Apocalypse Hotel (2025) - REVIEW
"Time isn't something you lose. It changes constantly and adds layers to your life."
Apocalypse Hotel is a 12 episode anime series that was released in 2025 and was animated by CygamesPictutes, a company known for their mobile games and anime adaptions based on those mobile games, though this one was an original story. The series was directed by Kana Shundo, who had previously only directed a single episode of Princess Connect! Re: Dive.
The series is about a hotel ran by a few robot employees after humanity leaves Earth due to the air becoming toxic to primates - their goal is to keep the hotel running until humanity, and especially their hotel's owner, returns. As decades, and eventually centuries, begin to pass, it seems less and less likely that humanity will ever make the voyage back to Earth. Though at first the robots idly tend to their daily tasks of keeping the hotel running without any guests, they soon start to receive one after another of extraterrestrial visitors staying at their hotel.
The anime had an incredibly strong first episode, juxtaposing the hotel's introductions and core values with the fate of humanity as the first waves of the toxicity spread, showing some strong resemblances to the real world experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. From there, though, the premise began to fizzle out. While it was often fun and even endearing to see the different alien species visit the hotel, it felt as though the story and the characters within were always just on the cusp of strong ideas and themes without ever really touching them.
Towards the middle of the 12 episode run, the episodic formula became a hindrance to the plot as elements began to feel shoehorned in, and emotional beats failed to land as they never felt earned; character arcs would see their conclusions without ever really beginning. The penultimate episode of the series would end up being the best of the run, packing a lot of emotional weight into a near silent episode, just showing the remains of humanity on an abandoned Earth through the eyes of a robot still struggling to learn how to feel empathy for others. If that emotional weight was able to be genuinely felt through the rest of the series, then Apocalypse Hotel would have been much better off.
As it stands, while Apocalypse Hotel had a really refreshing premise with a really strong opening and closing, everything in between bogged that strong premise down, resulting in a sometimes fun, but often lacking story.
My Current MAL Rating: 7/10
Top 100 Contender: No
