What do you get when Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro — known for the Deadly Premonition series — and Goichi “Suda51” Suda — known for No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw — work together? Hotel Barcelona, an unapologetically challenging, but intriguing, take on a roguelike horror 2.5D hack and slash action game.
Hotel Barcelona finds itself cherry-picking interesting combinations of mechanics from various popular genres to complement its cinematically inspired narrative. The story centers around the timid and meek rookie U.S. Marshal, Justine, who finds herself possessed by the soul of an evil serial killer — Dr. Carnival.
After an accident, Justine awakens in the beautifully extravagant Hotel Barcelona, but she’s not alone here. The Hotel is stuffed to the brim with unusual characters, some who prove to be helpful and others who are a little less so. Outside of the hotel, the stories the player experiences may feel eerily familiar to horror fans.
“Instead of one specific movie, we wanted to create a love letter to the horror genre as a whole: ‘80s slashers,’90s cult classics, modern horror, and everything in between,” Swery says in a quote to Xbox Wire. “Hotel Barcelona is a homage to horror itself.”
Justine doesn’t have the luxury of sulking in the hotel and coping with her dual-souled situation. Dr. Carnival’s soul takes over when Justine leaves the hotel to tackle the local dungeons, and his presence is obvious in the changes to Justine’s appearance. Her professional and mild demeanor is gone — her hair becomes a fiery orange, she dons an eye patch, sheds her suit jacket, and her blouse becomes partially unbuttoned.
Before heading out to each arena, players have the option to choose which weaponry Justine will use to hack and slash her way to the level’s boss. There’s a curious menagerie of options: twin saw blades, axes, pistols, and more. Each level is a 2.5D set piece that looks as though it could have been ripped straight from classic horror movies, and the player must move between areas by visiting strange doors. In classic roguelike dungeon fashion, players can freely explore as much or as little of an area as they’d like before moving on and ultimately reaching the final boss.
Blood is your ultimate power-up, and Justine will need to create as much of a bloody mess — while avoiding cleansing waters! — to fill the meter and unleash a carnival awakening that will deal massive amounts of damage to whatever foes are in the player’s way.
But exploring doesn’t come easy, even if that is the difficulty level you opt to play on. Death is a certainty, and it comes at a high price. The dangerous enemies stalking each level will do their best to keep you from reaching the final boss. Taking them out grants Justine ears, bones, and other grimy trinkets that can be used to upgrade and become stronger. But should she perish, those trinkets are lost unless reclaimed from the corpse in a future run, a feature commonly seen in soulslikes.
While Death may come at a cost, it also brings about a reward of sorts. When you embark on an area again, you’ll be joined by Hotel Barcelona’s Slasher Phantoms. These ghosts of past attempts rerun the dungeon with you, repeating your previous run step for step and dealing all the same damage that you did before your knockout. That makes taking out those final bosses a little easier, provided you have the tickets to keep retrying.
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Such a bizarrely sinister horror experience shouldn’t be kept to oneself. Hotel Barcelona features two multiplayer components — one for cooperative gameplay and one for invasive PvP battles. If you’re lucky enough to have some help getting through the seven killers lurking around the hotel grounds, this chaotic bloodbath of a 2.5D hack-and-slash action experience can be less challenging to grind through.
If you’re looking to get that nostalgic horror flick meets hack and slash fix, Hotel Barcelona is available now on Xbox Series X|S consoles, as well as on PC via the Xbox on PC app. It is part of the Xbox Play Anywhere program, meaning you benefit from Xbox cloud saves so you can pick up and slay on any Xbox or Windows PC device (including handhelds).
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