Death Game Hotel: Gamble life and limb in Swery’s ultra-gory VR game, coming this July 

White Owls, the game studio headed by Deadly Premonition creator SWERY, has announced that they will release their grisly bet-to-the-death VR title Death Game Hotel on July 11. It will be available on Meta Quest (specifically Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest Pro). 

In Death Game Hotel, you play a poor unfortunate who has accidentally got themselves invited to the Death Game 2000 tournament- a deadly battle of wits in which each player literally puts their lives on the line. Players bet not only their chips but also their body parts- resulting in some gruesome and gory losses. Death Game Hotel has both a single player mode and an online multiplayer mode, where you can end up losing an arm and a leg (or maybe an ear or an eye) to players from all over the world. 

Sitting around a table, players can play Goblet of the Reaper or Death Poker. In Goblet of the Reaper, players are each given a blood-filled goblet and a hand of five tiles. The aim is to get rid of all your tiles by placing them in goblets- ideally without the blood in the goblet overflowing. Sounds simple right? Problem is, you only know the capacity of your own goblet. You must deduce how much blood is in the other goblets and skillfully add tablets to them, taking advantage of each tile’s effects (for example, one tile allows you to make an opponent skip a turn). If 3 goblets overflow, all the candles go out and the Grim Reaper appears. The game enters sudden death mode in which each player must bet a part of their body (eye, mouth, ear, hand etc.).  

Should a goblet overflow in sudden death mode, the unfortunate player will lose the body part they bet in a fountain of blood. If you win the game, then everyone else’s bet body parts go flying off. There will also be a tense one-on-one version of Goblet of the Reaper too.  

Death Poker is a high-stakes game based on Texas Hold ‘em – in which a Death suite has been added to the pack of cards, along with special rules for picture cards. Having death cards makes your hand stronger, but if a death card is played as a community card, then a candle is extinguished. Raise the stakes by betting body parts, but if all the candles go out, the bloody carnage begins. 

Death Game Hotel takes advantage of being a VR game by giving you unique ways to “cheat”- by switching cards in Death Poker or sneakily finding out a goblet’s capacity in Goblet of the Reaper, for example. However, if you lose a body part- you will be penalized according to the part you bet and will no longer be able to cheat, potentially putting you at a deadly disadvantage. 

Death Game Hotel’s developer White Owls is known for an eccentric range of titles created by Swery (aka Hidetaka Suehiro) including Deadly Premonition, D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, The Good Life, and The MISSING: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories. Swery is also working on a game called Hotel Barcelona alongside Grasshopper Manufacture’s Goichi Suda (Suda51). Death Game Hotel is White Owls’ first VR game, and was developed in collaboration with Skeleton Crew Studio. 

Death Game Hotel is scheduled to be released on July 11 for Meta Quest (Quest 2, Quest 3 and Quest Pro). It is available to pre-order at 10% off. As a preorder bonus, purchasers will get the in-game Burger and Beer items, which can be used to toast other players (no, not literally… as a greeting!). More food items can be bought in the in-game shop.

Written by. Verity Townsend based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2024-06-21 02:01 JST)