Even though it's quite minimalistic and sometimes simplistic, this game can provide a good atmosphere. Not the portion based on story (it's bad for the most part), but the environment overall. It does feel creepy, uninviting, depressing. The rooms approach is also quite fitting: most rooms are independent and somewhat unique, even though they do have common traits, which is something that you would expect from a real-life motel.
My main problem is the death mechanic. My first death happened quickly, actually in the very first room, and most of my playthrough was on 2nd try. It was totally fine, but then I died again, because I did not have bandages available after accidentally touching acid (which I did not even realize to be acid until then). Which is fine, although I would prefer a proper health-bar, rather than bleeding out from any little thing.
What I did not like happened after I started 3rd try. While some interactions noticeably changed, to speed up getting through the puzzles, you still needed to do a lot of the same things, some of which still triggered monsters to spawn, while there seemed to be fewer bandages around. Which for me resulted in another death, when a monster suddenly appeared in not so good a spot and I was not able to shoot it in time due to reload: it nicked me, which resulted in my bleeding out. That's not to mention more monsters on walls that essentially slowed you down.
4th try turned out to be even worse, because there were even more monsters now, and you had to use 3 or 4 bullets right in the very first room. I mean the "had to" part: without it it you could not progress. When I walked out of the room and saw monsters roaming around, I was now completely discouraged, and did not continue further.
My problem with this mechanic overall is that you were punished for every death not just with the need to redo all the things again, even though slightly differently, but also by increased difficulty. And, yes, of course, the roaming monsters can be avoided by sneaking past them, but when you have to redo things, you naturally want to redo them faster (changes to rooms do help with that) and more monsters with more instances, where you need to sneak, work against that.
Considering the size of the environment here, considering that it's not that interesting, even though atmospheric, this killed my personal motivation. Since [most of] the rooms are isolated, I would have preferred that cleared rooms would not spawn any monsters at all, or that you had more items lying around to help you balance things out. Or maybe upgrade the gun with each death, so that you need to use less bullets, because 5-6 bullets for the roaming monsters, who move relatively fast - is a lot in this game, when you can literally die from picking up a pot.
As such, even though I like the atmosphere and the environment changes with each death, making the content less stale, I do not like the balancing, and the story is also so-so. Since I got it at a discount for 6 euros, I would not say I necessarily regret the purchase, but if I got it for full price of 20 euros - I would have regretted that a lot, especially, since in the end it should be like 2 hours of gametime. I would recommend trying it out when there is a discount to get for 5 euros or less, but otherwise - watch a walkthrough instead.
