie shooter before. Instead of worrying about walkers sticking out of the ceiling (there are a few) or seeping chaotically through closed doors or windows, you become much more obsessed with every corpse lying in the hallway, of which there are To a lot. You won’t be wandering through an endless hellscape either, as you’ll backtrack, learn the layout of the hotel, and dodge zombies while pointing a gun at their faces, lest they wake up and go. start harassing you again.

Indeed, any of them could be waiting for you to let your guard down, open your eyes, and grab your ankle. Unfortunately, a preemptive headshot is completely ineffective, which is a disappointment for the Immersiondepartment, but more on that below. Likewise, you’ll be careful because you can’t ignore a single corpse, which is a new kind of creepiness that really kept me on my toes. Knowing that, I would have loved the option to chop some heads off to end the constant revisits, but that’s just not in the cards.

That’s basically the case until you get a shotgun in the second half of the game and then those walkers go to bed for good because you’ve effectively stunned their infected brains (finally). What used to be one-on-one battles transitions to three-way battles, testing the games only with other (and more powerful) weapons. You’ll also start dashing through a few new zombie classes in addition to some tougher baddies, which provides an interesting variety of difficulty. Will you meet three walkers? A scorpion-style zombie? A ripped dude who can take a ton of punches in the face?

While there are a few challenging and unique zombies, there’s really only one real boss in the game. Full disclosure: I didn’t like it, and while I won’t spoil anything here, rest assured you, you will probably also be frustrated with how to bring it down. He’s ultra lame, and you’ll want to cut the game just so you don’t have to constantly hear your character screaming until he’s nauseous, I gotta knock him out!

All right. No. I will spoil the boss. Skip this paragraph if you want to avoid the spoiler: What do I need to knock him out? Don’t I need kill that bastard? Should I knock it out Before I kill him? Is this a clue? Do I need something to do this? Maybe I need to call the elevator and prepare something for knock it out? Maybe I need to escape the hall and up the stairs to get something I missed? Maybe I need to blast a fire extinguisher in her face to knock it out? No. My hand goes through these, so it can’t be that. Maybe I have to die a dozen times before I learn he has a specific attack pattern with a singular weak point, hit him three times and fight my way to the sequel and then the end credits? Yeah, that’s it.

Be that as it may, many mechanical elements of Spread: Paradise Hotelare very functional and work well. The body-based inventory system isn’t overloaded, so you always have what you need, like a medical spray on your left side, a flashlight you can strap to your chest or hold in your hand , your 9mm pistol to your right, or the shogun over your shoulder. It’s all there and easy to grasp. This completes a 2D menu you can bring up, which as mission critical items, the map, settings, etc.

It’s not easy to change user expectations of level design when we all know what to expect more or less in a space as familiar as a hotel. Still, the game throws a few curveballs at you to keep you from mechanically peeking through every room in the hotel, which spans seven levels. Still, the story itself didn’t seem like a compelling enough driver to drive you forward. The found notes add a bit of flavor, but don’t do enough to flesh out the background of what’s really going on, leaving you mostly banging your head against each stain until it’s done. is complete so you can move on to the next one.

Finally, the game, which took me about 3.5 hours, also includes some puzzles, although all the solutions are published in found notes, so you just need to be thorough in your shelf-opening game .

Immersion

Everything on Spread looks the part, but very little is actually interactive, making it feel more like a flat-screen game than it probably should. There are a few key items you can pick up and use, but everything else is pure dressing. I don’t want to underestimate how beautiful the game is, as it offers visual acuity and variety that makes each piece unique, and not at all the kind of copy-and-paste experience you’d logically expect from a pattern which is basically supposedto look extremely uniform. Still, you can’t grab that fire extinguisher, or even pick up a bottle of detergent. You can only open doors and drawers and interact with keys, key cards and important notes.

It’s already pretty gameenough, but just when things start to look up you grab an item and a big achievement pops up to spoil the atmosphere because apparently you constantly have to remind yourself that you just collected nine of the 30 secret objects. I would like my full field of vision please, since I am constantly threatened with death and all.

One of the big narrative drivers is the notes found in games, and I generally like the mechanic for its ability to drive the narrative or subtly flavor its story. In VR, they can be particularly immersive since you’re handling something that feels more like a physical artifact than just a pile of text on a screen. It’s here that Spreadfails somewhat because all of the notes have a physical next button at the bottom that you have to click on, which feels more like interacting with an eReader than something written by someone who lived, survived, and maybe even died at the hotel.

Maybe the notes could be shorter? Maybe they could have used the backpaper ? Maybe a different font? Either way, interacting with a piece of paper shouldn’t feel so abnormal in a VR game.

And the goofy unorthodoxy doesn’t stop there. While reloading weapons is a pretty standard experience, the gun ammo counter system is definitely not standard. The number listed is not how many bullets you have in the gun, it’s how many are in the magazine. So if you have 15 bullets in a new magazine, as soon as you chamber one the counter shows 14.

This is great for the gun, but if you forget it when using the shotgun you might end up in a deep dog doo-doo as you unintentionally take a live spin out of the gun. by mistake. Provided you loaded the shotgun and chambered a bullet, you can have 3/4 bullets displayed. Once you’re in a tense battle and you show 0/4, you just can’t be sure if that 0/4 means you still have one in the chamber or not. You’ll reload, round by round, until you’re at 4/4 again, but you have no discernible visual indication if you still have an empty chamber or not, so you run the pump just in case. An unspent shell flies up, lands on the ground and disappears.

While its gunplay is visually interesting and mostly usable despite these inherent flaws, the icing on the cake is definitely the game’s voice acting, which has clearly been exploited by native French speakers putting on their best American accents. It ranges from I went to high school in Ohio for a year and picked up the accent pretty well, to how are you, fellow American? It’s more an eccentricity than a blow in itselfbut it leaves me wondering where the hell I am on planet earth.

Comfort

As a 100% walking-based experience that does not include forced locomotion, such as on a roller coaster or similar vehicle, the game proves to be very comfortable except for a single moment when there is a tremor of the camera. With a wide range of standard comfort options, almost anyone will be able to play Spread: Paradise Hotelwithout too much trouble.

Spread: Paradise Hotel Comfort Settings May 8, 2023
Turning
Artificial turning
snap-turn
Quick turn
Smooth turn
Movement
Artificial movement
Teleportation
Dash-move
Smooth movement
Blinkers
Head-based
Based on controller
Interchangeable movement hand
Posture
Standing mode
Sitting mode
Artificial squat
Really squat
Accessibility
Subtitles	Yes
LANGUAGES	English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Polish
Dialog audio	Yes
LANGUAGES	English
Adjustable difficulty
Two hands required
True crouch required
Hearing required
Adjustable player height