Hotel Barcelona Review

Suda51 and Swery65 are acquired tastes on their own as developers, but with the former having delivered bangers such as Shadows of the Damned, Lollipop Chainsaw and No More Killers, and the latter birthing fever dreams like Deadly Premonition and D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, it should follow that when they team up something amazing should come kicking and screaming into the world. Alas, the product of their weird genius ends up an underwhelming roguelike whose heart is in the right place, even if nothing else is.

Every serial killer has a story

You play as a rookie Federal Marshall named Justine, who following a grisly car crash wakes up in the titular Hotel Barcelona. The hotel is stuck in somewhat of a timeloop, and according to the demon spirit of a serial killer called Dr Carnival that cohabitates Justine’s body, the hotel houses dangerous demonic fugitives. The hotel is run by a witch who is implicated in the death of Justine’s father, and so is Dr Carnival…or something. The story is as dumb as you would suspect, and while I enjoyed the twisted backstories of the serial killers themselves, Justine’s plight and mission for revenge are tonally all over the shop. But don’t worry about that though, we’ve got serial killers to hunt.

The game essentially boils down to seeking out and putting down a few (very) bad eggs with tortured pasts who reside within a handful of self-contained biomes. This involves navigating a series of side-scrolling 2.5D environments broken up by doors that will grant you certain boons (such as movement speed or healing) as you pass through them, with the final door leading to a confrontation with the big bad. Between you and your target is a menagerie of smaller minions begging to be eviscerated, and the game mostly strives to keep the pace frenetic and the blood (or popcorn if you so choose) flowing. If you bite the bullet during your mission you will have to start the level over again, but you can spend a handful of currencies before doing so to upgrade your stats and abilities, or buy new weapons back at the hotel to make each subsequent run a little easier.

What I’ve described so far is familiar roguelike territory, but in a clever twist, each time you die an apparition of your former self will appear and help you up until the point you died last. These apparitions stack as well, and you can eventually have up to three speeding through the level with you creating a symphony of blood (or popcorn) and chaos. The caveat is you have to take the same series of doors to the boss in order retain their services, which is annoying as the doors you pass through offer different buffs that change from run to run, meaning the one you would like (a door that heals you for instance) may not be the one you took last run, forcing you to choose. This feels less like a clever tradeoff and more of a distinct pain in the arse, compounded by the fact that there are simply not enough ways to heal in the game and keep your run sustainable. Even worse, the apparition mechanic is unceremoniously ripped away from you in the last half of the game AND the healing doors simultaneously. Why? While we are on the subject of terrible mechanics, who decided that in order to upgrade weapons or reroll attributes you have pay to play a game of chance that only occasionally spawns in a run and carries a mere 20% chance of success?

Bondage talk makes me blush

Good roguelikes like Hades, The Binding of Isaac and Cult of the Lamb are generally fast and fluid affairs when it comes to the action, but Hotel Barcelona only got some of the fastness while letting the fluid part leak out onto the floor where it’s now stained the carpet and you have to cover it with an ugly rug. Movement and animations feel stilted whether you’ve got quick knives, an axe or twin saw blades, and ranged weapons like pistols, shotguns and flamethrowers feel similarly gauche. The godforsaken platforming sections are floaty and imprecise and simply should not exist (including an optional Bonus area that should be avoided at all costs if you value your sanity). Loading screens and cutscene transitions continually stall and splutter, it’s all a bit of a mess. The way the game is set up you ought to feel like a slaughterhouse god, but the jank never lets you truly live out that fantasy.

The slaughterhouse vibe is almost there though. The game leans heavily into B-roll horror tropes that should speak to me as a schlock horror aficionado, but it feels a little derivative and lacks flair and variety. This isn’t helped by the fact that there are only six levels, two of which are optional. The bosses in all their wonkily-designed glory are also shamelessly recycled to pad the game out, which means you only face four total if you don’t get to the optional areas (which you probably won’t and you shouldn’t be ashamed if you don’t). On the subject of bosses, playing on Normal difficulty they can definitely still give you a bit of grief, but I found that the AI either relentlessly pummelled me or just let me smack them around to my heart’s content, there is no in between.

Let the popcorn flow

Final Thoughts

Hotel Barcelona is an underwhelming roguelike with lopsided design that simply doesn’t nail the fundamentals that make the genre popular. Head-scratching design choices regarding stingy mechanics that are almost tailor-made to extract joy from your life, mixed with a lack of fluidity and unity of vision make this a hard sell. Even in you love Suda51 and Swery 65, this is not what you hope it will be.

Reviewed on PS5 Pro // Review code supplied by publisher

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