The Hotel - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Welcome to The Hotel, not to be confused with Hotel, a horror adventure set in a single building. It's a simple map with a couple of surprises, some good and some bad. 

SCMapDB page

Authors: W00tguy123

Date of release: 2007

Maps in package: 1

Map review of The Hotel

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | April 25, 2026 | 3391 characters

    The Hotel is an odd little half-finished thing that chooses the oddest places to impress. While the overall premise is slapped together and roughly as functional as somebody's second-ever map, random details are given a level of attention and show expertise that I ooh'd and ahh'd at.

    The map takes place in a massive hotel building with several floors. Some of these floors contain halls of rooms, some contain setpieces, some contain nothing at all and were clearly left unfinished. The floors of rooms are generally pretty decent, with ambient zombie ghosts milling around causing threats and the rooms themselves being good representations of hotel rooms. Toward the roof there's a really decent attic area where the players can finally obtain weapons and start killing the zombies- which is ridiculously easy. There's also a pool area with an ichthyosaur ghost in the pool with a pretty smart puzzle required to obtain necessary satchel charges. Frankly, once you start killing the zombies the pace of the map is: keep looking around the only areas with anything of interest until you find out how to properly interact with them. It isn't exactly fun, but if you're playing with friends, it's easy to make into a fun time.

    Navigating the hotel is awful. The elevators are cryptic in their functionality and are difficult to navigate when there's a zombie on the first floor camping the elevator doors before the players have a chance to grab any weapons. I found it was easiest to take the elevator a single floor up, then take the stairs everywhere else- though the stairs are also silly because you have to jump to get onto the first step. This is what I mean of much of it feeling like somebody's first or second map- tons of stuff is just clearly unfinished or not thought out at all.

    On the opposite end of that, there's incredible detail in the environment of the attic, like a phone receiver dangling by its cord with a func_pendulum, or a box of lightbulbs beside a ladder leading up to a lightbulb. There's a cutscene with a van driving with spinning wheels that tilts slightly on its side when turning corners. There's genuinely impressive stuff in this map that feels otherwise like somebody gave up on it and slapped the minimal effort to make it playable before releasing.

    Overall, I do not recommend The Hotel unless you're specifically looking for weird good/bad Sven maps to scour with your friends.

Pros:

• Great introduction car cutscene
• Great attic floor
• Pretty decent navigating hotel rooms with zombie ghosts skulking around
• The pool locker room puzzle is actually pretty good
• The very end made me bark laughing

Cons:

• Huge chunks of the map are empty or otherwise clearly unfinished
• The elevators are so awful that I'd probably add two points to the score if the map only had stairs from top to bottom
• Aside from one pain-in-the-ass zombie ghost on the bottom floor, the ghosts were never a threat and were easily dispatched once any weapons were obtained
• The satchels to explode the dirt pile puzzle doesn't read
• There's a lot of bits that feel like they should go somewhere but just kinda don't- exploration is rarely rewarded

Score: 4.8 / 10