Tasokare Hotel is engulfed in perpetual twilight, 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 or return to the living world can rest their wings. Neko Tsukahara wanders in without remembering who she is or why she's there. Guided by the hotel staff, she's led to her room. There should be items related to the customer's memories in each room, and these might serve as clues to help them regain their identities. She then gets caught up in an incident while searching for a way to remember who she is.

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. Some of its guests may be well and truly dead, and some may simply be fighting for their lives, but the gist is that you can't recover your true face or your memories until you figure things out for yourself. Neko seems to have a knack for solving the mysteries of the other guests' lives beyond the hotel walls. Since there's really nothing else to do in the place besides listen to the radio or day-drink at the bar, it only makes sense that she'd take up work as the place's official detective until she can sort out her own reasons for being there.

Tasokare Hotel makes good on its premise by filling the place with all manner of bizarre and interesting characters. The hotel manager who looks a bit like Grillby is maybe the most relatable character outside of Neko. The bartender is a cute-as-hell flapper girl with horns who I'm very excited to see more of, there's a monkey-looking weirdo in a funny hat who's sure to be important later, and the first guest whose identity gets solved has a whole tarot card deck for a head, which is some Kinnikuman-tier ace design.

The setting itself is the star here though. We have a kind of purgatory 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 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.

I suspect that most people are going to watch this show and make comparisons to Death Parade. Those are warranted, but I had a different reference in mind: 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, in a space forever in twilight, 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 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, so it's not an unprecedented decision, but it is one that screams deliberate avoidance, a possibility we really can't ignore.

Where it falls short lies mainly in two areas. For one, the direction is a bit lacking. You'd think that a show like this would revel in the chance to get at least a little spooky, but the presentation generally comes across as quite flat. It's serviceable, but nothing elevates the material above what you could probably get from playing the game it's apparently based on. Also, the actual mystery angle doesn't seem to be firing on all cylinders yet. I get the broad appeal of a story like what we get with the girl whose obsession with a psychic livestreamer 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 episodes.

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 hoping the latter ends up being the case!