Get Lost in the Mind-Bending ‘Hotel Infinity,’ Launching Today on Meta Quest

Strange things are afoot at Hotel Infinity. What at first appears to be a normal, if vast, grand hotel quickly becomes something else. The hallways don’t seem to fit together properly. Doors open onto impossible spaces. Your perspective on a room changes its shape. In order to find your way through, you’ll need to think carefully and nonlinearily, because the laws you’ve come to know about the world don’t apply here. The good news is, you can check in right away, because Hotel Infinity is available today on Meta Quest.

Hotel Infinity is a mind-bending puzzle game best played in a two-meter square space, where you can open doors, walk through halls, and peer around corners. But the hotel is ever-shifting and doesn’t conform to Euclidean geometry, so a door might open onto a hallway that should rightly intersect with a wall — but doesn’t. Turning a corner might take you into a guest room that exists in the same space as the lobby. Exploring Hotel Infinity means changing how you think about physical space as the hotel rewrites all the rules.

Those rewritten rules work perfectly in VR. While you might only have a limited physical space to move around in, developer Studio Chyr carefully designed Hotel Infinity’s looping halls and routes so that you can explore the entire game without ever running out of room. And while a roomscale space is the best way to experience Hotel Infinity, the game features a stationary mode too, so you can still explore the hotel even if you’re short on room to maneuver.

Studio Chyr is an experienced hand at creating strange and fascinating gameplay spaces, informed by architecture, science, and art. Its previous title, Manifold Garden, uses impossible geometry and infinite spaces to create a world that’s unlike anything else, with puzzles to solve that require changing how you think about these spaces and the ways they fit together. The studio builds on those ideas with Hotel Infinity, creating a new world that’s at once grounded in reality and completely untethered from it.

With Hotel Infinity hitting the Meta Horizon Store, we took the opportunity to sit down with Creative Director William Chyr to talk about what it takes to create these fascinating worlds, what players can expect to find when they venture into the hotel, and what challenges the studio faced creating a whole world within a two-meter square play space.

William Chyr: Hotel Infinity is a roomscale VR experience where you explore the environment simply by walking. From the very beginning, we focused on natural locomotion, so every step you take in real life moves you through the world. You don’t have to use joystick movement or teleportation. This takes immersion to another level, and creates some truly surreal spatial moments, like opening a wardrobe to reveal a portal, stepping through and finding yourself in another room.

You’re exploring a vast, empty hotel where the rules of physics and space don’t quite behave as expected. As you interact with the environment, you slowly uncover its secrets and descend deeper into the hotel.

Like Manifold Garden, it’s meant to be a meditative, quietly mind-bending experience that invites you to see architecture in new ways.

WC: There is a story and lore to the hotel, but it’s presented in a very subtle way. There are no text, dialogue, or voiceovers throughout the game. The narrative is communicated through the environment. If you take your time and look closely at the details and symbols on the props, and at the architecture itself, you can start to piece together fragments of what’s going on and what the intentions of this place might be. Ultimately, the game is more interested in asking questions than providing answers.

The “weirdness” of the hotel is part of the premise: this is a place that defies normal reality. This is not a hotel from our world.

WC: We’re not making a horror game, but there’s definitely a sense of uncanniness and unease throughout. Everything looks elegant and pristine, yet something feels just slightly off.

We did draw a lot of inspiration from hotel-based horror, so yes, some of the references are intentional. Room 1408 is one of them, and the hotel features a hedge maze, which is a very prominent element in The Shining. We wanted to capture the mood and imagery of those works without making the game itself a horror experience.

WC: This was one of the biggest design challenges of the entire project.

We wanted movement to feel completely natural, so no teleportation and no joystick movement. When you take a step in the real world, you take a step in the game. That makes the experience far more intuitive and immersive.

To make that work inside a 2m x 2m space, we had to design environments that loop and fold. We have hallways that bend back on themselves in ways that would be impossible in real life, but VR lets you experience that.

We also had to think a lot about physical comfort. Too many turns in the same direction can make players motion sick, so we had to constantly balance how the player moves. You don’t actually need to walk a lot, but you have to see a lot. A huge amount of our work went into crafting the illusion of large, continuous spaces while using subtle cues like furniture placement and railings to show where you can and can’t walk without breaking immersion.

Because the game is so physical, pacing is critical. There’s a balance between moments when the player is moving and moments when they’re stationary. Too much movement can feel overwhelming and tiring, while too little feels boring. It’s truly a full-body experience.

Our environment artists, Nick Williams and Oscar De Anda, also became level designers on the project, and they developed a great instinct for guiding players naturally through the space. The world has to unfold around you and gently foreshadow where you’re headed. You should never walk through a portal and feel like you’ve appeared somewhere unrelated. There needs to be a clear throughline. When it’s done right, players don’t even notice the portal. Even though the space is physically impossible, it still feels natural.

WC: With VR puzzles, we spent a lot of time exploring what kinds of movements actually feel good in VR. For example, we found that full-arm movements like pushing a door or pulling a lever tend to feel much better than tiny wrist motions, so many of our puzzles are built around those kinds of physical interactions.

What makes Hotel Infinity interesting is that these objects often live in spaces that don’t obey standard physics and geometry, like pulling out a drawer that’s deeper on the inside than the outside. VR lets you create puzzles that wouldn’t make sense in the real world, but still feel perfectly natural when you interact with them.

The challenge is making sure everything stays intuitive. Even when the space is physically impossible, the interaction has to be clear and readable. The players have to immediately understand what they can interact with and how, and that helps make the experience more grounded.

WC: One of the biggest lessons from Manifold Garden was developing a consistent language for impossible spaces. Even though that world is surreal, it still follows a set of patterns and rules, and players slowly learn how the space behaves.

We applied the same idea to Infinity. The environments here are very different, but they also have their own internal logic and follow a certain pattern. Part of the experience is learning that language, how the different sections of the hotels are structured.

Another major lesson was iteration. On Manifold Garden, we learned how important it is to prototype, playtest, and refine ideas over and over again. Doing this in VR is much more challenging and exhausting, especially in our game where you have to physically walk through the spaces. But because VR is so physical, you can’t know that something will feel good unless you build it and try it. A lot of the game’s spatial design came out of that iterative process.

WC: We actually originally set out to make Manifold Garden in VR, but very quickly it became clear that the game didn’t translate in a meaningful or innovative way. For example, we implemented gravity-changing in VR with teleportation, but it didn’t feel that special or interesting. Likewise, falling through space repeatedly is a big part of Manifold Garden, but that just wasn’t as comfortable in VR.

So instead of adapting Manifold Garden for VR, we went back to the roots and inspirations behind it. Manifold Garden was inspired by a desire to experience space that’s impossible in the real world, so the question was, what would experiencing impossible space in VR be like?

From there, the project evolved into its own thing and became Hotel Infinity. We decided to embrace VR completely and design around what makes it unique. Natural locomotion became a central pillar of the design, because it allows you to experience impossible spaces in a way that you simply can’t in any other medium.

WC: One of the earliest inspirations for Hotel Infinity came from Hilbert’s Hotel, a famous mathematical thought experiment about a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. Every single room in this hotel is occupied, and yet the hotel can still make space for new guests. If one person arrives, you simply ask the guest in Room 1 to move to Room 2, Room 2 to move to Room 3, and so on. Every guest moves up one room, and suddenly Room 1 is free again. It’s a playful way to show how infinity behaves differently than other numbers. I’ve always loved the imagery that this thought experiment evoked, and we asked ourselves: What would it actually feel like to stay in a hotel like that?

From there, we started to bring inspirations from a number of different places. M. C. Escher’s drawings showcasing impossible geometry and optical illusions were a major influence on Manifold Garden and continue to fascinate us. We studied the architecture and history of grand hotels from the 1920s, and the team also visited several hotels in person to experience their spaces and meet with the staff.

We also looked at films and TV shows set in hotels to understand the mood and storytelling possibilities of the setting. The Shining is the most obvious reference, but we also drew ideas from The Grand Budapest Hotel, Four Rooms, and even the third season of The Umbrella Academy, which features a seedy hotel as a major location.

All of these influences converged in Hotel Infinity. Our goal was to create a space that feels familiar but otherworldly and uncanny at the same time. We can’t wait for players to experience it firsthand.

Begin your stay in Hotel Infinity and start exploring its vast and winding halls — it’s available now on the Meta Horizon Store for $19.99 USD.