Swery’s bloody gamble in Death Game Hotel won’t be his only multiplayer game, he says

Death Game Hotel came out last week – a comically gory game where players play casino-style card games around a table, raising the stakes by using their own limbs. It’s a VR game that’s a departure from the norm for White Owls, the studio run by Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro (but what’s their “norm”?). It’s got a big multiplayer component too, with plenty of happy bubble-popping and chicken-squashing in between the comical blood splatters. And this taste of multiplayer mischief has Swery’s head bubbling. This game won’t be his last foray into the multiplayer ocean, he told us.

“In the future,” says Swery, “I want to use this experience to challenge myself with something new in online multiplayer (something you probably haven’t even thought of yet).”

That’s just a taster. He didn’t reveal much more about future plans in our chat. We know that Swery is already working with Goichi Suda (aka Suda51) on a completely different deadly guesthouse – the Hotel Barcelona. But whatever multiplayer chaos is going on in Swery’s head, it has nothing to do with this.

For now, Swery is mostly interested in getting players into the lobbies of the studio’s VR gambling den, where each player has a chalice full of blood in front of them into which they must throw their increasingly insane bets. He said the idea for a mortal multiplayer tabletop game came about during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the studio’s staff started hanging out in VR to discuss work.

“During the ‘stay home’ period, when we couldn’t leave our homes or meet friends and colleagues, we at White Owls distributed VR headsets to all employees and held gaming meetings in VR,” he said. “This experience led to the idea of ​​creating a place where people could meet and network, which greatly inspired this project.”

This will be Swery’s 17th published game (at least according to his wiki), which isn’t surprising for someone who has been developing video games since the 1990s, sometimes drawing mixed reactions. The lead developer of cult favorite Deadly Premonition and cozy village cat-people simulator The Good Life shared that he’s pleased with his studio’s work so far, even though it’s the nature of art that there’s always something left unfinished.

“As a game developer, I believe that all of my works are ‘forever unfinished’, but are nevertheless considered ‘as complete as ever.'”

When I asked him if he could give advice to younger developers, he avoided flowery talk and said it directly: “Know what you are doing.”

“Big companies produce AAA titles by investing money,” he said. “Indie developers try to compete with big titles by offering something unique that you can’t experience anywhere else. I think it’s important to look deep inside yourself and ask yourself what you’re offering – and how – to avoid moving forward without a strategy.”

Swery is also a fully trained Buddhist monk who is an excellent judge of cats. He had previously given me some good advice about my cat’s behavior. When I told the studio manager and cat lover that I was no longer living with my beloved cat due to a breakup (sniff), he knew what tone to use.

“Everyone has a different approach to coping with the loss of a beloved cat,” he said. “Getting another cat (preferably a newborn kitten), reading cat blogs daily, finding a new friend who has a cat, or chatting with an AI pretending to be a cat – all of these could be good options.”

“For my part, I would calm my mind by believing that we will meet again one day (in another dimension). For now, let’s play Death Game Hotel together and cheer up! Hang in there!”

Death Game Hotel is available on the Meta Store if you have Oculus. The developer also notes that there is a Discord server where studio staff arrange games, which sometimes involve Swery.