You can check in, but you can never leave.
- Roberto: You wouldn't happen to know anything about the strange things people have been reporting around here, have you?
Porter: Room 610 - Block B. The elevator is just through these doors, straight ahead on the right.
Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel is a Survival Horror-themed First-Person Shooter made by Pulsatrix, an indie studio based in Brazil and released by Maximum Games.
Set in Treze Trilhas (a real-life municipality somewhere in south Brazil), the St. Dinfina Hotel has been subject of rumors by locals. Rumors about mysterious, paranormal activity, illegal experimentations and attempts to bridge the real world with the underworld. As the local legend goes, the hotel was once site of a cult called the Sacred Trail, who's responsible for wiping out the population of a nearby mining town back in the 1920s. After the hotel's construction, it was plagued by a series of unexplained disappearances over past several decades, and somehow still in operation despite the various incidents.
In September 2009, a recently-graduated Mass Communications student and amateur journalist named Roberto Leite Lopes, after being informed by his contact Stephanie Freitas from the journalist RSI forums, decide to investigate the hotel and uncover the mystery, only to be dragged into the same occultic conspiracy which has resurfaced in the hotel's basements. For starters, an unexpected encounter with a spooky ghost-girl in the toilet inexplicably drags Roberto into another realm before he realize a year had passed.
Also, there are zombies and giant monsters. Of course.
The game draws plenty of inspiration from the Resident Evil games, with online review noting the first-person graphics and puzzle-solving mechanics bearing similarities to Resident Evil 7 (then the most recent installment).
Enjoy your stay. FOREVER.
- Advertised Extra: Despite being featured in most promotional materials, Emily (the girl in a gasmask) only appears near the end, for less than ten minutes.
- Always Night: Every single stage, regardless if the player is controlling Roberto, Luis or Christopher, takes place after sunset.
- Apocalyptic Log: Roberto can come across various notes from other hotel residents who got stranded in St. Dinfna. And then there's this chilling digital voice recorder message:Unknown Female Voice: Something is definitely wrong here...
It all started after I head that loud buzzing noise coming from Room 610.
That was the first time I saw the girl... then these horrible monsters starts showing up.
The Hotel has gone to shit. And these creatures seem to have taken over just about everywhere - inside and out.
Some people tried to leave the Hotel to get help. But... they never came back.
We're stuck. No communication, no food... God...
This feels like the fucking apocalypse... - Abandoned Mine: The last, last stage Roberto needs to contend with, a mine shaft from the 1920s where he uncovers the last conspiracy of the Sacred Trail.
- Attack on the Heart: The common zombie enemies are surprisingly durable (at least, compared to it's inspiration, Resident Evil) but their hearts are exposed, glowing organs on their chests. Obviously shooting them right there puts them down quickly.
- Badass Bookworm: Roberto being an amateur journalist doesn't stop him from kicking ass and defeating giant monsters the moment he got his hands on a gun.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Besides zombies, giant insects are another recurring enemy type.
- Blackout Basement: So many stages are set in complete darkness, from the basements of the titular hotel to the cabin, mine shafts and woods in the 1920s levels, where visibility is limited to the reach of a flashlight.
- Camera Abuse: One with an in-universe justification at the end, where Roberto puts on a gasmask when fighting Aquilles that last time in the secret facility near the ending. Roberto's gasmask gets punctured by Aquilles leading to a cracked hole from his POV, seen through the mask's damaged lens.
- Creepy Basement: The titular hotel's basement (surprise?). Not only are most of the lights out, it's also infested with gigantic insectoid monsters and undead who tends to ambush Roberto from the dark.
- Disney Villain Death: Aquilles' last boss fight ends with it falling off-screen into a chasm of acid. There isn't even a splash.
- Distant Prologue: In the opening prologue set in the 1960s, players obviously doesn't assume the role of Roberto Lopes. Instead, they play as Joao Luis, a captive imprisoned in St. Dinfna's dungeons, who escaped with a diary about him and hid it in a wall before he's abruptly recaptured. The game then skips to 2009, and later on players as Roberto can uncover Luis' diary.
- Expy: The bosses have some similarities to those from the Resident Evil series.
- Non-boss examples with the grub-like creatures, who latches on Roberto and tries chewing his health up like the leeches from Resident Evil 0.
- The Giant Spider boss, for instance, is one to the Black Tiger from Resident Evil (Remake). It's even fought in a similar cobweb-coated interior.
- The Pianist is based on Lisa Trevor, being a deformed mutant-woman (albeit with Creepily Long Arms instead of tentacles) who walks with a hunch and is a tragic Tortured Monster who's visibly moaning in pain throughout her boss battle.
- Aquiles sounds a lot like the eponymous monster from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, a genetically-empowered undead creature clad in a trench coat and an Implacable Man who keeps chasing after Roberto. It even has an animation where it executes victims with it's empowered left hand (albeit with pincers instead of Nemmy's tentacles) by grabbing them via Neck Lift and close-up penetration.
- Hell Hotel: The very premise of the game, being stuck in a hotel infested with zombies and monsters while uncovering it's dark secrets.
- Intrepid Reporter: The player character, Roberto, a budding journalist intending to investigate the St. Dinfna for his latest scoop, rumors and scary myths be damned.
- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The opening FMV where Roberto arrives at St. Dinfna the first time is at dusk, in the middle of heavy downpour, just like every good horror story out there. Predictably, things go horribly wrong once he checks in.Roberto: The rain's really coming down hard now...
- Magical Camera: Roberto can obtain a special camera which allows him to "see things in other worlds". Looking through the lens around St. Dinfna's interiors allows Roberto to catch glimpses of it's past supernatural activities, locate hidden entrances, and See the Invisible.
- Meat Moss: The Hotel seems quite normal on the surface, but Roberto quickly realize somehting's amiss when he reach the basements - and realize the walls and floors are coated in plenty of meat-like growth, with fleshy tumors growing from the ground. And what appears to be intestines hanging from the ceilings.
- Mind Screw: What else do you call a game where you're supposed to investigate an allegedly haunted hotel, only to pass out for a year and uncover a futuristic conspiracy from 2060 intending to rewrite the present?
- Missing Steps Plan: In one of Roberto's recovered notes, one of the hotel's escaping guests wrote about how he successfully found out the combination code (645820) to the floor's exit, only to note a page later that "nobody told him he needs a bloody security keycard". Of course, it's up to Roberto to find the card.
- Multiple Endings: It depends on whether Roberto chose to accept Christopher's We Can Rule Together offer by taking his hand, or grabbing the gun instead.
- By taking Christopher's hand, Chrisopher then reveals the Sacred Trail was formed in the 2060s, after Christopher and his fellow researchers discovers Emily, a young girl with latent psychic abilities and decide to use her to reshape time and history. Roberto accepts, Christopher sends him to the future, and the game abruptly ends.
- If Roberto grabs the gun, he managed to put one last bullet into Christopher. But Christopher doesn't die, and instead stabs Roberto repeatedly from Roberto's POV. The screen goes black, but after that Roberto regains consciousness, still alive and in the middle of the now abandoned cabin.
- Numerological Motif: One of the game's puzzles requires Roberto to rearrange seven books in the library's shelf, in numerical order, to uncover an exit. Roberto obtains a copy of The Three Musketeers early on, and sees six other books arranged randomly with their spines visible - Seven Deadly Sins, The Bermuda Triangle, 6 years, A Tale of Two Cities, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Slaughterhouse-Five. There's a rather nifty, clever detail hidden in here - Bermuda Triangle is the third book in order while Three Musketeers is the fourth, because the latter book actually contains four musketeers (Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, Aramis)
- Personal Space Invader: There's a small, grub-like enemy with sharp teeth whose sole attack is latching on Roberto and chewing his flesh up close. They usually deal Scratch Damage, and when they're caught Roberto will pull them out - with a graphic Gross-Up Close-Up on said grub-creature - before stomping them underfoot.
- The Place: The titular hotel, where shit gets real and everything else goes wrong.
- Precision F-Strike: Roberto usually doesn't swear that much (despite being alone in a monster-infested hotel) but he does get a good one when facing the first zombie. And later after fighting Aquilles the first time.Roberto: FUCK me - where the hell did that come from?
Roberto: I came this close to being killed by some kind of giant monster with a fucking claw for a hand! - Recurring Boss: Aquilles, the Nemesis expy, needs to be fought multiple times just like it's inspiration. The first few battles can be skipped by having Roberto run for exits though, but he might miss out clues or items.
- Red Right Hand: Aquiles the mutant brute has a gigantic left hand bulging with exposed flesh, which ends in a fleshy power pincer which it uses for grabbing Roberto when up close.
- Sad Battle Music: The battle theme for the Pianist boss is a solemn piano score, to highlight her status as a Tortured Monster.
- Shout-Out:
- The library contains several classic works of literature, as noted under Numerological Motif.
- The game itself has enough references to the Resident Evil games, with it's bosses being direct expies. The underground laboratories even bears similarities to various Umbrella facilities.
- There's also a piano puzzle lifted from the first Silent Hill.
- For most of the game, Roberto is investigating a haunted hotel used for the occult, only to find out near the end that the hotel is a front for a high-tech facility filled with state-of-the-art equipment, and it's from there where all the undead and monstrosities are spawned from. So, The Cabin in the Woods?
- Switching P.O.V.: While Roberto is the game's protagonist, there are a few levels which flashes back to the 1920s, revolving around theSacred Trail's founder Christopher. There's also the first level with a prisoner named Joao Luis in play, but he doesn't appear after that.
- Tiny-Headed Behemoth: The Pianist is a giant monster with the head of a regular human woman, taking up roughly 5% of her whole body.
- Undead Child: For most of the game's first few areas, Roberto constantly catch glimpses of a creepy ghost girl who usually appears few paces in front of him, as if bidding him to follow her. That's before he realize there are monsters around. The girl is revealed at the end as Emily, who's not a ghost, but a child with psychic abilities under Christopher's commands.
- The Voice: Roberto's liaison, Stephanie, who only appears via radio but isn't shown onscreen. She finally appears in person at the end, when Roberto meets Christopher and uncovers the Sacred Trail.
- Wham Line: After Roberto regains consciousness, and managed to contact his liaison, Stephanie.Stephanie: No... no, that is not possible! There's no way! How are you still here? It's been over a year since I told you to come here... I thought they killed you!
- You Monster!: Roberto said this word-for-word when confronting Christopher at the end, after seeing Christopher stab Emily in her guts. The latter isn't fazed by it.Christopher: Monster, psycopath... God. I've been called many things over the last century, Roberto.
