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There is a specific, recurring promise that virtual reality has made to us since the days of the Oculus Development Kit 1. It is the Holodeck promise: the idea that we can step inside a digital volume and have it feel, for all intents and purposes, like an infinite world. Most games cheat this. They give us thumbsticks to slide our avatars around while our bodies remain planted on the couch, or they teleport us in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it jumps to avoid the nausea of simulated motion. Hotel Infinity, a new puzzle-adventure from Studio Chyr, stops cheating. It asks you to clear a two-by-two meter space on your rug, stand up, and actually walk. And then, through a trick of geometry that feels like black magic, it proves that your small living room is actually an endless, surrealist hotel.
The premise is deceptively simple, bordering on a tech demo, but it executes on a concept I haven’t seen done this well since the early experiments with “impossible spaces” in PC VR. You check into a hotel where the floor plan doesn’t care about Euclidean geometry. You might walk down a straight corridor, turn 90 degrees to the right, walk another straight line, turn right again, and somehow find yourself in a room that shouldn’t mathematically exist. It is Antichamber meets The Shining, wrapped in a cel-shaded aesthetic that feels ripped from a comic book.
The magic trick here relies on “redirected walking” techniques and non-Euclidean level design. The game constantly rebuilds the world just outside your peripheral vision. You step into a closet, the door closes, you hear the mechanical whir of an elevator, and when the door opens behind you, the closet is gone, replaced by a sprawling ballroom. Your brain knows you haven’t moved more than a step, but your eyes tell you you’ve traveled ten stories up. It creates a sensation of trust-building that is rare in gaming. You have to trust that the wall you’re walking towards will move, or that the hallway won’t lead you face-first into your real-world television.
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This is where the PSVR2 version of Hotel Infinity enters a complicated relationship with its hardware. On the Meta Quest, this is a wireless experience. You can spin and walk freely without tethering. On the PSVR2, you are dancing with a cable. While the sense of immersion is thick – the deep blacks of the OLED panels make the darker, moodier corridors of the hotel feel genuinely cavernous – you are constantly managing the wire at your feet. It breaks the spell slightly when you have to perform a delicate high-step to avoid tripping over the cord connecting you to your PS5. It is the one place where the “infinity” of the title hits the hard reality of physical limitations.
However, once you learn the “cable tango,” the experience is indelible. The visuals are stylized, opting for a flat, low-poly look rather than photorealism. This is likely a necessity to keep the framerate rock-solid while the game engine frantically rearranges the level geometry in real-time, but it also serves the atmosphere. The hotel feels dreamlike and liminal, reminiscent of the Oldest House from Control or the shifting hallways of Inception. There is a vague narrative about the nature of the hotel, but the game wisely keeps it ambiguous. You aren’t here for a story; you’re here to be tricked.
The puzzles themselves are tactile and integrated beautifully into the movement. You aren’t just solving logic problems on a screen; you are physically interacting with the architecture. Pulling a lever might slide a wall away to reveal a new path, or pressing a button might rotate the entire room. There is a specific joy in the “cupboard” moments, where you step into a tiny space, turn around, and step out into a massive hall. It plays with scale in a way that only VR can, making you feel small and then large in quick succession.
It is worth noting that Hotel Infinity is a short stay. You can likely see everything it has to offer in under two hours, perhaps even ninety minutes if you are a quick puzzle solver. For some, the brevity will be a sticking point, a sign that this is more of a proof-of-concept than a full-fledged title. But in the current landscape of VR, where 50-hour RPGs often feel bloated and exhausting, a tight, polished experience that respects your time is refreshing. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. It shows you its magic trick, lets you play with the props, and then bows out before the novelty wears off.
The fidelity on PSVR2 is crisp, though it’s clear this is a port of the Quest version. You won’t find high-end texture work or ray-traced reflections here. The “foveated rendering” and eye-tracking features of the Sony headset don’t seem heavily utilized, which is a missed opportunity to push the visual clarity even further. Yet, the art direction does a lot of heavy lifting. The stark blocks of color and sharp architectural lines make the impossible geometry easy to read, which is crucial when you are trying to orient yourself in a world designed to disorient you.
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Ultimately, Hotel Infinity succeeds because it forces you to use your body. It demands that you physically walk, turn, and crouch. It rejects the sedentary nature of modern gaming and asks for your kinetic participation. When you are creeping down a narrowing hallway, physically sidestepping to avoid virtual walls that aren’t really there, you feel a level of presence that “thumbstick walking” simply cannot replicate. It tricks your lizard brain into believing the space is real, even as your logical brain knows you are walking in circles in your den.
It is a specific kind of magic, one that requires a bit of furniture moving and cable management, but the payoff is one of the most unique experiences you can have in a headset right now. It might be rough around the edges and short on runtime, but for a brief afternoon, Hotel Infinity lets you live inside an optical illusion. And that is a trip worth taking.
Verdict
Hotel Infinity is a triumphant, if brief, experiment in room-scale VR that proves we haven’t even scratched the surface of what impossible spaces can feel like. While the PSVR2 cable acts as a literal tether to reality, and the visuals clearly betray their mobile roots, the core loop of walking through a physically impossible architecture is pure, unadulterated wonder. It is a must-play for anyone who wants to see their walls melt away, provided they have the floor space to pull it off.