As per the description in the Xbox Store. The Spectrum Retreat is a challenging, first-person puzzle game set in the near future. You awake at the Penrose Hotel, a peaceful yet unsettling refuge from the outside world. As a valued guest, your existence is embedded into the corridors and guest rooms of the Penrose. Exploration of the striking art-deco hotel will begin to uncover the mysteries of both the Penrose and the uncertainties surrounding your current stay. Your desire to unearth the truth is obstructed by an array of color coded puzzles, mind-bending physics challenges and the growing fear of exposing your true intentions.
The Spectrum Retreat is developed by Dan Smith Studios and published by Ripstone Ltd and has a teen rating due to some strong language. OK, let’s talk gameplay. The controls are simple. Using the standard two stick approach that most first person games employ, you navigate the floors of the hotel and interact with various things. Many of the puzzles I did find to offer quite a challenge. Especially towards the end of the game. For most of this review I will stick to the puzzle solving aspect of the game. I don’t wish to spoil an engaging mystery, gradually revealed through flashbacks of memories.
The story plays out in a slightly Matrix-esque fashion. Basically, you are trapped inside a computer simulation with someone on the outside aiding you in making your way out. The puzzles take place in the framework behind the simulation fantasy and are accessed through hotel doors with security keypads. There is one on each floor. Finding the access codes is pretty simple if I’m honest. It’s almost as if The Spectrum Retreat is two separate games that somehow got rolled into one. The main story of the game and most of the events in the game that made me feel uneasy, take place in the simulation world of the Penrose Hotel.
The puzzle solving aspect and the real “meat”of the game take place in what I call the framework, where the player’s character is no longer in the simulation world but not “woken up” either. The first series of puzzles are pretty basic. You have to unlock various colored barriers in the correct order to escape to the next puzzle. As you progress from floor to floor, the puzzles become harder and more elaborate, making one really have to think about how to advance. Also as you progress, new abilities are introduced such as teleporting and walking on walls and ceilings.
These things really messed with my sense of perception more than I thought they would. I was surprised by that. Visually the game is pretty good. The hotel simulation world has all the things you would expect to see. Carpeted hallways. Marble tiled floors in the main lobby. All the amenities. The only downside I can say is that I thought it was all too clean in terms of the design. A lot of perfectly straight walls. Repeated picture frames and such. But I’m going to actually say that this adds to the atmosphere of the game in the sense that these are the exact kinds of things that would prevent my mind from accepting that the hotel was actually a real place. So in that regard, it works.
The puzzle levels of the framework are in stark contrast to the luxuriousness of the hotel. More of a colder color palette that gives the electronic glow of the various locks and barriers a bit of a Tron aesthetic, which also fits in quite nicely with the whole idea of the game. The soundtrack is sufficient to keep you on edge with some goosebump inducing moments. The voice acting is quite acceptable for the most part except for the fact that you, the main character, don’t have a voice. It kind of makes the person on the other end of the phone sound like she’s just talking to herself rather than conversing with you.
On the whole The Spectrum Retreat is a descent bargain experience if you like puzzle games of this kind. I found it to be engaging and challenging while being slightly unnerving and unsettling. The faceless Android hotel staff were quite creepy. Anyhow, You’ll get roughly 7 to 10 hours of gameplay for a fairly lite asking price. Maybe five more if you give it a second play through as there is a choice to be made at the end. Unfortunately there isn’t much replay value once you complete the game. This is the bane of puzzle games. Once you solve all the puzzles, what else is there to do?
Conclusion
The Spectrum Retreat’s greatest achievement is how engaging, challenging and unnerving the whole experience can be. The drawback however, and the bane of most puzzle games, is that there really isn’t much longevity to it. That said, Dan Smith’s debut project is certainly a game that any fan of the genre should try out, and for his first attempt, Dan shows a great deal of promise for his future in game development.
This game was tested and reviewed on Xbox One. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version.
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