Haunted Hotel: Room 18

**Haunted Hotel: Room 18** is the eighteenth installment in the *Haunted Hotel* series by Elephant Games.

## Plot

The game's opening cinematic shows an unidentified man writing out invitations to a Blackthorne family reunion, while swearing revenge against Samuel Blackthorne. It then cuts to James Blackthorne talking with his brother John, the player character, about attending the reunion. James is excited; John is a bit more reserved about it.

The brothers arrive at the Hotel Sweet 18, but soon find that not all is as they expected. No one else from the family is in evidence. Once they check in, they eventually reunite with Uncle Samuel, and start piecing together the truth. Samuel was once friends with both the hotel's owner, Leonard, and a young woman named Caroline. Leonard was in love with Caroline, but she became afraid of his obsessive nature and turned to Samuel for help. They went to talk to Leonard together, which led him to erroneously believe that Caroline and Samuel were in love. Enraged, he accidentally burned the hotel to the ground, killing everyone inside - including himself and Caroline. Only Samuel managed to escape. Now the hotel is the site of a mass haunting, and Leonard's ghost wants to make Samuel - and his family - pay for the perceived betrayal. John and James manage to trap Leonard's spirit and reunited it with his remains, and the game ends with Uncle Samuel arriving and helping his nephews leave in his boat.

### Bonus Chapter

The bonus chapter shows the backstory of the Hotel Sweet 18. Samuel and James, who is now the player character, return to the hotel to confront Samuel's nightmares. Samuel believes Caroline's spirit is reaching out to him for help, but he feels he is too old to do it himself, so he enlists James to help him. While exploring, James encounters the benign ghost of a hotel butler, and when James returns the gloves the ghost has lost, it allows him to depart peacefully into the afterlife.

They soon discover that the woman who worked as the hotel's concierge blames Caroline for the fact that the spirits are all trapped in the hotel; she has taken Caroline hostage, wanting her to suffer in their place. Uncle Samuel tells James that he knows a ritual which can banish the spirit of the concierge, and has James collect items which belonged to her when she was alive.

The ritual involves burning the concierge's personal items, and it works. Between this and James's encounter with the butler, the Blackthornes realize that the ghosts in the hotel can't leave because they're too connected to the items they had there in life, but Uncle Samuel says that they don't have time to reunite every ghost with their lost effects. The only way they can release all the imprisoned spirits is to burn the entire hotel to the ground, so he sends James to pour gasoline throughout the hotel in order to make it burn quickly. They escape in their boat as the hotel burns, and Uncle Samuel returns later to erect a memorial stone to Leonard and Caroline.

## Characters

* John Blackthorne: The player character.
* James Blackthorne: John's brother, a natural medium and paranormal investigator; he is the player character of the bonus chapter.
* Samuel Blackthorne: The brothers' uncle, who has a history with the Hotel Sweet 18.
* Leonard Maxwell: The original owner of the Hotel Sweet 18, who had been in love with a girl who turned him down.
* Caroline: The young woman who was the object of Leonard's affections, but though she cared for him, she didn't return his feelings the same way.

## Connections

* On the wall in John and James's room is a large painting of a hotel. This is the Freedom Hotel from *Personal Nightmare*.

## Trivia

* According to the invitation shown in the beginning, the game takes place on August 28, 2013.
* In one puzzle, John finds a picture of Leonard and Samuel when they were young men. In his youth, Samuel looked a lot like James.
* In the garden shed is a gaming console, and John has to beat the game to receive a needed item. The game is a Halloween-themed clone of the classic game *Frogger*.

## External Links

* *Haunted Hotel: Room 18* at the Elephant Games website
* *Haunted Hotel* at TV Tropes
* Elephant Games on Facebook