Your friend calls you and asks for a favor. He’s out of town, but he hasn’t heard from his dad or his sister Rose in a week. They’re supposed to be renovating the old hotel that’s been closed for decades. Would you mind just popping over to see that they’re okay? 

 

You start out exploring the exterior of the hotel, starting with the front steps and the gardens. You find letters, notes, and other pieces of evidence that start to teach you about the hotel and its recent history. It seems that Rose’s grandfather used to own the place, but then it shut down after some kind of tragedy. William, their dad, has been trying to get the place up and running again, and Rose has been helping. 

 

In the gardens, you find the key to the shed. There, you find William, passed out. 

 

When you wake him up, he recounts a few things: how he and Rose were working in the house. How she’d asked him to look at the furnace. How lighting the furnace woke it up. How it it wanted him, tried to keep him there. 

 

How Rose asked it to take her instead. 

 

That thing… whatever it is… it’s got her now. Inside the house. Please, go see if there’s anything you can do. The front door is locked, but William gives you a flashlight and the key to a window. Good luck. 

 

Inside, you begin to learn more about the hotel and some of the people that stayed there. There’s also more evidence of what’s happening now with Rose and her father–attempts to clean the place up, piles of bills they aren’t able to pay, and letters from Rose’s siblings about the new house project. The time periods are all overlapping, so it’s only after a bit of exploring the hotel that the different people and stories begin to make sense. There’s also information here about why the hotel shut down originally–namely, a series of tragedies/disappearances and a rumor of hauntings led to the place closing. 

 

The player is mostly given free reign through the hotel, but there are a couple of locked areas that require finding keys or information from somewhere else in the house (this allows us partial control over what information is uncovered early on vs. later in the game). 

​

Just as you think you've discovered everything there is to see in the hotel, suddenly your flashlight flickers--and then dies. When your eyes adjust, it is not to the same hotel you were exploring: this hotel is haunted, and now, with the lights out, you can see the hotel and its ghostly residents as they once were in their prime. 

 

Ultimately, the players will find Rose, who is locked in one of the upper hotel suites. She has transformed from the pictures and flashbacks we’ve seen of her–her 70s clothes have been replaced with a more timeless, feminine style of dress that would seem at place in the 1910s. Rose insists that the menace haunting the hotel is actually gentle and kind to her–despite some evidence to the contrary that the audience has seen up to this point. 

 

Will the player trust Rose that the menace in the hotel means them no harm, or will they play the gallant hero and rescue her from the hotel? Can the anger of the Menace–and the other spirits that he’s trapped here with him–be used for good, or will it consume them, and the hotel along with it?