skygiants

blotthis did a fantastic write-up of our recent game of You Can Check Out Any Time You Like; this supplemental post, in which I largely repeat everything they said in theirs, mostly exists as an opportunity to drop in long block quotes of some of my favorite bits of supernatural horror from our collab writeup.

The game is a hack of Firebrands and is constructed of a series of mini-games themed around the Experience of being Trapped in a Haunted Hotel, named by us the Daze Inn. You-the-player can choose to be either a guest, a staff member, or an Anomaly ("someone or something distinctly wrong that has manifested inside the Hotel").

In theory this has an impact on your character build, such as it is -- the game asks you different questions/assigns you different traits between these categories -- but in practice we found that the categories ended up fairly fluid: guests Trevor and Pat did stay solidly guest-shaped, and the Seagull Room was very definitively an Anomaly, but my character Junior and staff member Together [And In Silence Stood] very much straddled the guest/anomaly and staff/anomaly lines, and elevator boy Oliver started out as staff but Changed States Due To Circumstance.

As blotthis says in their writeup, the game does not prescribe any specific balance of guests/staff/anomalies, nor does it proscribe an ending -- the whole experience can just be about a series of vignettes about a set of haunted horrors hanging out in a hotel if it wants to be -- but it is fun to build towards a Burning Down the House ending, where everyone takes on the hotel together, and for that one does sort of need characters who are actually invested in helping each other to leave. The minigame structure works really well to build intense two-player dynamics within a scene, but doesn't necessarily stack in a way that creates ongoing group narrative without some forethought; we did spend a fair bit of time in and around scenes asking each other, "where do we want this to go? what kind of ending would satisfy us here?"

Many of my favorite scenes came from simultaneously leaning into and really pushing at the written boundaries of the minigames, e.g.:

- Together, the head of housekeeping, absentmindedly starts eating the wallpaper in the Seagull Room; the Seagull Room, taking great offense, abuses the laws of physics even more than usual by pursuing Together with violent intent despite being, technically, a room

( spatial horror ) ("Stayin' Alive," Or, A Chase, creatively reimagined for a Room)

- Oliver the elevator boy finds Eugenie, the friend he came to the Daze Inn looking for -- at least, sort of finds her

( body horror ) ("I Think We're Alone Now" Or, Stealing Time Together, shifting in the middle to "Fight It Out," Or, Meeting Fist To Fist, as the scene demanded)

- Pat "I'm here for the escape room" Worthington and Trevor "I'm definitely not here to run away from the consequences of my white-collar crime" Ganz, the hotel's only two actually human guests, develop romantic tension

( just vibes ) ("I Wanna Dance With Somebody," Or, A Dance, themed for haunted karaoke because Trevor is Not a natural dancer)

The fact that the games provide dialogue and action prompts to build from -- "follow me if you dare" in "A Chase"; "I draw you closer to me, do you allow it?" in "Meeting Fist to Fist"; "I slip my hand into yours, looking for closeness or comfort. Do I find it?" in "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" -- is really rewarding as a scaffold for building out character dynamics and encouraging them to escalate in ways that I, as a player, might not think of or might not be bold enough to push for without having those story-guides to work with! But I also think for satisfying gameplay it is also important to be flexible with said prompts and make them work for you & what you and your group want to do with the characters.

It's also sort of unclear in some of the games as written -- especially "Is There Something I Should Know, or, An Investigation" -- whether additional players beyond the active player and their primary scene partner are meant to be participating as their actual characters or as part of the environment. In this game it took us a little while to get into the groove of collaborative Environment Building, and the Seagull Room's player certainly led the way in piloting the environmental horror, but once we all sort of got in on it, it was extremely fun to keep ramping up tension and drama using random bits of Daze Inn stage-setting. I think every single player contributed to adding Vibes to the haunted karaoke machine in "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" and in all scenes thereafter, building pretty naturally to the final confrontation in "Burning Down The House," where it's actually written into the minigame that the Table As A Whole will collectively act as the antagonistic force of the Hotel. blotthis described the dance scene as one of the scenes that we played more or less straight, which is true, but I think the collaborative worldbuilding element that we added also sort of helped us give the scene a directionality that it might not otherwise have had.

Now, all that said, I'm going to be playing this game again in early 2022 with a different group and thus may follow up with an entirely different set of takeaways based on different group energy and play styles -- very much looking forward to it and excited to see how it goes!