It has only been a few years since Faerin Games started their venture by publishing interactive games on Steam. Despite being worked in a very challenging genre, their first game, Man of the House, was quite successful. However, its gameplay was passable enough, but the game was extremely grinding and had a tendency to force you to go through the same monotonous gameplay over and over again in order to advance. Mystwood Manor, on the other hand, has improved much in that aspect, and the gameplay not only gets addicted but amusing too. Anyway, to begin with, Mystwood Manor is not a game for kids or younger gamers, as it is restricted to people below the age of 18.

It's possible to refer to Mystwood Manor as a narrative adventure, although the game's primary focus is on being a hotel management simulator. Your primary focus should therefore be on the hotel, both in terms of effectively managing the establishment's resources and, more importantly, ensuring that all of the clients have a positive experience while they are there. This should be done in addition to the numerous conversations that you will have with various characters throughout the game in order to advance the plot. If you find that maintaining the hotel is too much of a burden for you, you can turn on the in-game settings that allow you automatically pass all visitor interactions, lock hotel qualities, and, most significantly, lock your staff's energy meter. These choices are available if you activate them in the game's options menu.

The story of Mystwood Manor is surprisingly deep as it unfolds throughout several sequences during the game. You take the role of a young adult who finds himself in charge of a very ancient hotel inherited from his late father. Since his father owed a lot of money to the bank, he must push forward his father's dream to establish this hotel and repay the debt. In doing so, he comes across a supernatural mystery that holds answers to many of his questions regarding the death of his father and the history of the hotel he owns. Throughout the story, he hires new staff, trains and manages them, as well as constructs additional facilities and the improvement of your hotel to satisfy the needs of his clients.

Mystwood Manor can be played in both Normal and Story Mode. Normal mode is recommended, as it holds most of the gameplay aspects, especially if you want to get deeply into hotel management. The best part of the game comes from its management simulation. Planning and renovating the hotel are both connected in some way to its overall star rating. Obviously, as the rating rises, more rooms and upgrades become available, and at the same time, higher-level patrons begin to visit the establishment. Even though there are two more hotels called Forest Queen and Royal Stag other than the Mystwood Manor, there isn't any competition bar or anything like that to take this simulation to an extensive level.

While managing the hotel requires a lot of renovation work, your primary task is to assign the right staff to their appropriate services. The condition of the hotel is shown in four different measures Housekeeping, Maintenance, Health, and Security. When their numbers go below a certain percentage, facilities related to the hotel, such as spa, gym or restaurant won't provide any service resulting in negative feedback from the customers. Each day you need to adjust your staff four times a day, morning, afternoon, evening, and night to ensure the best possible outcome from them.

While it might sound easy only to assign staff to their related services, things become complicated when their energy bar comes to the scene. Each time a member of the hotel provides any service, they lose one-fourth of their energy bar, and it only refills when she takes a break for rest. When the energy bar is fully depleted, she falls sick and needs medical attention, which keeps her away from providing any sort of services. However, it's a relief that two of the staff members have common traits in terms of the services required for the hotel. So, if anyone falls sick, you can either assign a different staff to attend similar duty or avoid accepting guests who require that particular service.

Unlike other simulation games, Mystwood Manor has ten fixed customers who regularly visit the hotel with different service needs. Each of them has a star rating, and when they come to check in, the screen shows the number of nights they will stay, the number of points you will gain from them, and the total money they will spend. In addition, each guest is assigned a level, and that level, together with their star number, determines their worth. The greater the level of the customer, the more stars they have, and the rewards are proportional to this number.

The number of customers that are satisfied is the most crucial metric. This is another challenging aspect of the game, but it's definitely knowledge worthy. While providing any services to the customers, they will order their services in an indirect manner, and you need to find the correct answer or service for that. For instance, they will order a Korean dish, and you'll have to serve them the right kind of dish from the three choices given on the menu. While serving with the right choice satisfies them, the wrong one damages the reputation, particularly when you do it three times during one stay. In the event that their requirements are not met a total of three times, the hotel will not be eligible for any award points.

The level to which they are satisfied is of the utmost importance. Their outcomes depend on how often they engage with the game's protagonists. Because besides the star points and money, they also grant destiny points. These points stack up to three bars and can be redeemed by a fortuneteller called Isabella, who is more of a mysterious character in the game. When you have accumulated enough destiny points, you can visit her at night to convert the destiny points into cards while assigning them to a staff member to confer extra benefits onto them. These cards can also be used on your character, gaining benefits like having to hire someone without pay or low renovation costs, etc. A limited number of items can also be bought from the store or found during fishing, boosting staff attributes. Each character can hold up to 3 cards in their inventory and 3 maximum items.

During the day, you can either explore a few areas of the map, check on staff or a guest to progress their narratives or attend to your office to ensure higher customer service or faster skill generation of the team. Each customer has a total of 5 different interactions to further their narratives; usually, they are shorter. On the contrary, every staff (all of them are female) who works for you will have her own distinct personality as well as a narrative to progress. You will learn more about each of them as you move through their individual interactions and get to know them on a deeper level while progressing mostly from the romantic perspective.

Speaking of romance, you can develop relationships with all eight team members, starting with Julia, Amber, Riley, Kay, Laura, Annika, Hana, and Catalina. Each of them can be viewed from their distinct profiles that show their current stat, such as how they address you, your relationship progression with them on a scale from 10 to 100, the salary they draw, their skills, and traits. Each of them has an inventory that can hold up to three destiny cards, three items to boost their stats, and a gallery for each that unlocks a number of their revealing photos. These photos are unlocked after a certain number of interactions when you progress on their narratives.

The progression is shown through a series of tires from Tire 1 to Tire 5, while each tire has three different interactions that unlock after the hotel reach a certain star level. Once you complete a Tire for a character, you also unlock a prize for them. This prize determines how they will be dressed when attending to the hotel guest. Once unlocked, however, you can never return to their previous dress code as the game progress is pretty much fixed on this aspect. Since progressing the narratives requires you to collect the prize after each tire, you can only go to the next tire once they are collected.

Interacting with these characters is not anyhow part of the game's narrative. This is where the story loses a bit of its charm since all the characters are very nicely designed. Each of them attempts to generate a significant amount of suspense as your relationship grows stronger, but only a shady part of it connects with the game's narrative. Despite this, it's always exciting to interact with any of them. They are all appropriately attractive, and most of the conversations are interesting too.

Sadly, however, these conversations are all narrative based and have no voiceover. This means you'll have to read many conversations while they can be testing at times. The only voiceover you can find is during their intimate time, but it's the same voice for all eight girls, which only suits some of them compared to their appearances. The animations are nicely done, and some will please you, but this portion is the least reasonable compared to the rest of the game's presentation.

In the end, Mystwood Manor seemed like a good foundation for future games from Faerin Games due to its hotel management portion. Even though it gets a bit grinding at times but it's never dulled. You always feel the urge to generate money and progress the game's story and narratives with each girl. The presentation is very friendly throughout the game, and you end up learning quite a lot about many different things starting from food types of other countries to fitness tips. Even though the game primarily focuses on adult content, there is much more to Mystwood Manor than meets the eye.