‘Manifold Garden’ Studio to Release Room-scale VR Puzzler ‘Hotel Infinity’ November 13th

By
Scott Hayden
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3

Studio Chyr, the team behind flatscreen puzzler Manifold Garden (2019), is bringing an enigmatic VR follow-up to Quest and PSVR 2 this week.

Called Hotel Infinity, the game lets you explore the winding halls and grand ballrooms of a mysterious hotel using your own two feet, letting you wander vast areas from your living room without the need of controller-based movement or teleportation.

“Through seamless blend of portals, lifts, impossibly winding hallways, and other architectural deceptions, Hotel Infinity allows you to explore vast areas by physically walking around your play area,” Studio Chyr says.

The cornerstone of Hotel Infinity’s design is its constantly changing hallways and rooms, ostensibly inspired by M.C. Escher’s art, which of course includes a bevy of mind-bending puzzles to solve.

 

While Hotel Infinity shares “a lot of the same impossible architecture DNA” as Manifold Garden, “they’re not directly related,” the studio explains.

“Our hope is that folks who like Manifold Garden find something special in Hotel Infinity, but playing Manifold Garden is in no way required for folks to fully enjoy Hotel Infinity,” Chyr Studio says.

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Notably, the studio says Hotel Infinity is best experienced in a room-scale environment with a play area of 2 m × 2 m (~ 6 ft × 6 ft), however alternative locomotion controls will also be available at launch for those who aren’t able to play in room-scale.

Hotel Infinity is launching on Quest and PSVR 2 on November 13th. You can find it over on the Horizon Store for Quest 1 and above and the PlayStation Store for PSVR 2.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.

  • Looks very cool! I really liked that… what was it called? Tea for God or something? This looks similar. I cleared out my garage so I had a huge place to play that one, was really fun!

    • NL_VR

      Yes Tea For God. Its a classic. ifyou havent played it for a while its worth revisiting.
      Tea For God was a long time in development. iirc it was even free in the beginning. It later got finished and had a proper release which i think many missed out on. so def worth revisiting it again if you havent.

  • polysix

    I'll be very glad when every dev stops pumping out low effort graphics for VR games which serve only to gimmick-ise the technology and stop the masses truly believing in it. First quest needs to die. Second devs need to get over the 'it's in VR so anything is cool' BS.

    Primarily it has to be a great experience, no jank and good gameplay (without being overtly gamified) – RE:Village on PSVR2 hints at this because it's VR enough but not VRAF for the sake of it (as it was never a native VR game to start with) but also important is to have graphical qualities at LEAST on par with things like AAA RE games, cyberpunk VR mod, GT7 etc and then move only up – towards photo realism to actually achieve virtual reality.

    Been in this since DK2 over 10 years now, my own stuff in UE5 blows away 90% of released 'games' from the perspective of presence, immersion and being actual virtual reality. Even my 5090 groans under the pressure of what I'm doing at times, but it's worth it. Anyone saying GFX don't matter in VR because VR itself is cool, is wrong, GFX absolutely matter in VR even MORE than on a screen which is just a passtime. VR to be utterly compelling and finally get people in 24/7 needs MUCH MUCH BETTER "Reality Graphics" not this cartoon flat shaded mickey mouse hand nonsense that only pleases kids (in spite of VR not because of VR).

    I'm sad to see how VR went after the intitial promise, we've not really moved on much since the days of job sim thanks to quest underwhelming power. META caused this issue mostly and any real VR fan with time ticking away on their body clock should hate them for holding the tech back just to feather their own nests (millions in USELESS mobile VR just for data/eco systems).

    Thank god we have Sony at least trying for AAA VR, but real VR is still only being hinted at by very few companies like Capcom (even Alyx suffers from being busy work VRAF without being a truly amazing AAA game – why because it's another 'hey 'im VR so I'll just do anything because of it'

    Cheapening out on GFX in VR is like paying a high price for a concert only to sit in the toilets listening to the gig.

    /Rant over.