Concierge Review – Not Quite A Five Star Stay

Kodino’s Concierge feels like a fever dream to play. We play as an old man who wakes up in Room 6 of a snowbound hotel. The only other person in the hotel is the mysterious concierge, who can somehow be in multiple places at once. However, there are other guests to be found in the hotel for those who can work out how to spot them.

Concierge is a surreal point-and-click puzzle game. As the old man, we must use point-and-click puzzle mechanics to locate the keys for the other rooms in the hotel and find the guests who are staying in them. At one point, we pick up a camcorder which can be used to see things that are invisible to the naked eye, allowing us to uncover further secrets. There is a hint system, but it costs coins, which can also be found by solving puzzles and exploring the hotel. The hints are ideal in that they point you in the right direction rather than straight up giving you the answer. That being said, Concierge gives off the impression that it’s designed to be played at a slower pace; there are a lot of elements included in the game to slow you down, such as the concierge character, who you’ll often run into while he’s in a particularly chatty mood. However, while he talks a lot, it’s never about anything particularly important. While you can access the hint system if you really need it and have the coins to spend, a lot of the puzzles can be solved by experimenting with the environment and testing what you can or cannot interact with. 

The game taps into its lucid dream atmosphere with its hand-painted, hazy art style, which stutters occasionally. When we enter cut scenes, the art style is transformed into a foggy, even sketchier, painted art style, using stop motion-style editing. The soundtrack also has a dreamy feel to it, with a bouncier track playing whenever the concierge is in the room. There’s even something not quite right with our character, with his black eyes that resemble bottomless pits. Through its stylisation, it’s clear to see that Concierge is intended to be an experience, rather than a bog-standard linear narrative. I was also really impressed with its audio design; as you tap on the walls or objects, there’s a different sound effect depending on the material that you’re tapping on. That being said, sometimes the camera distortion effect could get really annoying, especially when trying to do a puzzle or minigame that requires focus. I’m sure this was deliberate, but it would have been nice to be able to turn this effect off. 

However, while Concierge thrives as an atmospheric point-and-click puzzle game, it falls apart when it tries to pad itself out with literally anything else. The point-and-click gameplay experience is well-designed and concise. You can take your time with it, and there are plenty of secrets to uncover if you do so. However, if you did want to breeze straight through the game, then it would take around two to three hours to complete. If it wasn’t for the minigames. 

Each time we locate one of the five other guests, usually by searching their room and uncovering the puzzle hidden within it, we’re transported to their “world”. This consists of a minigame related to their story. While these offer a break from the point-and-click gameplay and would have been fun little genre swap moments had they lasted for around five minutes, they unfortunately do not. In fact, some of these I was stuck on for as long as an hour, by which point they were an utter slog. One of these involved controlling a dot on the screen and keeping it within a moving box or holding it still while the game tries to wiggle the mouse – this felt like the equivalent of watching paint dry.

Meanwhile, one minigame was similar to the mobile game Froggy Jump, in that you have to traverse vertical-scrolling platforming. Only this was incredibly poorly designed, as you direct the guest’s jump by using the mouse to click and drag his tie around, pulling it in certain directions to choose where he jumps and pulling it harder to make him jump higher. Doing this with a mouse rather than a keyboard feels awful, especially when the cursor disappears while holding it down, meaning it’s easily lost on the busy screen in between jumps, as well as sneaking onto other monitors if the player has more than one. I had to ensure that I had no other windows open while playing Concierge because of this. As a fan of 2D platforming, I can safely say that this platforming section was painfully difficult due to its awful controls. Games such as this are simply not designed to be controlled via mouse. As a result, I was essentially playing Froggy Jump for over an hour, which is incredibly frustrating for players who have purchased Concierge specifically because they like point-and-click games and expect the game to consist mostly of that. Even the minigames that were quite creative and well designed, such as the audio-based Five Nights at Freddy‘s style one, simply went on for so long that they got tiresome by the end. 

There’s also no way to save during these minigames, and I was actually set back quite a bit for assuming that I could just come out of one and start again from the moment that I entered that world. One guest can be uncovered by performing an action at a certain in-game time. The in-game time changes depending on when you boot it up to ensure that you always have plenty of time to wait for the clock to reach this point. However, you’ll have to wait that full fifteen minutes. I completed this, booted up the minigame, and then realised that I needed to log off for the day. So I did so, assuming that this puzzle would still be unlocked when I logged back on. Wrong. I had to wait fifteen minutes again, twiddling my thumbs for a puzzle that could have easily been completed by allowing the player to change the clock hands to the designated time – plenty of puzzle games do this. 

While Concierge is a great atmospheric point-and-click game, unfortunately its overuse of minigames from different genres really hampers the overall experience. 

Jess reviewed Concierge on PC with a provided review copy.