HOTEL BARCELONA Review

HOTEL BARCELONA is a narrative-driven action roguelike from White Owls Inc. alongside the minds of SWERY (Deadly Premonition, The Missing) and Suda51 (Killer7, No More Heroes); the game is themed around classic horror movies and tropes, ranging from high art features like Alien to complete B-movie camp like Friday the 13th. The story follows a young, idealistic US Marshal, Justine, who shares a body with a ruthless but intelligent serial killer Dr. CARNIVAL, who travels to a hotel full of murderers on a personal quest to avenge her father under the guise of an assignment.

Soon after arriving in the area, Justine's car crashes and the vigilante she was escorting to deal with the killers gets axed himself, leaving her to fend for herself, almost. When Justine is in danger, Dr. CARNIVAL, bound by a pact to protect her, takes over, granting her great fighting ability to fight her way to the hotel. After waking up in our room, we quickly learn everyone there is stuck in a time loop, and the only way to get out is to challenge the legendary killers residing in the areas adjacent to the hotel, take their hearts and use them to confront the witch who owns the hotel.

Now the timeloop is a big obstacle and facilitator of surreal events and interactions, but it is also an elegant way to explain the looping gameplay of roguelike, always going back to the beginning but also another classic trope! Triple-Action Game Design! But even from the very launch of the game, HOTEL BARCELONA is dripping with style and holistic game design where everything serves the theme and has an appropriate function. The main menu looks like an old DVD movie menu with bad quality live-action footage in the background straight out of a poor VHS transfer. The gameplay UI resembles horror movie posters or trailers with high contrast black/blues and white, stylised icons with strong silhouettes, big red crooked headers and splashes of blood. Level select is a physical map of the hotel area helping the tourists find surrounding attractions with levels themselves, each themed around a subgenre of horror movies, nicely rendered in sleek cel-shaded 3D, and that's only the start of it.

A more accurate description of this game should be “slasher platformer”, get it? As Justine, you will jump, dash, and wall-jump through each area of the hotel while fighting off hordes of psychotic and supernatural killers who can be comboed, launched, juggled, and shot. As you attack enemies with your melee weapons, you will get covered in blood and accumulate splatter, which will gradually enhance your abilities and allow you to perform an invincible, screen-wide Carnival Awakening when full. The splatter meter will fall off over time, requiring you to maintain it, but the levels also contain sources of water, like leaky plumbing, or breakable barrels full of water on campgrounds or simply a pond, challenging your strategy and platforming skills to avoid them.

The precise controls, varied moveset and the splatter mechanic allows skilled players to comfortably clear the levels without having to interact much with the roguelike elements and continuously loop the same levels to upgrade your damage in order to alleviate the frustration of continuously alternating between chipping off at a boss and avoiding the same move over and over and OVER again until you get so desperate to deal damage and end it all that you keep attacking after an opening is closed and get blasted! You know the one. But HOTEL BARCELONA actually allows you to leverage each failure in a way that will make the next attempt much easier by making each run part of an overall strategy to clear a level. The timeloops cause Justine to leave Slasher Phantom behind, which repeats her last run and can damage the enemies.

By repeatedly following the same route through the level, multiple phantoms can be systematically accumulated to eventually overpower the enemies and clear the stage for you, even the boss. And even if phantoms still don’t quite do it for you, or if you just want to take it easy, each run lets you pick out of four difficulty levels, which is bound to please both masochists and story enjoyers, but nothing is as satisfying as having multiple Carnival Awakenings layered on top of each other in the early game and steamrolling the boss.

Speaking of bosses, the developers at White Owls Inc. clearly took a lot of care to design them. Each is an original twist on a horror movie icon or a mashup of them, complete with unique backstory, a completely different challenge, and even their own psychedelic animated intros directed by Saho Nanjo and Setsuka Kawahara, who also directed the stylised opening and ending cutscenes. The fights range from a more straightforward duel with a deranged wheelchair-bound chef who changes his moveset by putting on a different animal mask to an HR Giger-style sexualized biomechanical alien that takes up an entire arena and has help from grunt enemies.

The bosses and other characters are represented by detailed drawings by Hiroaki Hashimoto, which serve as striking close-ups during dialogue for the cel-shaded 3D models streamlined for fast action during gameplay. Hashimoto's signature vibrant, semi-realistic style makes even more ordinary-looking designs stand out, but my favourite were definitely the protagonists.

Dr. CARNIVAL himself looks like something from a metal album cover. A tall, muscular man bound not only by a form-fitting straitjacket but by an iron maiden cage around him with a skull mask, tense muscles, and dark aura seeping out of him, telling you he better not break out of those restraints. In total contrast to CARNIVAL, Justine's timid posture, body language, and big coat almost make you think she is smaller. That, along with her soft face features, big fluffy brown hair, round glasses, and a ribbon neatly tied on her shirt collar, all serve to highlight her lawful, gentle personality. However, when Dr. CARNIVAL takes over, her presence exudes confidence and swag. The droopy hair becomes red and swept up, the coat is gone, revealing an open form-fitting shirt and denim, emphasising her assets, while her neat ribbon is now tied on her neck and flowing like a ninja scarf as she stylishly slashes the enemies.

Justine and Dr. CARNIVAL are an interesting duo, both representing extreme conflicting stances and an underlying conflict of being considerate of others to a fault and expecting others to do the same, versus following our own set of rules that make us happy and not changing them for anyone. While definitely not a role model, even going as far as to reject his humanity and believing in survival of the fittest, Dr. CARNIVAL’s intelligence and logical deconstruction of others is a counter to the emotional and idealistic Justine, who doesn't want to hurt anyone while wanting to get justice for her father without considering it might actually entail hurting someone.

Their voice actors, Jeff Titus and Zaida-Joy Davis, do an amazing job of bringing those characters to life, especially the latter, who effectively has to portray both characters depending on who is in control of Justine’s body. The two's opposing personalities and points of view make for compelling and occasionally humorous interactions between them as well as other colourful characters like Charles Grady, the friendly, ear-collecting bartender, or Tim the closet monster who always reassures us he is ALWAYS THERE for us... IN OUR CLOSET.

The soundtrack includes a diverse mix of genres pulled from all over the B-movie and horror genre. An eerie mix of classical and synth horror tracks with clear nods to movie themes play throughout the game, adding to the tension, especially when traversing the levels while the game transitions to rocking metal music during boss battles, with some clearly inspired by the classics like Black Sabbath's Paranoid. Occasionally, you can even hear some carnival/haunted house-style themes, retro game music, and some soothing jazz. I found many tracks to be memorable, enjoyable to listen to even outside the game and overall fitting the eccentric feel of HOTEL BARCELONA.

Even side content in HOTEL BARCELONA is great and unique, like the bar pinball machine that you can spend your coins on, a VHS treasure hunt where you watch bad movie trailers made out of stock footage, straight out of ‘80s/’90s B-movie genre and even a retro dungeon crawler. All of the above grant you access to additional boss fights, by the way, and just as fun and creative as the main levels.

But as much as I would like to gush about all the great small details, there are some issues I should mention. The foremost is the inclusion of online multiplayer, both cooperative and competitive. The co-op seems like an ok idea, especially if you have a friend who owns the game but most players probably encountered the PvP part, AKA DARK SOULS–style invasions. Those allow you to attempt to mess up another player’s run, and the winner receives a weapon upgrade, usually granted through RNG in the casino or by beating any of the bosses. The matchmaking for the invasions doesn't seem to take into consideration player stats so it's very likely that the invaders would have much more time in the game, as well as skill trees and weapon upgrades, to easily beat their target.

The good and at the same time bad fact about this feature is that while you can disable invasions for one level by spending your resources on a dreamcatcher, it is also very dead by the time this review goes up. The game also occasionally hangs up on level transition, but thankfully, you get checkpoints at the beginning of each area. That's about it.

This is the first roguelike I played where I felt the rogue elements did not bog it down and I could just enjoy the gameplay, not to mention the story which also didn’t feel like an afterthought. While the skill tree and RNG weapon enhancements are there, it never felt mandatory to grind and min-max because of plenty of core game mechanics to leverage available early on and multiple difficulty levels to choose from. And even the inevitable rogue looping served to enhance the game for me as it put more mechanics to consider into play. Overall, It's a really fun, and well-designed game full of creative choices that serve to enhance the stylistic and narrative themes.