Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel Review – Call the Exterminator

Fobia – St Dinfna Hotel has an infestation of annoying bugs. Two kinds, actually. The first kind covers the hotel’s walls, jumping out at you when you least expect them. The second kind pops up with even less warning, technical bugs that break the game itself. The premise of Fobia is that you are a journalist named Roberto tasked by a mysterious woman named Stephanie to investigate the shady goings-on at, you guessed it, the St. Dinfna Hotel in Brazil. Though many players may notice that the hotel resembles a particular fictional mansion in the midwestern United States. Fobia borrows liberally from the early Resident Evil games, offering up some classic horror gameplay in a more-or-less modern package.

Game Name: Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel
Platforms: PlayStation 4 (Reviewed), PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC
Publisher: Maximum Games
Developer: Pulsatrix Studios
Release Date: June 28th, 2022
Price: $29.99

Case in point, Fobia immediately offers players the contemporary convenience of customizable settings, everything from objective markers to ammo assistance. The game blends classic gameplay with newer flairs. Much of the gameplay consists of solving puzzles interspersed with survival horror combat sections. Classic horror fans have seen this before and should find this a pleasant scary comfort zone–that fun oxymoron. Several puzzles are quite inspired, though a few boil down to bringing the right key to the right door. Fobia also spruces this gameplay loop up a bit with a fun time-bending mechanic in which a special camera allows players to view their surroundings from different points in time. This inventive element lends itself well to the puzzle-solving and even a few combat encounters. Peaking through the lens makes the game spookier, both from the limited infrared visibility and the jolts of what a given space used to hold.

Altogether, Fobia knows the horror genre like the back of a severed hand. The hotel offers a creepy atmosphere, and when I compare it to the infamous Spencer Mansion, I mean it as a compliment. The most popular guests at the hotel consist of humanoid abominations that I feel would somehow get offended if referred to as merely “zombies.” These enemies prove genuinely freaky, lumbering slowly towards you until they suddenly decide to dash like someone lit a fuse under their bony butts. They made me jump a few times, even after I recognized their shtick. And that’s nothing to say of the creepy gas mask-wearing girl who wanders the halls, expertly deployed to likely land in players’ peripheral vision while scouring the hotel.

Fobia is an ambitious game, and I have to give props to Pulsatrix Studios for borrowing from some of the most notable mechanics of other horror franchises and putting them in one $30 indie title. However, the game buckles under the immense weight of all this with poor implementation. The environment is highly detailed, but the character models are less defined, creating a weird effect of a PS4 game with PS3 characters. The native Portuguese voice acting fairs better than the serviceable English voice acting. A low-budget version of RE2‘s Mr. X occasionally appears, coming off as suspenseful but sometimes more of a nuisance against the finicky run button.

These are minor quibbles, especially compared to the real problem—the bugs. During my playthrough, I encountered four game-breaking bugs. Immediately after starting, I had to restart due to a key item not appearing. Learning my lesson, I saved whenever possible, and I highly recommend others do the same. Later, another key item got taken away followed by my whole inventory going missing. One glitch came during a boss battle, which broke the game until I figured out how to exploit it outrageously. Reloading the save from an earlier point always fixed these issues. There’s an unintentional meta-game to Fobia of how you can avoid or take advantage of glitches. But I would’ve rather just played the game itself.

Fobia may play much better on PS5 and PC than PS4, as I haven’t heard of many issues on those systems. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a more challenging game to get through on PS4, more so because of glitches than difficulty. Appreciation of Fobia comes down to a matter of perspective. For a tiny indie team to create a game almost on par with Resident Evil is impressive, but for a game to get a full-scale release with this many hiccups is disappointing. My playthrough clocked in at nine hours and thirty minutes, but between all the reloads, I likely played for over thirteen hours.

Fobia offers an intriguing story, though I felt I didn’t quite get all of it and had to infer a bit despite accumulating most of the documents and files. Still, it kept me invested. The game does offer two distinct endings. Weirdly, one explains a good deal of the story while the other keeps you entirely in the dark. There’s a mid-game twist that many will likely guess early on, but I found it refreshing and don’t want to spoil it. Essentially, some of the supernatural elements work on your side. After all, why should the monsters and villains have all the fun? I wish the game explored this further, and that sentiment sums up my feelings about the game as a whole. Fobia has mechanics and moments that really work, and I look forward to seeing what Pulsatrix Studios creates next. I just wish this hotel experience had received more of a deep cleaning.

Review Disclosure Statement: Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel was provided to us by Maximum Games for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please go review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.