Hotel Barcelona review: "Everywhere better roguelike games go right, this hotel-set horror goes left"

Hotel Barcelona isn't somewhere that you'd choose to stay if you had a choice. A cursed hostelry, deeply inspired by The Shining's Overlook Hotel (complete with a barman who may as well be Lloyd the Bartender), located in the wilds of the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border. Yet such is the fate that befalls Justine, a federal Marshal who shares her mind with Dr Carnival, a depraved serial killer, who transforms from a shockingly gentle cop into a one-woman killing machine. If this all sounds odd, it's worth noting that this game comes from a collab between Japanese auteur developers Swery and Suda51. It's tragic that the surrealist visionaries behind Deadly Premonition, The Missing, No More Heroes, and Killer7 have given us a game so sodden with mediocrity.

Hotel Barcelona is, at the best of times, a frustratingly clunky experience. The core loop of the game will be familiar to anyone who enjoys action roguelites. You pick a stage to attempt, hack and slash your way through enemies and confront a final boss, upgrading your skills and weapons between stages. If the screenshots make you think of something like Dead Cells or Hollow Knight, dispel those ideas from your mind right away. Everywhere better roguelike games go right, Hotel Barcelona goes left. Where the combat in those games is tight and fluid, here it's stodgy, repetitive, and annoyingly unfair. Until you defeat the third boss and awaken your latent ability to be invulnerable after being knocked down, you will get relentlessly caught up in combos that cascade your run into failure.

"Which cliche would madame care for tonight?"

You choose from a melee and ranged weapon to take into the stages. It's all horror movie cliche stuff: buzzsaws or an axe? For your ranged weapon, how about a pump-action shotgun? None of them feel good. The axes have a wind-up time of around five working days, while the buzzsaws chip away at enemy health like you're gently tapping them with a butter knife from the breakfast buffet. Ranged weapons are like firing cap guns at enemies. Combat feels weightless and clunky simultaneously – there's very little in the way of visceral feedback, despite the game's boasts about being a blood-soaked horror odyssey. Yes, dismembering enemies is how you build up your special meter, before unleashing Dr Carnival's huge attacks onto enemies, but it never feels satisfying. The enemies are lacking in character, all drawn from the B-movie guide to horror monsters. While fighting them can offer a kind of surface-level satisfaction, they always feel like ragdolls, nothing more.

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You can make your weapons slightly more effective by using them under certain criteria, but they're never substantive enough to make a big difference. Use the "Bloody Slicer" knife when it's raining, for instance, and you'll get a +2% crit rate when it rains, while the "Massacre Chopper" axe gives you +5% defence when suffering from an ailment. It's the same old roguelike problem of not making boosts actually feel important. I didn't notice these in the slightest, so I ended up just taking whichever one felt the least painful to use.

I mentioned ailments before, and they are just one of several things that the game doesn't explain to you except as journal entries. The game has a stamina system that I can't say I noticed once; apparently, you can run out of stamina and go into "Stamina Break" mode, which limits your actions. It's possible that this may have simply fallen into the cracks produced by another of the game's key problems: unresponsive controls.

Multiple times, I tried to do an attack (this happened with light, heavy, and ranged attacks) and nothing happened. It just refused to work. I even had this happen with the special attack during a boss fight, which was, to put it mildly, an infuriating experience. This is not to mention the challenges that some areas give you, such as killing three enemies while airborne, which seem to fail for no reason.

Boss fights, despite the bosses themselves being horror clichés made towering golems of flesh, is the place where this game's one key interesting feature shines. Your previous runs are recorded, akin to ghosts in a racing game, and fight alongside you as part of a system called the Slasher Phantom system. This effectively allows you to stack your runs, which helped me get through multiple boss fights. If you pop a special attack in a boss room and then die, you'll still be helping out your future runs. They help you out through the entire run, which can make even this game's most unbalanced levels a little easier.

The West Virginia Chainbore Massacre

This game's systems all frame a deeply forgettable story. Dr Carnival may or may not have been mixed up in the death of Justine's father, you're on the trail of a Witch, trying to figure out the hotel's curse. There's a lot of story here, particularly for a game of this style, but it's conveyed to you through plodding dialogue, terrible voice acting performances, and multiple jokes that seem to veer into "you can't say anything without being cancelled these days" territory, which would have been tedious and tone-deaf five years ago, let alone today.

It's a dismal experience of a game, whose one interesting feature is hidden under a triple-threat bushel of tedious combat, banal dialog, and bugs aplenty. Sure, there's fun to be had picking out references, deciphering exactly which Western horror movies Swery and Suda are fans of, but I'd rather just read an interview to find that out. To paraphrase the song that plays in my head whenever I see the game's title: you can check out of Hotel Barcelona anytime you like, and you'll definitely want to leave.

Looking for more loops and runs? Check out our best roguelikes list!