Not Another Weekend

I have a soft spot for point-and-click games that understand exactly what they are and lean into it without apology, and Not Another Weekend from Animatic Vision is precisely that kind of game. You play as Mike Melkout, a distinctly unhinged bellboy at the Hotel 404 who needs every guest and employee off the premises by Sunday evening for reasons the game slowly, darkly reveals. The loop is essentially what one reviewer aptly called an "annoy 'em up": you wander the hotel's floors, pick up objects, combine them with other objects, and figure out increasingly absurd ways to make each character's stay utterly untenable. There is no combat, no death screen, no time pressure bearing down on your reflexes. The whole thing is deliberately low-stakes in execution, which gives the comedy room to breathe. The '80s setting is not just wallpaper. The cast of characters reads like a loving fever-dream of pop culture caricatures: a barely-disguised Indiana Jones stand-in named Westy Jones, a pair of bespectacled computer-nerd twins called Point and Click Jefferson, a washed-up wrestler, a fading pop singer. Each guest gets their own self-contained narrative arc, and the structure of vignettes-within-a-whole means the pacing stays lively even as the hotel fills out. The Beeper 2000 gadget and the Notemap (a floor plan that tracks your targets and teleports you between floors) are quality-of-life wins that the genre genuinely needed. Pressing the spacebar highlights every interactable object on screen, which sidesteps the pixel-hunting frustration that plagued the old LucasArts era. The developers clearly thought about friction and removed most of it. The pixel art is deliberately rough in a way that suits the Atari-era aesthetic the team was chasing. Character designs are caricatured down to a few expressive, iconic features, and the animation is noticeably smoother than you might expect given how lo-fi the sprites read at a glance. The soundtrack, meanwhile, is the kind of synth-flavored thing you will leave running in a background tab. Players who finished the game reported anywhere from ten to sixteen hours of playtime depending on how thoroughly they interrogated every corner of the hotel, which feels genuinely generous at its price point. The puzzle difficulty sits in a comfortable middle zone: logical enough that solutions feel earned, loose enough that you rarely feel stuck for long. One late-game puzzle has a reputation for snagging people, and the game's horror-bookend framing will catch a few players off-guard, but neither is a dealbreaker. The fair criticism is that the premise runs a little thin in spots. The story trades depth for pace in a few of the guest arcs, and if you are someone who wants layered, psychologically complex characters from your adventure games, this is not that. What it is instead is consistently funny, propulsive, and crafted with genuine love for the genre's golden era. The adult humor is present throughout (the game is candid about implicit sexual content and mature themes in its own disclaimers), so players who prefer their comedy clean should know what they are getting into.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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