Software:Minotaur Hotel

Short description: 2019 visual novel

Minotaur Hotel
Developer(s)	Minoh Workshop
Publisher(s)	Minoh Workshop
Engine	Ren'Py
Release	Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux WW: Sep 07, 2019 Android WW: Feb 11, 2020
Genre(s)	Visual novel
Mode(s)	Single-player

Minotaur Hotel is a visual novel being developed and published by Minoh Workshop for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Android, Linux. The game has the player becoming the manager of a magical hotel inhabited by the Minotaur from Greek mythology. The game features a main story that follows the main character as the manager and master of the hotel unveiling its secrets, and multiple side stories supported by a cast of multiple mythological characters.

Gameplay

Minotaur Hotel is a visual novel, where the player inherits and becomes the manager of a magical hotel. The main character can choose from many backgrounds that will give them skill and bonuses that can be used through the game. The game features several choices that affect how the story unfolds. It also contain several in-game systems such as cooking, exploration and a wardrobe. The narrative splits between the main story arc that features the hotel, the Minotaur and the valley surrounding the hotel and how the new master of the hotel decides to treat Asterion, and the other part of the story are the different characters own narrative arcs. The game features LGTBQ+ themes and characters and their interactions. The game features two versions a Not safe for work one, featuring adult and sexual imagery and a Safe for work one that contains censorship and no sexual content.

Plot

The game is divided in chapters, there are currently 18 chapters in the latest version of the game, the first chapter features the main character as the new master and owner of the hotel. The player receives a mysterious deed from an old man that leads him to the hotel, finding inside the Minotaur from the Greek legend. The Minotaur is in a poor condition when the player finds him, since he has been locked up in a cold room for decades, the Minotaur reveals to the player that the hotel is his prison and that he was sentenced to spend eternity there after the events of the Theseus myth and how the person in possession of the deed is meant to be his jailer and torturer, the way the player decides to treat Asterion will shape the plot in different ways. The master of the hotel is given an almost godly power over the hotel and the land surrounding it through magical means, one of the hotel previous masters decided to use this power to reshape the hotel into a place for the lost and wandering to rest. The player has to recruit several characters that will fulfill different functions in the hotel. The story develops into the re-opening the hotel and start receiving guests, the player mission is to restore the hotel to its former glory and unveil the hotel's and Asterion's secrets and past.

Development

The game started as a quest in June 2019 on the website 4chan, where members of the site voted to develop the story, the quest story was left unfinished, later adapted into a visual novel. The production of the visual novel is handled by a collective of artists, writers and collaborators known as Minoh Workshop. The original creator of the quest "MinoAnon" considered the original quest as a "kinky erotica with soul". The visual novel is programmed in python using the python library Ren'Py. The game is still under development being the latest version 0.5.1 but it can be downloaded from the official site and updated as new versions are released. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux devices on September 07, 2019, and for Android on February 11, 2020.

For the game development, the authors did some study in ancient Greek writings and their narrative structures and ancient Greece homosexuality.

Reception

Minotaur Hotel was nominated for the "Melbourne Queer Games Festival 2021 Shortlist" at the 4th Melbourne Queer Games Festival 2021 winning the Bronze medal category.Jason Drake of Kotaku featured Minotaur Hotel in their coverage of the Melbourne Queer Games Festival and it was described as "A magnum opus of the furry romance genre".

The game was used a case of study in a gender studies dissertation presented in the Tropos: Comunição, Sociedade e Cultura magazine about misuse of the word "gay" online to cover more than one LGTB identity, since the term gay only covers male homosexuals. It was also cited in a Social communication dissertation "A normalização dos gêneros nas capas de games LGBT e gay na Itch.io : tendências, identidades e protagonismos em uma plataforma de jogos digitais" for the Federal University of Minas Gerais about the normalization of the LGBT and gay video games as a genre, specifically about the game developer studies about the search algorithms used by the platforms and the collection of several LGTB identities under a single tag or name. Notably, Valadares attributes the developers of the game a series of "forms of collective algorithmic resistance", considering it as relevant work for developers, not only in the scope of production, but also in the capacity of building.

External links

• Official Minoh Workshop Itch page
• Official Minotaur Hotel page