AN INTRODUCTION
There’s a saying that everything you post online stays online. While it relates specifically to social media, the same is true for the internet as a whole – articles, videos, fanfiction, and games. The Wayback Machine is a helpful tool that allows us to archive particular pages of interest, not only to see how they change over time, but so that we still have access to their content if they are ever removed.
Everything that’s uploaded to Steam, GameJolt, and Itch.io, free or not, is eventually ripped and posted to a mirror site, available for instant download forever. It can be deleted at the source, but it will always exist somewhere. Such is the way of the modern internet.
Things have not always been so simple.
In the early days, a game could be taken down after being online for days, weeks, sometimes even months at a time... and never get preserved. Blog posts or Reddit threads talking about the game may remain, giving us a glimpse into what we’re missing, but if the source material was deleted before someone had the idea to download it to their hard drive, then it’s likely been lost to time.
One such game is Coil Studio’s Hazel Hotel – a pixel-art puzzler that first graced GameJolt to an utterly lukewarm reception on the 29th of June, 2009. The game page boasted a thumbnail image and a short description, reading as follows:
“Welcome to Hazel Hotel. An upcoming life-sim with an emphasis on creative problem solving, you play as Hazel; a passionate wizard using their powers for the greater good by assisting fellow guests in an ever-expanding hotel complex. With an abundance of characters to talk to and hundreds of fine-tuned dialogue options, the full game is sure to entertain all players of all age ranges.”
Over the years, various information about the game has been collected by users on Reddit, Discord, and the Vacant Fingers Wiki, compiling what little screenshots they have alongside recounts by those few lucky people who played the game before it was taken down.
And what they’ve found? It’s no life-sim.
It begins immediately with no title screen or tutorial. The player character (a featureless thing with big, black, pixel eyes, only vaguely resembling the pink teddy-bear figure on the thumbnail art) simply spawns underneath the shadow cast by an enormous purple building. They are as lonely as lonely gets, surrounded by a forest of identically tiled trees extending to the edges of the screen. The still-illuminated headlights of the few parked cars besides the building provide the only source of light. A completely still water feature lacking any animation sits before the double doors of the building.
Pressing ESC opens a menu. Aside from containing a single image of a completely smashed mirror, though, it doesn’t seem to have any functionality.
Upon entering the building, the player is greeted with a blank, white corridor. There are two things here – the entrance door, and a door at the end of the corridor. Going through either door causes the player to loop to the other. It is an an endless, non-Euclidean nightmare, and once you are here, there is no way out.
This is essentially a softlock – a gaming term used to describe a state where progress is impossible unless the game is restarted – and it’s very likely the vast majority of first-time players walked straight into it. The earliest comments on the GameJolt page were exclusively negative, the “game” offering barely 2 minutes of actual gameplay. This was clearly a debug test by a new and inexperienced developer, and it wasn’t worth anyone’s time.
It wouldn’t be until roughly a week after release that someone would find something other than the forest and an endless corridor.
By standing behind with the water feature and looking down, then pressing “E”, a piece of crude art is shown of the player character looking at their reflection in the water. Strangely, the white and featureless player character, assumed to be a placeholder for the pink and cutesy one featured on the thumbnail art, is drawn white and featureless within the art. Their black eyes pierce through the ripples of the water.
The user who discovered this quickly uploaded a Reddit thread detailing their (albeit small) finding, encouraging others to play the game and do the same. Just a few minutes later this reply by the same user detailed how witnessing the fountain cutscene has an effect on the broken mirror in the pause menu. Previously completely destroyed, it now contains a single shard. Selecting the mirror in this new state loads an entirely new menu.
With this discovery, things were only just beginning.
The menu contains art of the mirror, alongside 5 dialogue boxes to choose from - questions - which when clicked receive an answer in the form of dialogue. Questions are not unordinary, but answers are worded in a round-about, peculiar manner. Clicking on “Who am I?” incurs not the name of the player character, but the response: “You were created on SEPTEMBER 25TH, 2006. You have not spoken since 5:14 PM on APRIL 17TH, 2009. Perhaps silence is unusual, but to you it feels like the most natural thing in the world.”
The full list of recorded questions and answers have been compiled here, but the most important part is that the response to “What can I do?” is a complete non-sequitur detailing the story of a woman who is late to a meeting, much to the dismay of her boss, eventually ending when she produces a gun and shoots them in the head. While having no relation to anything seen thus far, viewing it unlocks the ability for the player to fire slow-moving projectiles in whatever direction they’re facing.
These projectiles do nothing, and barely interact with the environment at all. Still, players were confident there was more. Upon observing that doors automatically open whenever the player is nearby, one user figured out that it was possible to fire a projectile through an open door in the repeating corridor room, causing the projectile to travel through and then come out of the door on the other side of the room. By timing it correctly, the player can stand in front of the projectile, essentially shooting themselves.
The screen cuts to black.
THE RABBIT HOLE
The player wakes up in a lobby. A dirty golden bell sits atop a reception desk. Photos of pixellated still life don the walls. Five doors lead to five different rooms and the stifling, endlessly repeating corridor is never seen again.
From here, there are several rooms available: a canteen, a kitchen, a lost-and-found cupboard, a dried-up pool, a playroom, and an elevator that leads to “guest bedrooms” – only a handful of which can be entered. Bedrooms are labelled with names: “Stitches”, “Moe”, “Cam”, and each is heavily personalised with objects, clothes, and framed pictures. Curiously, these pictures showcase various characters and faces that had so far only been present in the thumbnail.
It had been suggested up until this point that the game had been mixed up with a different one upon release. Looking at all the main beats from the description – “life-sim”, “fellow guests”, “hotel complex”, “dialogue options” – none of them seem to apply to this bizarre, half-finished world. But as the building gradually reveals itself to be none other than the hotel mentioned in the description, featuring creative puzzle solving and the apparent guests’ bedrooms, it becomes increasingly clear that there is no mix-up. This is Hazel Hotel.
Specifics get hazy after this point. With such a wealth of content to explore, players were less likely to document exact details.
Only one puzzle is documented in its entirety, perhaps sticking out due to the involvement of the only other living being besides the protagonist throughout the whole game:
A tiny door blocks the way. The door is shut and openable only by a mouse that emerges whenever the player leaves cheese nearby and hides behind a corner. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be helpful, as the mouse scurries back into the hole and shuts the door behind them as soon as the player moves. A tricky puzzle indeed.
By bringing over a box all the way from the other side of the hotel, and then leaving the cheese inside of a nearby broom closet, the player can push the box over the entrance while the mouse is still inside, successfully trapping them within. Since the mouse can no longer return to shut the door, it remains unlocked. The player can easily enter through and continue exploring.
Particular details are scarce, however the overall structure of the gameplay loop is well-documented: players must bear witness to their own reflection, which are found through exploration and increasingly elaborate puzzle-solving. With each new reflection, a shard is restored to the broken mirror in the pause menu - and with each new shard comes 5 more questions and answers, one of which contains a non-sequitur story and a new ability, known as a “spell”. Early on, these spells are weak - a single bullet, a flash of white light, a trail of black dust that disappears behind you - but they become more complex the further the player progresses. One spell summons a series of vines that ensnare every object they touch, blooming flowers around yellow objects, but sprouting poisonous ivy around purple ones. Another turns the player into a blob of sludge, a transformation only revertable if the player is within an area of complete shadow, leading to a frustrating number of softlocks.
Each of these spells are the solution to a puzzle that, through a chain of domino-like events, eventually lead to a new reflection being discovered (and thus, another mirror shard). Much like everything else, these puzzles begin simple, but very quickly sprawl into the complicated and arbitrary. An empty pool must be filled with water - achievable by swapping a stack of books in the library with an empty watering can from the greenhouse, pushing the watering can all the way to the outside fountain to fill it with water, and then lifting it upwards by magically supersizing the grass blades beneath it, allowing it to enter the swimming pool’s window on the 3rd floor... and finally using the water to fill up the pool.
Players were entranced by the absurdist, oddly addicting nature of these puzzles. And with an estimated 200 unique rooms, alongside the growing collection of spells, complexity would only balloon. It was strange, confusing, and deeply, deeply interesting.
Just 48 hours after the Reddit thread detailing the nature of the fountain reflection cutscene went live, the game was deleted off of GameJolt.
A GAME NO LONGER
The small group of players within the Reddit thread were understandably heartbroken. The game had potential, and could have easily amassed a large player-base in just a few more days with its captivating puzzle design. Although, many now speculate that the extra eyes on the project was the cause for the game’s deletion.
Others speculate differently. Theories range from the developer reading the original negative comments and pulling down the game out of shame, to the entire thing being a social experiment to see whether anybody could actually beat it (there exists no proof that the game was ever completed, unfortunately). The Vacant Fingers Wiki - a space for fans to compile all known information about the game, ranging from interviews, to dissections of the questions/answers section, to pixel-by-pixel screenshot analysis - have an entire subsection of pages dedicated to the notion that the games story is integral to the reason for its deletion. If they can just piece together what happened to Hazel, the Hotel, and the guests, they might be able to figure out why the game was pulled.
While it might sound silly, the idea does have some merit.
Several recorded answers within the pause-menu mirror contain a fourteen-syllable sentence that bear little relation to the question asked:
“GLASS SHARDS PRICK VACANT FINGERS
HOLLOW EYES REFLECT NOTHING”
“Cracks that run deep into the
linoleum floor below.”
“You cannot be whole again,
But you can cease to be null.”
“Perhaps, in another life,
The sharp become the wisened.”
They can all be related to the idea of “fracturing” - whether that be a fractured person, a fractured building, or a fractured mirror. It is assumed these sentences form a complete poem when arranged in a particular order. However, since the list of questions and answers are incomplete, it’s likely that many sentences are missing.
While probably not a meta-narrative about why the game was deleted, the poem proves that the game doesn’t shy away from hiding puzzle pieces in odd places - and many use this as evidence to suggest that the game’s deletion could be one piece of a complete narrative whole. But as such large portions of the game are undocumented, it seems impossible to figure out what this narrative might have been.
The Coil Studios account has been inactive since the game's deletion on the 9th of July, 2009, and does not show any signs of reopening. Concrete answers will likely never be found.