Hotel - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Not to be confused with THE Hotel, this map is an unfinished project meant to be a Sven Co-op map and a Half-Life: Deathmatch map. The map page seems to suggest it is almost finished but who knows.

SCMapDB page

Authors: DennisG50

Date of release: 2005

Maps in package: 2

Map review of Hotel

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | May 3, 2026 | 3182 characters

    Hotel is a very surreal deathmatch map converted into a Sven Co-op map (if I am understanding correctly from the description) that apparently isn't quite finished as of 20 years and some change ago.

    The players start in what I at first thought were jail cells with buttons to open the doors. one of the four rooms has a door that opens very slowly for some reason. The doors open into a hallway which terminates at both ends in doors which open into a large lobby area. The lobby area has a big front desk that reminds me of the snack counter at a movie theater, a front vestibule with a button that triggers the credits message that ends the map in the Sven Co-op version (but still says The End in the dm version lol), and a door to a strange staircase. The strange staircase leads to a stranger outdoor corridor with four more rooms and a shortcut that can be opened from an adjoined corridor back around to the first room. The strange staircase cannot be accessed normally by its door and thus must be accessed via a secret under the lobby snack bar.

    The rooms are stocked with shotguns, MP5s, and 357s. The lobby has some interesting cover opportunities like a stack of crates in a corner, as well as some grenades. The stranger outside corridor's rooms has underbarrel grenades and a hivehand.

    In the co-op version, the structure is populated by HECU, vortigaunts, alien grunts, and a stray zombie, assassin, and gonarch for good measure. The firefights are pretty easy for the most part, despite there being a lot of long mostly coverless corridor fighting with HECU. A lot of the combat felt superfluous as well, like the gonarch that dropped through the ceiling didn't need to be engaged at all for us to simply walk to the exit button and end the map.

    There's no beating around the bush: the map looks terrible. There's strange colored lighting, surreal outdoor corridors, a very strange uneven staircase that looks like it was constructed on shrooms, and architecture that isn't really evocative of what it's intending at any point. At times it reminds me of the Doom 2 era when games would attempt to create a real location and if not for the map's name, you'd never know that's what it was trying to be.

    Anyway, I can't imagine a circumstance where I would recommend it. It's cute at times at best, and I'm glad it exists. But there's nothing to it and I can feel it disappearing from my memory as I type. Maybe one day it will be finished, and it will suddenly make sense and fix all of these issues.

Pros:

• Sometimes I like the surreality of unrealized settings
• There's decent equipment (perhaps overly so)
• I laughed when the gonarch testicle burst through the ceiling when I walked into the hotel room

Cons:

• Sequence of co-op play is unclear and uneven and leaves combat behind
• Map feels like whatever the hammer equivalent of a scribble is
• Does not evoke intended environment
• Sometimes you have to wait for the long door :(((

Score: 2.7 / 10