Sometimes supergroups don’t always work out; Audioslave, Velvet Revolver, The Justice League… however, the pairing of SUDA51 and SWERY (White Owls Inc.) must be the best thing since split and atom? Yes and no. Hotel Barcelona is the project, and this is what I think and feel.
Hotel Barcelona is a straight-to-video, if not grindhouse project, that perfectly suits the work of both artists. You play as U.S. Marshall Justine Bernstein, and en route to the titular establishment with a Special Forces archetype in tow. After a brief exposition, told through a slightly better than Netflix animation, the Special Forces agent is rendered K.I.A., as is the fodder hitchhiker they randomly picked up.
Cue an excellent intro scene that may have had Deadly Premonition 2 written all over it, and then we begin. Awaking in her hotel room, Justine finds that she is sharing her body with Dr. Carnival – a serial killer and former GP that somehow has links to her past, and notably her late father. The doc acts as a mentor of such when in the hotel, explaining the shady goings on, and steadily revealing their connection. Outside of the hotel, he takes over her body, making her a deadly weapon.
Hotel Barcelona is batshit crazy, and we shouldn’t expect anything less from the pair. For all the convoluted characters and exposition, SWERY delivers it really well through the exchanges between Justine and the doctor. It’s very cliche, but it fuses, given the scenario, and it’s not particularly hard to follow along with the narrative and concepts, though the actual gameplay is the interesting bit.
When Dr. Carnival takes over, we enter a side-scrolling hack and slash where Justine has to reach the boss to progress. For the majority of the time, you can run through each level close to the end, though you will need to enter a series of hotel doors that take you up or down a level. The added bonus of this is that some of these doors will give you perks such as health, attack power, and blood splatter gauge options.
The splatter is an accumulation of blood that Justine gets through killing and translates as combat modifiers. The more you connect and use a variety of attacks, the faster the splatter and chances of summoning Dr. Carnival to ‘do a special’ called an Awakening, and this handles crowd control. Arguably, it’s always best to save for the bosses as they typically have an arduous shell you need to break through until properly reaching their health bar.
Combat in Hotel Barcelona is very hit and miss, and an important part of gameplay. From a technical perspective, movement is incredibly slow, and jumping is equally problematic. Initially, I played this on the Steam Deck, and it was fine. Once there was an obvious lag, I migrated to my gaming laptop and experienced the same. It’s the actual design of the game rather than processing power. Speed can be mitigated through faster weapons and boosts, but even then, it’s quite sketchy, and coupled with unlockable combos, it’s quite easy to get stuck in an animation and head off the wrong way and be hit from behind or fall into water.
This adds to the difficulty curve with the game, as by default, it’s very challenging. Fortunately, there are a handful of difficulty settings, and on repeated deaths, there are ways to get an extra life and also replay a boss, provided you earn a consumable ticket. These extras certainly add to the lure of what is essentially a rogue-like: weapon sets, marginal gains, a skill tree, and even game modifiers that unlock special gear.
Within the hotel hub, there are four key vendors. There’s a monster in the cupboard named Tim who handles the skill tree. This can be anything from parrying to life increases, combos to weapon types. Alas, some of these are locked until you beat subsequent bosses, and you also need to earn components from each run, or… the bartender. The bartender will give you parts to invest in your skill tree or coins for minigames (pinball, anyone?!) in exchange for ears. Yep. The hunter is responsible for melee and ranged items, then finally the concierge, who will set togglable challenges such as not blocking or not using a ranged weapon to earn something… special.
Now that we’ve established all of the outside mechanics, back in Hotel Barcelona’s core gameplay, we can use knives, axes, and buzzsaws, and though the attack stats are noticeable, that lack of speed is prevalent once more, so it’s best to experiment with melee weapons that complement your playstyle/you like the moveset. To counter this, the ranged weapons are great, and the moment you unlock the shotgun, Hotel Barcelona gets so much more entertaining. Though ammo is infinite, there is a cooldown, so you can’t, rightly, spam it.
To top all the weapons and perk-infused doors in each level, the type of enemies will change based on the time, day, and weather. At the start of the stage, you can use items to experiment with this, and also find that the game adopts a driving game mechanic of having a ghost present on screen. These ‘phantoms’ are your previous playthroughs that will move based on your last run, but can still kill enemies in front of them. It’s absolutely mental and works really well, and is undeniably a game-changer when it gets tough.
Besides the ridiculous Black Sabbath Paranoid bastardisation at the beginning of the game and the laggy feels of movement, Hotel Barcelona is an entertaining rogue-like that’ll encourage you to keep grinding to unlock those perks and weapons, be called a bitch by an oversized American football player, and ultimately, get caked in blood. Or popcorn, if that’s your thing. While it doesn’t have the same cult status as the action-packed Lolipop Chainsaw or the absurdity of Deadly Premonition 2, it’s quite unique in its delivery, which makes it somewhat different from the rest of the rogue-like crowd.
