Suda51 and Swery65. Two men who have numbers in their names that have created off-beat yet memorable games that shine despite their flaws. When a collaboration between these paragons of peculiarity was rumored and then confirmed, many people, including myself, were excited and intrigued. What could this meeting of the minds conjure forth, a tale of bizarre characters encountering events unlike any other put to pixel? A messy journey into the darkness that lives within us all?
What about a run-based hack-and-slash that lags and feels like shit to play? That’s Hotel Barcelona, folks.
Even though this is advertised as a Suda/Swery tag team project, Swery’s White Owls team actually did the deed of creating Hotel Barcelona. Suda apparently helped Swery brainstorm the concepts at play, but once the game went into production, it seems that Swery took the helm and ran with it. White Owls is not known for his action prowess compared to Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture, and boy, does it show here! Something like Deadly Premonition or The Good Life can get away with having gameplay issues as the standout aspects are plot and characters. Hotel Barcelona is built around its gameplay and the roguelike loop, and neither of these are worth digging into.
The game’s baseline sin is its lag. Every action you take in Hotel Barcelona is a solid second after you press the button or move the control stick, except for when you’re in your hotel room ‘base’ by yourself. Even then, when you cross in front of an interactive part of the environment, there’s a momentary hitch. Forget about the combat-focused levels. Each new object on the screen adds just a hint more slowness, making combat feel like you’re trying to take swings at someone under water. Missions that take place during a rain storm are completely unplayable. At best, combat is mashy and unresponsive. At worst, it’s still those things but slower.
Dodging takes a good second to happen, so reacting to your opponent’s attacks is completely impossible. At the start of the game, you have no invincibility after getting hit, so enemies, especially huge bosses, can juggle you and kill you after a single mistake that you could have easily recovered from otherwise. You do get wake-up i-frames later, though! After the third boss. Halfway through the game. Great job.
As you defeat enemies, they drop body parts such as their bones and ears. These items can be used to upgrade your abilities, and there is some improvement to the gameplay once you get the ball rolling on these, but the lag keeps the game from feeling any more responsive! You’ll get more drops and other bonuses by completing challenges that are assigned to you when you enter a room, but that’s only in theory. At one point, I was asked to kill five enemies with ranged weapons. I pressed the button to fire a shot from the requested ranged weapon, and it immediately failed the challenge.
These upgrades feed into the roguelike loop of Hotel Barcelona, as you travel through a small assortment of stages, slowly powering up and trying to beat the bosses. Each area is just a horror movie rip-off. You fight Jason Vorhees (he’s a baseball pitcher instead of a hockey mask guy, at least! …but still looks exactly the same.) at a summer camp, there’s a Xenomorph pastiche. The titular Hotel Barcelona obviously intends to evoke the hotel from The Shining. It’s not impossible to have fun with on the nose references here and there, but besides a few of the main cast, every aspect of the game’s world design is lifted wholesale from somewhere else.
I like the art, though! The style, anyway. All of the character art/talking heads look gorgeous, and are done by artist Hiroaki Hashimoto, who worked on promotional art for King of Fighters 2000 and beyond. But then the characters start talking, and hoo boy, I have no idea what the fuck SWERY and company were trying to do here. I think they were trying to imitate Suda’s style of writing, but very much are unable to in any way that matters. Pretty much everything about this game is an attempt to imitate Suda’s style that is a failure from top to bottom in that regard, save for good use of a guest artist.
Multiple characters seem to be worried about social norms and “how people are these days” in incredibly baffling ways, too. One of the first cutscenes is an assassin-type snorting cocaine off his girlfriend’s tits, calling the black main character an oddly racially charged nickname, getting annoyed at her GPS, complaining that the term “hitchhiker” is offensive, saying he hates bigots, then shooting the GPS for being bigoted because it annoyed him. Another character, the casino operator that allows you to upgrade your specific weapons randomly, is designed in a gender-nonconforming way, but the first words out of his mouth are “I identify as a man, I am not gay, bi, or trans.” I’m not offended here, just baffled.
Hotel Barcelona drops you into combat as soon as you start the game, and when that first impression had me muttering “oh, this is turds from a donkey’s ass” like James Rolfe within fifteen seconds of starting the game, there’s not much else I need to say. This is a poorly made video game, with nothing beyond its gameplay worth powering through to see. From the marketing I’ve seen, they’re trying to present this game as a challenging “git gud” experience and will probably try to say that game journalists just don’t get it and need to try harder. Gitting Gud at this game would be a waste of time. Don’t stick up for this.
Abysmal
"A Pale Imitation"
Hotel Barcelona is a game that feels like nobody making it knew what they were doing with it. A mess of bad mechanics, laggy gameplay, obnoxious writing, and an unrewarding challenges make for an easy skip, even if you love SWERY and Suda.
