Hotel Barcelona review — Not a lovely place

Despite their rough edges, I’m a big fan of both SUDA51’s and SWERY’s work. Heck, maybe because of those rough edges. If No More Heroes or J.J. Macfield were more polished, I don’t think they’d be as interesting as they are. However, there is a threshold of polish a game needs to be actually enjoyable. Just like Deadly Premonition 2 before it, Hotel Barcelona sadly falls under that threshold, though perhaps not nearly as much. It’s a 2D, Rogue-like action platformer modeled after slasher films, but it never really feels like you’re in control. It aims to make failure just as enjoyable as success, but the lack of control means things just happen at you.

Hotel Barcelona follows US Marshal Justine as she is transporting a dangerous criminal to the titular hotel to kill all the dangerous criminals there. However, the car crashes, killing her passengers, and now Justine finds herself trapped in the hotel grounds. Her only chance at freedom is to let her long-time possessor, Dr. Carnival, take the wheel, take out the baddies, and stop the mastermind behind it all: The Witch. 

Hotel Barcelona starts with a bang and a super interesting, oddball plot, but then you have to start playing the actual game. At the start of a run, you select an area, a difficulty, your gear including melee and ranged weapons, you get a warning about losing any materials you haven’t spent yet, then you’re off to the races. Each stage consists of several rooms with multiple exits, all ultimately leading to the boss. Each door has an attached bonus, such as faster attacks or free materials, so you theoretically can either head straight to the boss or meander a bit for bonuses. Well, you would be making choices like that if every possible route didn’t have the same amount of rooms to go through. 

You’re also encouraged to take the same route every single time thanks to Phantoms. Phantoms are literal ghosts of runs past, doing exactly the same things you did previously. If one of their attacks happens to make contact with an enemy in your present, they’ll deal damage, which is a necessity to beat any of the bosses. However, if you take even a slightly different route, you lose those Phantoms, making the game feel much more repetitive than it should be by having you throw yourself at the same wall the exact same way over and over again until it eventually goes down. 

It also doesn’t help that every button press feels more like a suggestion that Dr. Carnival might listen to if he feels like it. It makes some amount of sense if we’re still technically playing as Justine, but I don’t think it was intended that way. The weapons you start with, the Slaughter Knife, somehow feel both too loose and too stiff at the same time. Your heavy attacks take so long to go off, any enemy you wanted to hit with it has either already hit you to knock you out of it or changed zip codes entirely. So you’ll mostly be using your normal attack combo, which has you move forward with so much momentum it’s very easy to fall off a cliff or find yourself in the middle of an enemy attack. You also can’t dodge or block out of a combo, so it never feels good to use no matter what situation you’re in.

Needless to say, the moment I could make another weapon, I did, and that weapon was the Axe. Its heavy attack is still useless, and while its normal is still very stiff, it at least keeps you in relatively the same place and does more damage. I still wouldn’t say it feels good to use, but it's less unwieldy than the knives or the twin buzzsaws I unlocked later. 

No matter what you use, defeating enemies will sometimes have them drop materials like teeth, ears, and cash. After returning to the hotel, you can spend these to make new weapons and unlock skills in a massive skill tree. Those skills include new moves for each weapon type like an uppercut or slam, but I always found the base light combo to be the most effective. Instead, I spent most of my materials on increasing my health and general survivability because you will be dying constantly in Hotel Barcelona. 

Runs are short as it’s very easy to die, even on easy mode. I imagine this is intended to keep things fun and give you a feeling of always making progress. After all, every death means a new Phantom to help you out, right? Well, not really, because if you want to use Phantoms, they trap you into the same path over and over and only really matter if you reach the boss as enemies spawn semi-randomly. Using the same route means you might not get helpful bonuses like that aforementioned attack speed up, meaning the current you is going to be less effective and you’ll earn less materials for upgrades. If you use a different path, you’ll feel like you’re losing any progress you’ve made in the level so far. Essentially, you’re choosing between two different but equally tedious grinds, which makes success feel just as bad as failure.