Hotel Galactic is a cosy management game that aims to channel Spirited Away

I try to avoid describing video games in mathematical terms, but I can hardly avoid it here. Treasure Planet’s flying galleons plus Spirited Away’s bath house plus Spiritfarer’s gentle building and management mechanics equals Hotel Galactic. Watch the trailer below and tell me I’m wrong.

I’m not being reductive, right? Although it’s not like Spiritfarer wasn’t already channeling Ghibli.

You build your hotel and design each room to cater to different kinds of guests, manage your staff by assigning actions and priorities, and seemingly form friendships with alien companions with special abilities and traits they can pass on to new joiners.

There’s an implied villain at the end of the trailer above, although there’s no real mention of potential conflict on the Hotel Galactic Steam page. The closest it gets is a reference to a “spooky underground complex”, in which you can discover “new materials, creatures and expand the construction space.” Otherwise it’s pitched as cosy from top to bottom.

Hotel Galactic has no release date yet, but I’m intrigued. It’ll apparently have a Kickstarter in July, although whether that’s to fund its existence, or polish, or something else, I don’t know. In the meantime, let me do what YouTube did to me after I watched the trailer, and recommend Jenny Nicholson’s latest video on a different kind of galactic hotel. I’ve watched all four hours of it twice.