... I fucking hate to answer this but Asterion's poolside costume (and all new outfits for him) will have to wait for the next update.

Full disclosure: we stumbled a bit with planning this update, we had all of the content written for Kota's hangout scenes when we announced the release date, with a "conclusion" to Kota's arc eventually getting added to chapter 19. About a month ago we realized this was not a great idea, people already have massive blue balls from us taking a six month break and doing side stuff while all the threads from chapter 18 are still dangling, so we decided to give it a shot and use the rest of the month to write and add this to the game. Nemo ended up being a gigachad and writing 11k words of additional material to give this side story a really satisfying conclusion, with the entire team pitching in to edit.

As for the R&D stuff we were planning to add, I, uh... went a little crazy and wrote 10k words for the pool scene. And since A) I'm not a native speaker, B) not as experienced a writer as the rest of the team, and C) I wrote the whole thing over 3 days in a fucking frenzy, it needs a lot of editing. We'll most likely split it into three R&D projects, even. And we're stretched a little thin with the Kota stuff, so we'll be moving it to 0.6.1.

Sorry for the disappointment, but I guess the good news is you guys are getting more content than originally planned and even though we promised we'd make small updates we still made a really meaty one.

*another bit of good news is that since everyone's busy editing I have the time to do stuff like redo Ismael's sprites and add a couple really big quality of life updates we'll be revealing next week.

I think a good way of answering these questions is by taking into account that we designed the game to get the player in a very specific mindset. 

Now, i don't think you need to look at our code (but it could help) to get an idea of how reactive minotaur hotel is to your choices. Writing a guide for minoh is borderline impossible because of how much crucial choices of the game depend on previous choices, and how small decisions snowball into bigger consequences. A huge decision such as who gets to the hotel (Nikos or Pedro) depends on do many previous choices that at most you can have directions on how to get to a particular outcome reliably, but everything else is now up in the air. 

And most of the big decisions have tradeoffs. We mentioned multiple times that it won't be possible to have all guests in one playthrough. 

So, knowing that you can't get everything, and that the best outcome for a lot of choices is subjective, and that your playthrough will always be affected by a myriad of small decisions, you start making choices that make sense to you. 

But, you know, the way this is feasible is if all the choices have small, cumulative impacts. A couple if-elses and small variable increases for a lot of small choices is manageable, but splitting the game into three big branches depending on the MC's philosophy when confronted by Greta? That becomes unfeasible. 0.3 was kind of a nightmare to write because there's a big deviation with the main character being abusive to asterion, we can't have sweet stuff happen when the MC has the day before sent asterion out to get tortured without coming off as videogamey. 

So, yes, there are choices in the game that could have a bigger impact than they do, but that would balloon the scope of the game to an unfathomable degree. I think an underwhelming amount of weight put into a handful of choices is a small price to pay for having the game get you into a habit of expecting responsiveness. 

To answer your other question, we joke about the Mc being a Chad but I think that's an exaggeration. VNs tend to go for more passive, reactive protagonists because it's more economical. Not giving your point of view character a lot of agency means you can get away with not giving him a lot of meaningful choices (that expand the scope of the game) while not having the player feel a big disconnect when the MC reacts in a way that makes you want to jump into the screen and punch him (though it still does happen). Because they don't get to act much in the first place. So, in comparison, yeah the Mc of minotaur hotel comes off as a very competent guy with a lot of agency and say over what happens in the story.

Dont get me wrong though, I'm not dissing other creators, making games is time consuming and we have a five person team writing this, whatever helps get your game across the finish line, you do you pal. 

Many choices in the game don't have consequences aside from the brief burst of variation that follows it. Some people would say this is bad game design, that all choices should have some impact, but I don't agree with that. Sometimes we throw in choices to let the player roleplay how they see fit, and some times the choices are precisely because we know they can check what the other branches are like. The differences in reactions between each branch can reveal important details about the characters.

And, sometimes, the choices are there to plant ideas in the player's head. In the case of the prologue they set the mood — the fact that you are given the choice at all to go with "science explains things/I've seen something supernatural" clues the player into what sort of story this is. If the MC answered this on his own it wouldn't stick in the player's mind so well. Same with Greta, her question is planting the idea that the hotel's powers can be used in creative ways for creative goals.

These choices are setup for the choices that do matter, which often times are the ones you'll do with the management mechanic.

It's hard for me to give you a full idea of the MC. There's a sort of trick going on with him, actually. We frame him as a blank slate self-insert, but as a writer I think that is fundamentally impossible to realize. No character can be a blank slate, except a literal vegetable. You see, whenever we make a "blank slate" what we are actually doing is picking a few traits and making them vague, while picking about a dozen of well-defined traits and pushing them away from the spotlight. For example, Link, Samus, Mario, even the protagonists of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, are "blank slates" but they are brimming with character — because what they do says a lot about them.

We have this going with the MC. In truth, the MC comes across as a sort of undefined person, but there's a lot to him that we just don't bring to attention. A few guidelines for the MC:

• The narration should never say what the MC is thinking or feeling (but sometimes we let it slip, and that's a mistake.) What we can do is have the narrator go on about what someone would think, in abstract, but that's not necessarily what the MC is thinking.
• The MC is a generally competent person. He's not necessarily excellent, but he's smart and skilled enough that he can at least be expected not to make things worse. Socially, he's outgoing when he wants to but generally reserved. He doesn't need to resort to violence because he can talk his way out of trouble.
• The MC is never lecherous, or a pervert. Even in his most sexually charged moments, there has to be a sense of class, sensibility, elegance to him.
• The MC's physical actions should, when applicable, convey a sense of subdued grace. This is often done by invoking some mythological and poetic motifs. He is not a clumsy person.
• The MC is a profoundly humane and understanding person. He is capable of interpreting and understanding even very complex people, if given enough information to work with.
• He is a man of action and communicates with deeds more than with words, and there is a high chance that he worked as a detective (or something like it) sometime in his life.

These things may not seem like much when presented in bullet points, but together they paint a somewhat well defined person. The MC, you could say, is a humanist both philosophically and metaphysically. He has made his life's mission to help lost people by giving them the basic conditions to flourish and heal emotionally. He believes in human rights, and in doing his part to make sure they are respected. He is morally upstanding, but not moralistic or imposing of his sense of ethics. He understands the importance of what he's doing, to others and Asterion, and when the narration is not aimed on him he probably gets emotional sometimes. And he has nothing, nothing, magical about him: he is human, and that alone is more than enough.

There's also another trick we do, but this only applies for players who navigate successfully through a lot of the game's hidden challenges: in truth, the MC has independent thought and there is a gap between what he thinks and what the player thinks, much like there is a gap between the player and Pedro. There are rare moments which few players will see where the narrative does not give the player a choice because the MC and Pedro already made a significant, substantive, deliberate choice for themselves.

So, is he truly a blank slate? Is it possible to write a true blank slate? Because when we put it like this, the MC is actually a well-defined character, but we omit the most obvious signs that this is the case.

Mind you, this ties with the rollback thing. It may not seem like it, but Minotaur Hotel is a detective story, except the real mysteries aren't expressly stated in the narrative itself. The rollback is there to let you play the detective and investigate things...

Now, look back at the guidelines for the MC's writing. Do you see the part I italicized?

We keep the rollback so the player can be like a detective; think ahead, build a hypothesis, test it as many times as necessary. The mechanic is there to push you towards trying to understand and investigate what's going on. The reason why you can forgive and hug Argos is to push you towards a more humane mindset. So, in truth, with all those things and more we are trying to project the MC's characterization onto the player.

Sorry if I rambled. I was trying to answer this question before having dinner, and I think the hunger made me a bit disorganized. Hopefully this makes sense.

First of all:

But yes all of those are excellent ideas for illustrations, I would love to get around to them at some point. Especially Argos' introduction, shit the exit to the valley down the stairs seriously needs its own background and not just a picture of Monument Valley with a photoshop filter (in my defense I'm not American and I didn't get distracted by an otherwise instantly recognizable background that takes a lot of people out of the story). But I'm a busy dude, I suck ass at background art, and we have other priorities.

For now I want to leave Pedro's anatomy just a bit of a mystery, in case people want to write fan fictions about him and Oscar. That'd give them wiggle room to go with whatever they prefer.

And, yes, we will explore Asterion's feelings on the matter. That will be a central point going forward. Though it's important to note that... You know, gods in Minoh have a different perspective on the passage of time. A year is nothing to them, they can sleep it off with no issues. Asterion, immortal as he may be, still has the sense of time of a mortal. He knows not to get too attached (also because he doesn't expect staff to live their entire lives in the hotel), but sometimes he does.

Asterion has training as a midwife, yes, and in the right circumstances he would like to raise children. He would like that a lot, in fact, he may even consider retiring from the hotel for a few decades to really enjoy every moment of it. He'd be a great father.

It depends on the mythical species, but there is variation.

In the world of Mino Hotel, for example, there are different lineages of gryphons, just like humans have race and ethnicity.  Despite Luke's alleged Greek heritage, genetically he's overwhelmingly native American in origin (from his mother's side) and mixed (from his father's side). But he does descend, distantly, from the Nemean Lion.

Grootslangs, on the other hand, have less variety because they were almost exterminated by the gods long ago. They try to keep themselves close-knit and discreet, so there aren't enough of them for their community to grow genetically vibrant.

Anyway, even then some traits may skip a few generations instead of disappearing. It's safe to say that, yes, some will be more animal-like or more human-like than others. Oscar and Asterion are a good example of that, as they are different anatomically in a very specific way. And some will have more magical properties too! Luke had more magic juice than his brothers, and Khenbish too.

It's good to keep in mind that in-universe the Labyrinth's Constitution was written by someone, it didn't poof into existence out of nowhere. Someone thought out those details and made a conscious choice to phrase it that way, and that says something both about the person who wrote it and the what the times were like back then.

If the deed was passed on to a human female, or any person not born of human parents, it would not "stick". The transferal would not be effective, the previous owner would still be the de facto master, the alleged new owner would have none of the powers that come with it.

So... Someone made a conscious decision to forbid non-humans and non-men from being the Labyrinth's master. And, although that's not written in the Constitution, later masters made it even more restrictive by only passing its ownership to Catholics. You can say that's unfair and, yes, that's the point.

That said, there are confounding factors: there are plenty of loopholes for everything and the Labyrinth was created in the same age as the one where Hermaphroditus, Caeneus and Tiresias became mythological figures. Maybe the same gods who were associated with one of those figures had a hand in the labyrinth too? If so, it wouldn't be surprising if the Labyrinth has a concept of of maleness/femaleness as a state of being instead of an inborn trait. Or, even if it doesn't have that built in, maybe it can be made to think in that way.

Another thing I can add, very clearly and plainly, is that there was someone who worked in the hotel centuries ago, back when the Constitution hadn't been translated to a human readable state. This someone started presenting as a man during their stay in the hotel, and he had quite a story. He was one of the great explorers of the valley and, after many excursions, he had an epiphany.

I hope we can one day show a bit of it. He tried becoming the next master but, sadly, it became clear he would never be picked. But in the end he went on to achieve his ultimate goal, through other means.

Hopefully that sets you in the right trail, lore wise! But if that wasn't enough, I'll just say that they/them pronouns are not incompatible with being the master. That would not be an impediment...

but yeah lmao, editing the game for that would be a gargantuan task. One much harder than dealing with the lore hahaha

Yes, angels exist too in the universe of Minotaur Hotel. Robert deals with them somewhat regularly. He gets along with them well enough professionally, but not personally, they are just too different and removed from normal human beings for him to truly get along.

You have to spend every available day with Asterion on his project.

If you picked Khenbish and he invites you to cook some stuff at the last day of Chapter 17 you have to reject his offer and spend that day with Asterion too.