Death Game Hotel came out last week—a hilariously gory game where players play casino-style card games at a table and up the ante by betting on their own limbs. It’s a VR game that’s a departure from the norm for White Owls, the studio run by Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro (then again, what’s their “norm”?). It also has a large multiplayer component, with plenty of gleeful bubble-popping and chicken-squeezing in between comedic spurts of gore. And that taste of multiplayer mischief is keeping Swery’s head full of excitement. This game won’t be his last dip in the multiplayer ocean, he told us.
“In the future,” Swery said, “I’d like to use this experience to challenge myself and try something new in the world of online multiplayer (something you probably haven’t imagined yet).”
Just kidding. He didn’t say much more about his future plans in our conversation. We know that Swery is already working with Goichi Suda (aka Suda51) on a completely different, deadly guesthouse – Hotel BarcelonaBut whatever multiplayer chaos is going on in Swery’s head has nothing to do with this.
For now, Swery is most interested in letting players enter the lobby of the studio’s virtual gambling world, where each player has a goblet of blood in front of them into which they must toss their increasingly wild bets. He said the idea for a multiplayer table game came about during the Covid-19 pandemic, when studio employees began meeting in virtual reality to talk about work.
“During the ‘Stay at Home’ phase, when we couldn’t leave our homes or meet up with friends and colleagues, we at White Owls distributed VR headsets to all employees and organized VR gaming meetups,” he said. “That experience led to the idea of creating a place where people could meet and connect, which largely inspired this project.”
This will be Swery’s seventeenth published game (at least according to his wiki), which is not surprising for someone who has been making video games since the 90s, sometimes to mixed reception. The lead creator of cult classic Deadly Premonition and the cozy country cat simulator The Good Life has said he is pleased with his studio’s previous work. Even if the nature of making art means there is always something unfinished.
“As a game creator, I consider all of my works to be ‘forever unfinished’, yet considered ‘as complete as possible.'”
When I asked him if he had any advice for younger programmers, he refrained from flowery talk and told me directly: you have to know what you’re doing.
“Big companies are making AAA titles, investing money,” he said. “Indies are trying to compete with big titles by offering something unique that can’t be experienced anywhere else. I think it’s important to look deep inside yourself and ask yourself what you’re offering — and how — to avoid going forward without a strategy.”
Swery is also a fully certified Buddhist monk who is an excellent judge of cats, and has previously given me some good advice on my cat’s behavior. When I told the studio manager and fellow cat lover that I was no longer living with my beloved tomcat due to a breakup (sniffing), he knew exactly how to sound.
“Everyone has a different approach to healing from the loss of a beloved cat,” he said. “Getting another cat (preferably a newborn kitten), reading cat blogs every day, finding another girlfriend who has a cat, or talking to an AI pretending to be a cat are all good options.
“As for me, I would put my mind at ease, believing that we will meet again someday (in another dimension). For now, let’s play Death Game Hotel together and cheer up! Take care!”
Death Game Hotel is for sale in the Meta store if you have an Oculus. The developer also indicates that Discord server where studio employees meet up to play games, sometimes with Swery.
