- Publisher: CULT Games
- Developer: White Owls
- Available on: Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S
- Played on Steam
- Copy provided by PR
There is a certain brand of Japanese video game developer that defines the term auteur. We have the mainstream types like Hideo Kojima, Yoko Taro and Hideki Kamiya putting out critical and commercial successes. But there are two names that stand out as being unabashedly weird, with each of their games presenting off-the-wall, barely functioning ideas that nevertheless are so full of charm you can’t help but love them.
On one side, we have Suda51, real name Goichi Suda. His style is pure grindhouse, from Killer7 to No More Heroes to Lollipop Chainsaw. These are usually games about unhinged, dangerous people, delivered with a slick art style and snappy script (sometimes written by James Gunn). On the other side, we have Swery, real name Hidetaka Suehiro, a man obsessed with Western culture. His games are usually focused on small town misfits, although they’re also held together with duct tape. His most beloved games are the totally-not-Twin-Peaks Deadly Premonition and body horror cinematic platformer The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories.
A collaboration between these two is a dream for a certain brand of sicko (complimentary), so you can imagine how overjoyed that group was when the duo announced they would be doing exactly that. The result is Hotel Barcelona, a game that oozes both developers’ styles through every pore, with both sides bringing out the best in the other.
Hotel Barcelona is about a US Marshal named Justine who has journeyed to the mysterious titular hotel, somewhere along the Pennsylvania and West Virginia border. Here all of America’s deadliest murderers have been gathered by someone known only as The Witch. Sounds like a problem for a single marshal, only Justine is possessed by the spirit of a serial killer named Dr Carnival, and his influence gives her the power to cut through swathes of foes.
The first thing that stands out about Hotel Barcelona is how deeply in love it is with American horror movies of the 20th century. Without hesitation, the game hits you with references to The Shining, Friday the 13th and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, barely hiding their inspirations. But it’s also awash with weirdos from the moment you start. The hotel is populated by strangers who mutter at Justine as she passes, sharing thoughts about how impressed they are by free wi-fi or how hard it was riding a horse from Maine to Pennsylvania.
Visually, this is where Suda’s influence is best felt. This is a blood-soaked nightmare land populated by monstrous men who will tear you apart unless you do the same to them first. Each boss is introduced with a scratchy mood piece that provides flavour for who you’re about to fight. And those bosses are colossal beings of pure malice whose evil you can feel radiating off them the second you set eyes on them.
In essence, everything in Hotel Barcelona is dripping in brutal, bloody style. Straight away I was invested in this stupid, gory world of horror cliches. It’s just a shame that the actual game part of Hotel Barcelona is aggressively awful in every conceivable way.
Hotel Barcelona is a roguelite, with emphasis on the lite. It has a gameplay loop where if you die you go back to the start, as you’d expect, but these levels are all fixed, not procedurally generated. While some bonuses are exclusive to a single run, there’s a wider emphasis on permanent upgrades. New runs can also be started immediately from the failure screen, instead of requiring you to go back to the hotel every time you die.
The game is a side-scrolling slash-em-up as you travel from left to right, occasionally platforming through multiples floors. Enemies will swarm you and you have to defeat them with a range of weapons, including knives, axes and buzzsaws. Each area features multiple doors, each granting a separate temporary upgrade, although doors that take longer to reach typically offer better rewards.
One neat feature that Hotel Barcelona brings into this loop of death and rebirth is the Phantom Slasher system. All your runs are recorded, and every time you start a run in that area, your previous runs will be played back, with every attack causing damage. This ends up being most useful during boss fights, as multiple deaths can lead to you swarming these killers, and even the big screen-clearing special move will reappear at the same point on later runs, allowing you to chain them together into a meat grinder of success.
That’s about as interesting and fun as the combat gets though. Attacks feel loose and weightless, the mayhem of each area can often make it hard to accurately guard or dodge and the movement is clunky and unpleasant when you need it to be quick and snappy. The various weapon types are often pointless, with axes giving Justine the power of moving exceptionally slowly and buzzsaws barely registering in your opponents’ HP. Ranged weapons are available but their damage output is so slight they may as well not be there.
What’s worse is that in the carnage, it’s often impossible to avoid taking damage. Some environmental hazards get in your way while you’re attacking, leaving you with debuffs despite your best efforts to avoid them. The parry system is unintuitive, requiring two separate button presses when any other action game would have simply made “press the guard on the right frame” the parry. The dodge often sent me in the exact opposite direction to the one I was holding, seemingly for a laugh.
Hotel Barcelona is a game so powerful in its style that it had huge amounts of potential. It could have been the new Deadly Premonition, perhaps even surpassed it. But its dedication to being one of the most miserable games to actually play means this is more of a Deadly Premonition 2.
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