Well, it’s a late start, but better now than never. It’s time to start taking a look at Tasokare Hotel.
The concept of Tasokare Hotel, as it gets out pretty quickly in the first episode, is that the titular hotel is a sort of limbo where souls stranded between life and death, uncertain of their destination, show up. Our lead is an initially faceless little girl who we probably saw stabbed in the first scene, before she appears in a world of perpetual twilight and is drawn into the hotel.
Inside, the manager (who has a fireball for a head and a rather laid-back attitude) explains the rules: Guests check in, typically in a state of confusion, and check out when they know whether they’re bound for life or death. They all have rooms prepared by the hotel itself, which contain items related to their memories. Little Girl searches her room and finds her name, Neko Tsukahara, regaining a face in the process. However, she doesn’t have much in the way of a lead regarding what happened to her.
While exploring the hotel, she’s introduced to one of the other guests, a woman with a Tarot card currently replacing her head, and Neko decides to help the guest/staffer Atori with his effort to help her recover more of her self.
As they go through the room, Neko seems rather perceptive, noticing several hidden clues and also having enough knowledge of the outside world to put them together. This reveals the woman’s identity, her story, and the fact that she was merely concussed, allowing her to end episode 1 by leaving the hotel with something of a better outlook than she entered.
From this, we can essentially guess the formula for Tasokare Hotel: it’s pretty likely that we’ll be dealing with guests of the week if not every episode than at least on the regular, while Neko, Atori, and any other staffers who are also guests probably get more slow-burn approaches. As an episode 1 “case” to an episodic mystery it’s about what you’d expect: very simple and easily resolved, but that to not overstay its welcome when the show also had to introduce its main characters, concept, and setting. Rare indeed is the “scenario of the week” show that leads with its strongest material, rather than the tutorial to ease you in.
Since this is a double feature, we can move right along to episode 2.
Episode 2 lets us in on the fact that yes, it seems like the main loop of the show will be a case each week, as we both start and finish another guest’s story in the span of one episode. This one is a compulsive gambler, who discovers as he is pushed by Neko to explore that he racked up an immense debt, resulting in him being bound to an illegal group and buried alive after he tried to run from them. The end of the episode says he’s still alive, and seems to imply that the Hotel returning to that side likely means he has a dramatic escape in his future, but it’s a good deal more grim.
This takes up most of the episode, as it should. Neko does learn more of the ropes of the Hotel along the way, reinforcing the idea that she and the other staff will be developed quite slowly, between the individual guest bits. It doesn’t totally rule out that we might get a longer, multi-part guest with a complicated circumstance, but it does wink knowingly in the direction that the staff are the ones who won’t be easily solved.
So far, Tasokare Hotel seems set up to cruise control easily into the upper-mid brackets. Its very early, with having established an episodic pattern that there’s no indication it would ever have to run out of, it’s worth making a projection like that. That said, it’s a current anime that’s not a video game verse fantasy (isekai as is usually the case or otherwise) or high school romance, which together seem to make up the overwhelming bulk of the season otherwise. There’s at least a little interest to be had in seeing something that’s marching to a different beat these days.