Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel

Fobia St. Dinfna Hotel Review
Don't feel like reading the whole thing?
Down at the bottom is the conclusion and score given to the game! :)
Introduction
Fobia is a game criticized for the wrong reasons, such as its textures, backtracking, and enemies. A classic survival-horror experience is rare, so I appreciate a game that brings back the genre's roots while adding its formula to the mix: the different dimensions with the camera.
It's not an actual horror game due to a lack of jumpscares and fear elements, and it doesn't shine as a survival due to the combat being so rare. That being said, Fobia has a good quality put into its presentation. I don't mean the textures; I am referring to the environments and attractive locations the hotel offers guests. From infested halfways to elaborate secret areas, the hotel has more going on than one might think.
Control and Map Design
The best aspect of Fobia, along with the presentation, is the combat; it's slow but tactical in its approach as enemies while lacking variety, do feature a familiar topic: keeping as much ammo as possible. Monsters have a specific weak point that can take them down in one shot if you can hit it, that is, and that challenge of trying to aim for one to three shots rather than eight adds tension to the gameplay. The abominations roaming the areas are terrifying in aspect and can appear when less expected, creating a sense of being watched as you transverse locations.
One of the biggest complaints is the backtracking, but rather than thinking of the hotel as a level; it is far better to think of it as a giant labyrinth. Attractive designs take the spotlight so each floor can strike its memory in the player's head. It will be necessary to memorize the complex as you move around and solve the puzzles. The camera changes the hotel's layout completely, revealing hidden halls, ammunition, and secrets hidden at first glance. In that aspect, it is a satisfying and gratifying experience to explore every mystery and riddle in the hotel.
Strong Points
The game's strong point is the presentation, as I stated before. Fobia is a game that doesn't pack many scares but features heavy doses of tension. It adds that eery feeling that there is something grotesque around the corner waiting to eat you, and for the most part, it strikes right when mixing that concept with the bosses. The foes are not too complex, but their simplicity allows their appearance to shine, and the scenarios in which boss fights are situated reinforce that.
An example could be the piano monster; it gives an atmosphere of the unknown mixed with tragedy as it prepares to devour you. The stage appeals to the setting, and multiple ways exist to engage in the battle. From taking refuge on the lower floor to moving to the center, where the piano is located, for a better view of the creature, that fight illustrates Fobia's strengths in art direction.
Art Design and Visuals
Visually the game could be a lot better when it comes to textures. It helps the title back from unleashing the environments to their utmost potential and leaves a sour aftertaste when seeing surfaces looking horrible. If Fobia stood to sacrifice the complexity of bosses and combat for a more straightforward approach, focusing more on making the visuals match the art styles would have been a better choice rather than balancing everything out.
Most enemies look original and terrifying, but the main one chasing you through the hotel looks like a copy of a Tyrant from Resident Evil. It's weird to see Fobia undermine itself so much; for all of its originality and classic experience, it keeps bringing down its best elements as much as it empowers them. Fixing the visuals and changing the pursuit enemy model would have done much for the game.
Sound, Replayability and Performance
Regarding the sound, Fobia does a solid. It could be more impressive, but it gets the job done, as weapons firing have enough power to feel right but lacks the expected impact. The voice acting does good, but the dialogue and cliches play down the delivery of certain lines.
Regarding replayability, the game has an achievement expecting you to beat it three times so that the completionist might be in for a rocky ride. It is not a game that deserves a second run, but it is well-deserving of a first one. A playthrough will last 9 to 14 hours, depending on how fast you resolve the puzzles in the hotel.
Performances-wise, the horrible textures are at least a blessing to the FPS, as the game can run at max graphics without issue. I used the max preset in graphics and was getting 105 FPS on average. My specs are RTX 2060, 36 GB of ram, Intel Core i7-11700K - Core i7 11th Gen Rocket Lake 8-Core 3.6 GHz LGA 1200.
When it comes to crashes and issues, the majority of the game was clean and perfect. The only problem comes with the piano boss fight, as I would get stuck without being able to move or couldn't change weapons anymore for unknown reasons. Luckily the issues are not too frequent, but there is a 50-50 of getting some problem during that encounter.
Pros
Cons
The hotel's design is huge and offers multiple environments!
A classic horror experience that adds its twist!
Spectacular presentation that makes the hotel come alive on screen.
Satisfying gameplay during combat, it's slow, but there is a push to be precise!
The texture quality is terrible, and you can notice it.
Piano boss fight is ruined a bit due to issues.
The story and dialogue could have been worked out better.
Conclusion
Fobia is a fantastic game that revitalizes the genre of survival-horror games; it features some flaws, but the experience itself is excellent and something that must be played. The ambiance and exploration of the title are incredibly well done and a note for developers to notice on how to decorate their horror titles appropriately. If you like survival-horror games, I recommend you try Fobia, and if you fancy classics, it is a must-buy.
8/10 GREAT
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After finishing FOBIA St. Dinfna Hotel, I had one repeating thought in my head: A puzzle is always clever if you’re the one who made it.
And it’s true. If you created the puzzle and know the solution to that puzzle, it’s always going to be clever....to you. But to anyone else, that puzzle could be an obtuse, impossible, ridiculous nightmare.
This is what about 75% of FOBIA was for me. Not a horror romp. Not a fun, monster-shooting time. Just a head-scratching, obtuse...experience.
And yes, I‘m still recommending the game even though it was a slog of repeated puzzle-induced frustration for me. I liked the story and the characters. Technically it ran well. The limited voice acting is acceptable. And the UE4 graphics are nice and spooky. (There are gamma issues throughout, but they are manageable. And there's no real in-game map which is irritating at first, but eventually it's a non-issue.) When there was shooting, I thought the guns (pistol, shotgun, machine gun, and magnum) and aiming worked fairly well and created a good deal of tension. There really are only two varieties of enemies, but I’m okay with that as long as they are horror-game-weird, and these foes were suitably monster-y. The various texts in the game were well written. FOBIA is the first game made by a dozen or so Brazilian dudes. When I take all that into account, yeah, I say thumbs up.
But take this scenario: On one floor in one room of a multi-level building, there are a series of filing cabinets. The room looks like an office and also contains a desk and some chairs. And let’s say this room with the filing cabinets is on floor number 3 of his multi-level building. Just everyday filing cabinets of different sizes with a differing number of drawers placed up against a wall. Always on the hunt for resources in the game, you can open and close all the drawers to see what’s inside—in this case, no bullets or health pickups, but just a few notes that you can read. Eh.
Then 30 minutes later, on a completely different floor—let’s say three floors up on level 6—there’s one of many, many paintings hanging on the wall. You’ve already walked past dozens of them in the game. Nothing out of the ordinary here. But also, you are equipped with a special camera that, if you peer through it using night vision, you can see your environment from a different perspective. Sometimes the night vision lens may show a hole in the wall you can walk through....or whatever. And let’s say, with no prompt at all, you decide to look through your camera at this one of a dozen different paintings hanging throughout the place. And when you do that, this single painting changes into a series of simple lines of different lengths, some of them broken, some of them not.
Well, it must mean something, right? But what? “Oh well, I guess I’ll figure it out later,” you say to yourself. But you never figure it out later.
Only by reading a very thorough walkthrough on Neoseeker did I discover that this image of different-sized broken and unbroken lines is actually an indication for you to travel back down three floors, in an area you ran through 30 minutes ago, and open specific drawers of those filing cabinets so they perfectly match the lines in the night vision painting to reveal....whatever. I don’t even remember what the reward was because all I actually remember is thinking: Seriously? No one would ever be able to connect any of this unless that player is spending 50 hours turning over every single stone in the game. No one.
This is just one example of what FOBIA ultimately is. It is a lengthy (and I mean lengthy) series of obtuse, impossible, disconnected puzzles (like 50+ of them throughout the entire game) with little rhyme or reason. As soon as you might figure out one, there’s another one a few steps away. Think of the silly key-collecting puzzles in the various Resident Evil games. Only here, it's all on steroids.
I’m sure the guys at Pulsatrix were very pleased with themselves that they had created these very clever puzzles. But I come back to my first statement: These puzzles are clever only because they already knew the solutions. For the average player looking for a good, horror-time, this does not make good gameplay.
And these obtuse puzzles—which often have the player traveling from floor to floor to collect the various pieces or to connect various elements—naturally come with another problem. This is (mostly) a single-location-based game (hence the title St. Dinfna Hotel). Like one reviewer here on Steam rightly noted: The real name of this game should be “Backtracking: The Game.” Couldn’t say it better myself. You go from floor 1 to floor 4, back to floor 2, then up to floor 8, then back down to 1....and on and on. And throughout most of the game, the hotel has been devastated by some science-fiction-y phenomena (I’m cool with that), but this makes your traversal indirect. You can fix (and then ride) an elevator to some floors. But then you are required to exit, walk through collapsed floors, then backtrack through a hidden night vision area, and then through a few rooms (you get the picture), just to get to your destination. You traverse these twisting paths relentlessly—like for hours—back and forth as the hotel slowly (and I mean slowly) reveals itself, room by room and floor by floor. I twisted my way around this hotel so much, in the end I felt like a damn pretzel.
During this endless back and forth, you are sometimes attacked by kooky monsters, which helps to break the monotony. (And like I said, the shooting and guns work fine for a game of this caliber.) But unfortunately most of the time there are no foes, and you are walking these figure-eights to wherever just to collect puzzle piece number 3 of 8 parts. I did fall asleep once during my play through (in the middle of the afternoon) running through the same areas endlessly. Not a rousing endorsement for a “horror” game.
But I also wonder that maybe this game is just not for me. I see a horror game on Steam that seems competently made, and I immediately buy it. I love my horror games (as long as they aren’t asset-flips pasted together by 12-year-olds). And Pulsatrix is definitely going for a Resident Evil vibe here, as many Steam reviewers note. The story has evil science guys doing evil science things way underground where they think no one can see them. Above ground everything seems hunky dory, but then there are terrible consequences for their actions. And you show up right before the crap hits the fan. Cliché? Sure. But it’s all good for me.
The problem though is that this is not a Resident Evil game. It looks like one on the surface, and it smells like one when you watch the trailers. But when playing RE, I could actually figure out most of the rudimentary puzzles in short order. Sure, some of the puzzles may have stalled me for a few minutes in RE, but not for long. Then, I was back into the action. But here? Not even close. Each time I stared at an obtuse, disconnected puzzle for 20 minutes trying to figure it out (over and over and over), I actually forgot I was playing a horror game at all. RE doesn’t make that mistake. But maybe that’s because FOBIA is simply a different kind of game and one that doesn’t jibe with my sensibilities overall.
Just be forewarned before buying or playing. If FOBIA gives you the RE feels, you may want to adjust your expectations....and also bookmark the Neoseeker walkthrough so you can figure out most of the “clever” puzzles here....

So it's really not a bad game at all, but for me it's more of an escape room style game with elements of horror, rather than your typical survival horror... The game never really scared me or made me feel on edge, in fact the scariest thing was the poor lighting optimisation.
To be honest, the game doesn't run great. It's not a particularly demanding game but it still feels poorly optimised and combat doesn't feel satisfying at all. The puzzles were fun though and I did really like the overall vibe of the game so still worth a play through.
PS - I don't get all of the reviews comparing this to RE7. RE7 is a brilliant game, and in addition to it probably being the most adrenaline inducing RE game ever, it plays great and has really satisfying graphics/combat/pretty much everything. This game genuinely isn't bad, but it doesn't stack up to that.

Very decent survival horror game. Though this one is more about exploration and puzzles. Battles are rare and sadly there are also just 2 different enemy types and 4 different weapons.

This game is good, it looks good, has a good atmosphere, mechanics and is spooky.
However, its major downfall, in my opinion, is obtaining items. How do I mean that? Well...
The game barely navigates you, and I can't even name how many fucking times I was stuck, because I didn't know what to do or where to go.
Sometimes you have to literally run around the whole hotel just to find a room you went through a decade ago, in which there's an essential item that you couldn't access until you had the right tool for it.
MY SUGGESTION: Don't make the same mistake as me and write down somewhere every time you see a puzzle, a lock or anything you aren't capable of solving/accessing at that moment. There might come a time when you'll forget about it and tear your hair off because you'll struggle on how to progress.
It also has A LOT of unnecessary things. Like finding a combination for a safe, just to find a key inside, for a lock that's in that very room, even the same place. Or having the code for a lock literally right next to it.
These are some examples that aren't complicated to describe, but trust me there are way more of them.
There are a lot of puzzles that aren't really difficult. If you see a lock with a combination, you have a 90% chance of finding it either in the documents or in that room or room complex (usually using the camera).
And I don't really care if they are creative, or intelligent, or whatever. If I would want a puzzle-horror game, I would reach for something else.
The puzzles are just a cool thing to experience and not to make the game too dry.
I'm here for the spooks. I got them. Thus, I'm satisfied.
The story is kind of everything and anything. I won't talk about every single detail to not make this section a whole paragraph.
It is well-placed, but still chaotic. It can be really difficult to keep up sometimes with all this time travel, documents, lore and characters that are important for the story, but you get to know them for about 10 minutes in total and at the end you are just holding your head and telling yourself wtf was this.
It's good in my opinion, just plain. Like it could be better just by adding some explanations and expanding it a little bit so everything that happens there is actually interesting and keeps you wanting to know more about it.
Unfortunately it doesn't always tell you, or you have to be really observant, reading documents, finding some secrets and stuff to know at least something about the different things that happen/happened.
I just found funny that there are about 3 main characters + the player and they barely have a role.
There's the woman that's here from the very beginning of the story, and you only get to see her once for about a minute, where she tries to stab a god with a kitchen knife. Women? Right??? The cool thing was that I never knew if I could trust her and what really were her intentions. That kept it interresting.
There's the girl that's literally the game's icon. At the beginning she was appearing almost always and at the end she was the main objective. However her whole story and point in the game could be described in like 5 sentences. There's more lore to the people that were in the hotel trying to survive than there's to her.
There's the main bad guy, the reason for all of this, and he's just here for the story to have some kind of a mistful meaning, or rather a starting and ending point. Like in most games basically, but here it's as I said plain.
And there's you. Full of gadgets and powers, I guess? You don't know why, how did you get them, why YOU are the one to be here etc.
Even though I had a rough time playing this game, I enjoyed it most of the time. It's pretty polished and well made game.
PS:
I give you a 100 bonus points for that USB stick animation.

Janky combat, interesting narrative, plenty of puzzles! Was a fun experience, especially when I played on the steam deck!

This resembles
RE GENRE, I say resembles because there are OTHER games closer to that comparison than this.
This IS reminiscent ENOUGH of that though to mention it. You'll see.
Additionally the game HAS a mechanism; an item as in Outlast (It's the use of a camera, that you pick up, that has a supernatural effect of opening areas, that ARE in reality CLOSED, or INACCESSIBLE), It FEELS like Outlast, in a spooky sense, even though in Outlast the camera is used for simple sight, in Outlast the place is just SOOO DARK.
Here it isn't JUST dark rather; a supernatural atmosphere that this camera is connecting you to.
As I mentioned earlier.
The inventory, looks like something out of an RE game. So much so.
Is it a shooter, YES. As are the RE games.
I'm saying it here, saying it, if you like it or not. RE has become a GENRE,
we should get used to this.
Do I recommend Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel, Yes I do.
This is a great game with an ENGROSSING story. If you have the fortune to get it on
Sale. Even better.
-FP view,
-DLSS/RT,
-I didn't find it boring, I suppose hopefully you would find it interesting too,
Have fun. Recommended.