The Spectrum Retreat hands-on — puzzles and displaced reality at the Penrose hotel

The Spectrum Retreat‘s Penrose is a hotel with impeccable service, lovely spacious rooms, and stylish art deco trimmings. But you have no idea why you’re there, and you soon realize that this is one inn where you can’t check out — or leave. This sci-fi puzzler is indie developer Dan Smith’s debut game, and he teamed up with publisher Ripstone Games to release it later this summer for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

Smith is self-taught, and he began working on The Spectrum Retreat when he was 15. It was a solo effort for the first four years until he partnered with Ripstone. Even before the partnership, though, he was catching people’s attention — he won the British Academy Film and Television Arts’ Young Game Designer Award in 2016 for a prototype of this game.