I had The Spectrum Retreat enter my radar after seeing a YouTube video on it. The concept was interesting: You are in a hotel and things aren't right. You're connected with someone who is going to help you escape. To what extent is this Hotel containing you, and what purpose is yours to find out. To escape, you have to enter test chambers and give yourself further access through the hotel and toward the roof where you can finally escape. The plot unfolds to help you discover who you are, why you're there, and what this strange hotel really is.

I called the core puzzle conceit test chambers for a reason: You conquer it one floor at a time, and you can't keep anything from previous chambers into the next. Each are self contained puzzles revolving around colours and cubes. By capturing colours in your phone from the codes, it allows you to go through that colour gate. You can trade the colour for another with the illuminated cubes. Test chambers usually revolve around setting up the level to get through a series of gates, looking through windows and getting to the elevator to the next test chamber.

As you progress and reach each progressive floor, new mechanics or ideas come alive, including teleportation or gravity flipping. They're an incredibly welcome addition that really change your approach. The puzzles are work man puzzles: Where in Portal you can stand and look around, The Spectrum Retreat pushes the player to experiment and play. However, it relies on limiting player knowledge into expand puzzles and lengthen them: It's only after you are through an obstacle that you find out that you are needing to rearrange things slightly differently to allow for one last swap to allow you to get to the end. Doubling back is inevitable and happens often and only happens once you have new information. Through time, I was able to avoid the situation more and more (especially when you can accidentally lock yourself out of a solution and have to reset the room) but it was still an ongoing issue.

And that's really the issue with The Spectrum Retreat: The developers neither give themselves enough credit but neither do they give the player. In the moments outside of the hotel, there are little puzzles that you need to do to advance the story and find the passcode for the next floor's chambers. However, the voice in your phone is always giving hints immediately. They're spelling things out. They're also not spelling things out to a player who has all the hints of what is happening within the plot, having the big confirming reveals much later after they've provided the information. The padding in the rooms shows the lack of confidence that The Spectrum Retreat had by trying to lengthen the game just a bit more. It works in latter puzzles when you realize, but the last puzzle in the game is incredibly long and I had the misfortune to have to reset it because I didn't have the knowledge that it required me to have. It fooled me, rather than outwitted me.

The plot has similar feelings of shallowness. Plot points are lacking specifics and those are what bring what is special out of nothing. Same tired tropes crop up from other mediums and problems shown feel like from a previous decade. The only specificity we really get are names. A lot of mysteries still feel left uncovered, so by the end, I did not have an opinion on what the potential outcomes should be.

The game is far from being labeled as a "bad" game. It's very crisp in its presentation and the puzzles are satisfying if you get past a bit of the inherent tedium with them. In fact, if you do like games like Portal, I would recommend it, but there's a list of games I'd recommend before it that offer the same experience. The best implementation that The Spectrum Retreat brings that I have not experienced in a similar game is the Manager's Notebook at the end of the game, where you can compare your stats and improve your times in each of the five floors' chambers. It still seems to lack the infrastructure to skip the story parts in between, or to skip to particular floors' chambers.

The Spectrum Retreat exists because of Portal, but it doesn't do much to exist despite of it.