The Grand Hotel Entomologique
From the novel by Carmen Reyes
The game we see here
An old wooden insect hotel in a botanical garden has thirty days before it is torn down. Restore its six floors room by room, plant the flowers that bring solitary bees, ladybugs and lacewings back, run the dung-beetle chef's kitchen and the beetle jazz lounge, and pass the bumblebee inspector's visits to win the hotel the right to stay.
Why this world
Building up and running a business is a proven pattern on the platforms we build for, and this book is already a management story. The hotel has six floors and 247 rooms, and once housed 42 species but is down to seven residents. A concierge inspects every room each morning, a critic rates the restaurant and an inspector arrives with a clipboard. The guests are real garden insects, and the book ends by inviting readers to build an insect hotel of their own.
The book · Children & YA
Dawn breaks over the Schönbrunn Botanical Garden, and Klaus — a stick insect concierge in a freshly brushed purple waistcoat — begins his morning inspection of a hotel built fifty-three years ago, in the image of the Hotel Sacher, for solitary bees and lacewings and the occasional moth. Six floors, mostly empty. A guest register that has not been signed in eight months. A coffee cup poured each morning for a mother three years dead.
Then the yellow notice appears on the garden gate. Vienna Municipal Parks Department, Subdivision 7. Thirty days until demolition.
What follows is a campaign waged in bark parchment and bureaucratic German — Form 27-B/Stroke/6, an architectural survey conducted with a pine-needle ruler, an application for Protected Cultural Monument status that requires the signatures of every resident, including the one on the sixth floor whose door has been silked shut for thirty-seven years. Klaus believes the hotel's value is self-evident. The trouble is having to prove it.
Carmen Reyes builds her miniature Vienna with the patience of a watchmaker and the warmth of someone who knows that hospitality, once practiced long enough, becomes a form of grief. A story about an aging concierge, a jazz trio of beetles, a chef who cooks for two, and the difference between a building worth saving and a community that has already done the saving.
Games set in this world
Game adaptation is considered per title when the world-building can support it. Pitching is the first step; it is not a licence. See rights at Greenlight Publishing.