The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Tasokare Hotel

"TASOKARE HOTEL" is a hotel that is engulfed in twilight all day long, with no distinction between day and night. It exists as a place between life and death, where souls unable to decide whether to move on to the afterlife or return to the present world can rest their wings. Neko Tsukahara wanders into "TASOKARE HOTEL" without remembering who she is or why she's there. Guided by the hotel staff, she is led to her room. There should be items related to the customer's memories in the room. These might serve as clues to help the customer regain their memories. She encounters a certain incident while searching for a way to return to the present world and remember who she is.

Tasokare Hotel is based on a mobile game by SEEC. The anime series is streaming on Amazon Prime on Fridays.

The setting is the star here in Tasokare Hotel. We have a kind of purgatory between life and death that takes the form of a hotel. When suffering a near-death experience, you awaken here without any of your memories. To leave, you need to remember three things: your name, the circumstances leading to your near-death experience, and whether you're still alive or dead. Luckily, you have the hotel staff to help you, not to mention the shape-shifting hotel itself and its attempts to jog your memory.

This setup gives Tasokare Hotel the perfect “mystery of the week” premise. In each episode, we are introduced to a new character, unravel their past, and learn how they came to be at the hotel. It's similar to the 2015 classic Death Parade, though this first episode doesn't quite live up to the high standard set by that series.

This episode tried to do a lot in its short runtime—a bit too much, really. It introduced us to our heroine and the supporting cast, laid down the rules of the setting, and even gave us a one-shot mystery involving one of the other guests. While focusing on any of these aspects could have given us a strong first episode, including all of them dilutes each other.

In the end, however, the good certainly outweighs the bad. The overarching plot and weekly framework are solid. The supernatural nature of the hotel itself makes it a prime location for all kinds of crazy visuals—from the individual rooms to the strange objects serving as the different characters' heads. To close this out, I'll quote my review on the press screening of the first three episodes: “This is a series that will live or die based on how interesting these ‘mysteries of the week’ are, and how invested we become in the overarching mysteries of those working at the hotel.”

I suspect that most people are going to watch this show and make comparisons with Death Parade. Those are warranted, but I had a different reference in mind while watching this episode – The Eagles' "Hotel California." It's certainly not a perfect fit because it doesn't appear that “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.” Still, there's something about a mysterious hotel on the borders between life and death, appearing in the desert like a mirage or a miracle, that calls to mind the song. And hotels are liminal spaces anyway, homes that exist to be temporary, where people come and go but never fully settle – unless they can't bring themselves to leave.

That's where Neko seems to be. We know that she was stabbed and is currently bleeding out in the street, but all she can remember is that she was at an idol concert, and as the episode goes on, it begins to look like that's all she wants to know. She's much more invested in exploring the hotel and helping another guest, a woman with a Tarot card for a head, figure out her identity. This raises the question of whether Neko deliberately tries not to recall her past, because she certainly jumps at the chance to avoid choosing between life and death by taking a job at the hotel. Two other humans do work there, Atori and Ruri, so it's not an unprecedented decision. But it is one that smacks of deliberate avoidance, a possibility we really can't ignore.

I'm strongly reminded of the Korean drama Hotel del Luna, a series about a similar hotel where the dead can resolve their lingering issues before reentering the cycle of reincarnation. This episode lacks that series' pathos (and horror), but its use of the hotel as a liminal space is similar enough to merit a mention. The hotel itself feels like as much of a character as any of the people, with its art deco trappings and an elevator that simply won't respond, possibly indicating that it goes someplace only a select few can visit. There's also an interesting question of whether or not the staff who appear less than human truly are; the guest Neko helps at first appears inhuman, but when the cards fall off, meaning she remembers her identity, she's back to looking human. Is that the same for the flame-faced concierge and the bartender with horns? The way the cards fall from the guest's face, going through all of the major arcana before ending with the very symbolic Fool, indicates that a lot of thought is going into the visuals.

While I don't love Neko's voice (it's a little grating) or the attempts at humor with the concierge, I think this has a lot of potential. I'm a sucker for a good ghost story, and this has enough of Hotel California, Hotel del Luna, and the YA novel Hotel Ruby by Suzanne Young to make me curious about where it's going and how it will choose to get there.

I know that Tasokare Hotel is based on a mobile game, and judging from this anime episode, I don't feel particularly inclined to play it. Often, anime based on games do little to reflect the actual gameplay; after all, who wants to watch the beats of a rhythm game or rote combat play out in front of them instead of peppy musical numbers or a heart-pounding action scene? This premiere, on the other hand, has two separate scenes of the heroine Neko rummaging around a hotel room looking for clues, giving the distinct impression that this is basically a found object game, a genre I associate primarily with the 30-second ads that have rendered Microsoft's default Solitaire program unusable. That doesn't excite me, even if the app store describes it as an escape game.

As an episode of anime, though? It's fine. Pleasant. It's got a setup that lends itself well to both episodic mysteries and a slow buildup as Neko volunteers to work at the hotel to alleviate her boredom and learn more about why she is there. She's inquisitive and empathetic, her curiosity driving the plot forward as she explores the hotel and volunteers to assist the young woman with a tarot card for her head, and her ability to understand others bringing the story home as she helps the girl find resolution. The writing around the hotel's staff is fairly subdued, though everyone has a very strong vibe that they have some kind of wild backstory just waiting to be revealed.

Also, the bartender is super hot.

The visual design is quite nice, with lots of art nouveau influence and '20s style design. But there's a sedate feeling to the whole thing that just failed to grab me. It doesn't help that there are already two higher-energy mystery shows this season, Ameku M.D. and the second season of The Apothecary Diaries, while Tasokare Hotel was mildly soporific. Not unenjoyable, but the vibes were just a little too chill.

A great premise can get you a long way in this industry, and Tasokare Hotel has a real humdinger of a setup. Our heroine, Neko Tsukahara, has found herself a sudden new guest of the titular hotel, which exists in a sort of nebulous dream space on the borders of life and the great beyond. Some of its guests may be well and truly dead, and some may simply be fighting for their lives back in the land of the living, but the gist is that you can't recover your true face or your memories until you figure out what your unfinished business is. Neko seems to have a knack for solving the mysteries of the other hotel guests' lives beyond the hotel walls. Since there is literally nothing else to do in the place except listen to the radio or day-drink at the bar, it only makes sense that she would take up work as the place's official detective until she can sort out her own reasons for being there.

It's fun stuff, and Tasokare Hotel makes good on its premise by filling the place with all manner of bizarre and interesting characters. The fiery hotel manager is maybe the most relatable character outside of Neko and Haruto, the concierge, on account of the “Beer! Beer! Beer!” song he sings when he gets some downtime. The bartender is a cute-as-hell flapper girl with satyr horns that I am very excited to see more of; there's a monkey-looking weirdo in a funny hat that is sure to be important later; and the first guest whose identity gets solved has a whole freaking tarot card deck for a head, which is just ace design.

Where the premiere falls short lies mainly in two areas. For one, the direction is a bit lacking. You would think that a show like this would revel in the chance to get at least a little spooky-ooky, but the presentation generally comes across as quite flat. It's serviceable, but nothing on screen elevates the material above what you could probably get from playing the game. Also, the actual mystery angle of the premise doesn't seem to be firing on all cylinders, either. I get the broad appeal of a story like what we get with the girl whose obsession with a psychic streamer ended up putting her in harm's way, but it's more of a sketch for a good plot than a compelling tale in its own right. I can see how such a basic opening chapter would make sense as, say, the tutorial for a video game, but I'm hoping that the show has meatier meals to serve up in future installments.

Still, there's enough cool stuff happening in Tasokare Hotel to warrant further investigations into Neko's adventures in the world of spirits and lost memories. It could honestly go either way at this point. I could see the show fizzling out into a barebones cycle of anemic episodes, and I could see it blossoming into a much more complex and satisfying collection of mysteries. Here's to hoping that the latter ends up being the case!