I have a lot of respect for Suda51 and Swery, even if their games don’t always hit the mark. Both have produced games that are high up on my list of all-time favourites (No More Heroes and Deadly Premonition, respectively), and I don’t really believe in the idea that “you’re only as good as your last game.” So, I’ll usually turn out for their latest forays.

Hotel Barcelona was a bit difficult for me to get excited about. Roguelite action-platformer is a rather glutted genre for such a narrow concept, and something about what was shown off in trailers always struck me as a bit… lacking. Nonetheless, it’s not like the actual core gameplay in No More Heroes and Deadly Premonition was all that extravagant. It’s the style, the characters, and the way they tied their conceptual philosophies together that really dug into my brain.

As it turns out, that doesn’t always shine through. This isn’t something Hotel Barcelona taught me, but it is a solid reminder.

DING DING-A-LING

The narrative foundation for Hotel Barcelona is kept rather vague. What you quickly become aware of is that you play as Justine, who seems to be possessed by a homicidal being known as Dr. Carnival. The two are attempting to track down a powerful witch, who seems to be the proprietor of the eponymous hotel. Justine wants revenge, and Dr. Carnival gives her the power to seek it out.

The opening cutscene suggests a whole lot of stuff that turns out to be seemingly irrelevant and somewhat inconsistent.

Anyway, to get to her, you have to kill a few killers. That’s the basis of the game: Each level hosts a boss, and your goal is to take them out. The difficulty is skewed so you’ll most likely have to make multiple runs to complete a level. You collect money, teeth, bones, and ears that you can use after each run to upgrade Justine. Standard stuff.

COCKA DOODLY DOOM

What kneecaps Hotel Barcelona right out of the gate is that, if everything worked perfectly, it wouldn’t be anything special. As I already mentioned, the roguelite action-platformer genre is full of imitators, and most of them aren’t fortunate enough to be Dead Cells. So, if a game is going to stand out, it either needs a fresh approach, or it has to be really, really good. Hotel Barcelona is neither fresh nor good.

It’s simply not very thoughtfully design. The combat and movement feels extremely gluey. Justine’s attacks often have long wind-ups and extravagant follow-throughs, and the animation doesn’t like to be interrupted. You have a dash/dodge and a block, but neither will cancel an animation. You can also parry off of a block, but it was so difficult to find a situation where this felt like the ideal thing to do, and when I tried, I normally failed. So, I just never parried.

Justine also has a ranged weapon with her, which can be a bit more useful. However, I instinctually mash the button to try and fire as rapidly as possible, and the correct way to fill the air with lead (or whatever you’re packing) is to hold the button down. This is something I eventually internalized, but it’s weird to me that mashing doesn’t work. She sometimes just wouldn’t fire a follow-up shot, which made me think I was out of ammo or something.

PLAY BALL!

To make matters worse, the enemies are difficult to read. There tends to be a lot of them in one area, they often look rather similar, the graphics can feel pretty busy, and the drab colours all bleed together, but that isn’t the biggest problem. What constantly tripped me up was the way the enemies poorly telegraph their attack. And that’s not just in their wind-up, but also in how vague the area of effect is.

This is hard to illustrate, but there’s one particularly annoying situation that is easy to communicate: sometimes, when an enemy swings in front of them, they can hit you if you’re standing behind them.

I thought I was imagining this in my fury, but eventually I caught it on video. The enemy winds up, I dash behind them, they swing, it somehow hits me. It’s possible that the attack is supposed to be an area of effect shockwave, but their movement doesn’t suggest that. The graphical effect doesn’t suggest that, either. Here’s a screenshot of it happening:

LET’S GO, ME

It doesn’t matter, though. The point is just that Hotel Barcelona feels terrible to actually play, and it feels terrible in a genre that doesn’t have the clearance to allow forgiveness. I actually hated playing Hotel Barcelona for most of my time with it. At more than one point, I considered just dropping it. Eventually, I got a weapon powerful enough to kill most standard enemies in a single swing and most bosses in a few seconds at normal difficulty. It allowed me to just glaze over and zone out.

If there’s one thing that feels slightly unique to Hotel Barcelona, it’s the fact that phantoms of your previous runs will join you. They’ll generally just follow all the same movements you performed during that run, but since a lot of enemies typically spawn in the same locations, it’s effective help. They’ll even distract enemies. They’re especially effective in boss battles.

However, while the levels branch into multiple routes to the boss, the phantom system incentivizes taking one path each and every time so you can stack up multiple phantoms. Unlike some roguelites, the levels aren’t procedurally generated, even though they’re bland and lifeless enough to appear that way. So, there winds up not being a whole lot of environmental variation.

The bosses themselves aren’t much fun to fight, either. Like the standard enemies, their attacks aren’t all that well telegraphed, but more egregiously, they’ll sometimes launch into one the very moment the fight starts. Jacob, for example, a hulking, murderous, baseball player, will sometimes send a ball flying your way that you have to be ready to avoid the moment the scene fades in.

Beyond that, they spend way too much time in invulnerable states, and it’s hard to tell whether you can hurt them at any moment. The camera hates the ground for some reason, so if you’re the type who likes acrobatic attacks, you’re sometimes left guessing what’s below you and hoping that it isn’t fire.

I’m exhausted. It would take a lot of time to break down all the ways that Hotel Barcelona feels bad to play, but the conclusion remains the same: it feels bad to play. I did not enjoy myself.

THINKING ALL THE WAYS THE SYSTEM WILL PROVIDE

While a terrific narrative wouldn’t fully make up for all the discomfort it causes, the one told in Hotel Barcelona isn’t spectacular. Don’t get me wrong, if it was supported by the gameplay, or even if the gameplay was innocuous, it would be enjoyable enough. If everything was balanced, the whole package would be worth experiencing.

I’m not entirely sure what the extent of everyone’s contribution was. While Swery is listed as “Producer and Director,” Suda51 is “Original Idea and Supervisor.” So, that doesn’t actually say a lot. What I will say is that Suda51’s fingerprints show a lot more vividly on the narrative. There’s a lot more of his stylistic flourish to the characters and design. If I had to guess, Swery contributed more of the character backgrounds and dialogue. He tends to make some pretty weird folks, as well, but they tend to be more grounded and human, which can be glimpsed here.

The relationship between Justine and Dr. Carnival is the juiciest bit. Dr. Carnival’s true motivations are kept clouded, but the dude loves killing. There’s a good amount of friction here, and the central theme seems to be cooperation despite stark differences. It’s fun.

My main issue – and I’m mostly nitpicking here – is that Justine is presented as being extremely meek, to the point of overemphasis. This kind of makes her backstory of being a U.S. Marshal a bit hard to swallow, but even harder is the idea that she’d be hell-bent on revenge. There’s maybe enough ambiguity there to fit an explanation, but the way she’s portrayed as conflict-avoidant and easily startled doesn’t fit the role very well. Obviously, it’s meant to juxtapose against Dr. Carnival’s gleefully homicidal attitude, but it’s maybe a step too far.

SHINING PATH, THE CLOUDED MIND

I didn’t really touch multi-player. It seems to be similar to Demon’s Souls wherein you can invade other players’ games to either help or hinder them. I only interacted with this once because I was forced to at one point. Poor guy. I stomped him so easily.

I also want to bring up that playing on PC was a miserable experience. The first version I had access to performed horribly. Terrible framerate with a lot of stuttering. This was more-or-less ironed out in a pre-launch patch. However, controller issues dogged me the whole time. Part of the issue might be Steam’s controller interface, but I don’t think it can explain all of it. My left shoulder button would frequently stop working until I restarted the game, and it did this on two controllers I tried. It would let me remap it in the input menu, but it still wouldn’t function in menus. I later disabled Steam input, which partially alleviated the issue. But then the button glyphs kept switching between DualSense and Xinput and that confused me in certain situations. Problems on top of problems.

I think that, perhaps, roguelite isn’t a great genre for Swery and Suda to be collaborating on. I get the feeling that the genre was just a means to get an idea that they put together across. That might be okay if the roguelite was at least enjoyable or benign, but it’s really unpleasant to play. The slow, gluey controls, repetitive enemies and environments, and overall clunkiness turn it into a really abrasive experience. On one hand, I hope this isn’t the last we see of Justine and Dr. Carnival. On the other, I kind of just want to forget this ever happened.

3/10

This review was conducted using a digital pre-release version of the game. It was provided by the publisher’s PR.