Preview Hotel “At A Lost Climber”: Inspector Glebsky’s Puzzle Developer: Akella Publisher: TBD Release Date: 4th Qtr, 2005 Platform: Preview by Randy Sluganski December 9, 2004

Thanks to JA reader Jonathan Allen for providing this updated information on Hotel At A Lost Climber:

I think you're right when you say that you suspect something might have been lost in translation there. Hotel At a Lost Climber appears to be based on the same Strugatskys story that inspired the film Otel "U Pogibshego Alpinista" by director Grigori Kromanov, which is known in the English speaking world as The Dead Mountaineer Hotel. It's a movie that I have tried to get a copy of for years, as the descriptions I have read make it sound absolutely fascinating. The Strugatsky's have a positive genius for creating unique scenarios based on the idea of first contact with alien intelligences. Their novel Roadside Picnic, about an area of the earth that is transformed into a surreal deathtrap/intelligence test after apparently having been visited by aliens, was made into the film Stalker by the great Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky is better known for having made the original (and superior) film version of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, which for many years has been known as the "Russian 2001: A Space Odyssey". Solaris, as you may recall, involved a sentient planet attempting to communicate with the space station in orbit about it, but because its intelligence is so alien it seems to be attacking them -- in the form of the crew's deepest sources of guilt. In the case of the project leader, it comes rather devastatingly in the form of his dead wife, who committed suicide on earth, and now reappears quite alive and very confused in a deep space research facility.

The Dead Mountaineer Hotel and Solaris are quite similar thematically, but where the scientist in Solaris has his horribly difficult encounter with an alien intelligence in outer space, where one might be somewhat less surprised to encounter one, the hero of Dead Mountaineer starts off at more of a disadvantage.

A police inspector is summoned to an isolated hotel in the snowy Kazakhstan mountains to investigate a murder, but when he arrives no crime appears to have been committed. However, the guests at the hotel seem very odd, and the inspector is subjected to increasingly bizarre events as he attempts to discover why he has been brought to this place. It turns out that he has been chosen as earth's ambassador for first contact, because, as a man who solves mysteries for a living, he may be able to figure out how to communicate with entities whose thought patterns are entirely alien to our own...

Once the investigator has been at the Hotel for a while he – according to The Science Fiction Edition of the excellent Aurum Film Encyclopedia:

" ...begins to discover that he is being confronted by bizarre events and that he is surrounded by people from another planet. The rest of the movie is like a chess game in which the detective tries to find out what the rules of the game might be as he attempts to adapt his mode of thinking and detecting to an environment in which normal human logic does not apply... [The] film skillfully uses the conventions of the detective story, designed to establish or restore the rules of normality, to underline the notion that, all too rarely acknowledged in science fiction, that a different social existence also must entail a radically different notion of consciousness, of thought, of psychology and 'character'. Since it is the task of the detective to reconstruct the coherence of a story, the film shows that 'stories' involving people from radically different social orders simply cannot be told in story-forms developed by and for our own societies."

(p. 351, Science Fiction, The Aurum Film Encyclopedia Volume 2, Edited by Phil Hardy William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1984)

Akella is a Russian software company based in Moscow that specializes in the development, publishing and distribution of computer games. They currently have five in-house development teams, a publishing house, a distribution center, a localization team and a quality assurance department that all together employs over 140 people.

Hotel “At a Lost Climber”: Inspector Glebsky’s Puzzle is without a doubt a strange title for an adventure game, but some of that may be owed to meaning that is lost in translation. Hotel is based on a science-fiction story by Russia’s Strugatsky brothers and Boris Strugatsky is actively involved with the creation process.

While the Strugatskys are known for their science fiction, their stories focus more on people and their problems then spaceships and advanced technology. While their name may not be familiar to our North American readers, the Strugatskys are the spiritual leaders of Russian science fiction and have been read by generations of fans.

Hotel will be a 3rd person point-and-click adventure. The characters will be 3D against a 2D-renedered background and the developers are promising ‘Syberia-like’ graphics (which seems to be the new standard for all new adventure games).

The hotel will be inhabited by at least 15 different characters, each with their own unique story and personality. Much like the classic The Last Express, the gameworld will be based on a ‘living world’ concept as characters will have their own activities to attend to in the game in real time.

What is most interesting about the game concept is that the developers also mention Colonel's Bequest - A Laura Bow Mystery as an influence. So it appears as if we can expect an Agatha Christie type mystery set in a real-time futuristic hotel.

We’ll have a lot more about this promising game soon at Just Adventure.