Hotel Barcelona Review: A Disappointing Roguelite with a Compelling Story

Once I heard about Hotel Barcelona and found out that it was the lovechild of Swery (known for Deadly Premonition) and Suda51 (No More Heroes), I was all in. A 2.5D roguelite where you play as a US Federal Marshal whose body gets taken over by a scary and mysterious serial killer, strangely named Dr. Carnival, and work together to slay other killers who are staying in a spooky Hotel? That sounds incredible, right? On paper, it’s a solid idea. But, in actuality, playing Hotel Barcelona isn’t as fun as it seems, and it’s a shame.

So, like I mentioned, the premise here is that the main character, Justine, ends up seeking revenge for the untimely death of her father, taking her to the Hotel Barcelona, where a bunch of crazed serial killers reside. The hotel ends up being your base, where Justine “wakes up” whenever you die during a run. She teams up with Dr. Carnival, a serial killer with a lot of secrets, to take down the baddies.

There are only a handful of stages and bosses to get through in Hotel Barcelona, but they’re essentially 2D side-scrolling dungeons with multiple rooms and a final boss at the end. There are about three main stages you’ll need to complete before fighting the “final boss” and rolling credits, which took me about 6-7 hours.

I know that doesn’t really sound like a lot, but the beginning of Hotel Barcelona is not for the faint of heart. Even on Normal difficulty mode, the enemies and bosses can hit hard. And without many opportunities to heal, ensuring Justine stays in good health before the boss fight proved to be challenging.

I wanted to enjoy the loop of running through the levels, but after a few deaths, I found that most of the levels were quite similar and indistinguishable from one another. All the enemies feel the same; the backdrops are disappointing; and overall, the art style of Hotel Barcelona, excluding the gorgeous 2D portrait character art during conversations, the blurry textures of the enemies and world don’t do much for me, and I found it visually disappointing. What I will say is that the animated boss intros are pretty cool to watch, but since you’ll be dying to these bosses a lot, they will end up being skipped down the line.

In the hotel, you can use your collected resources to buy new weapons, upgrade your skill tree, play pinball, exchange items with a Bartender, and add some modifiers to make the game more difficult to get more rewards. And like I mentioned, you will die a lot in the game, but something kind of interesting that I did like about the roguelike aspect is that there are Phantoms that will join your run if you’ve died on that stage before.

You can have up to three at a time, and they will basically mimic your entire playthrough of that stage. So they’ll fight their enemies, but will still be able to attack bosses and enemies on your playthrough. This really came in handy when I was having trouble with a boss, and then the two or three of us would kick its butt immediately.

As far as the combat and weapons in Hotel Barcelona go, I didn’t love how it felt. It’s a little clunky, and the impact when you attack enemies just isn’t satisfying. There are katanas, hammers, saws, shotguns, flamethrowers, and a couple of other types of weapons, too. Still, I usually stuck to the starting type as it felt the most comfortable and useful. At the beginning of the game, I’m going to be honest, the combat felt terrible, but as you unlock more combos and parrying and dodging options on the skill tree, it starts to feel a little more playable, but at the end of the day, it never stuck with me, and it’s so frustrating.

Behind the janky combat in Hotel Barcelona, the lackluster stage design, and the annoying difficulty, there’s actually an interesting story and narrative that had me wanting more. I was expecting to get a lot more lore bits each time I came back to the Hotel after dying, but that just didn’t really happen. There aren’t many cutscenes in Hotel Barcelona either, and it’s a shame since the few that are there are quite fun to watch, like the intro.

I can’t speak much about what happens between Justine and Dr. Carnival, but the relationship between the two is quite compelling, and I’ll probably remember that aspect before the combat and actual gameplay of Hotel Barcelona. I think I wanted a stylish and super satisfying combat system, like No More Heroes, but this is just a weak roguelite that could’ve dug a little deeper into its mechanics and storytelling.

There are some neat secrets to be found once the credits roll, which I found to be more enjoyable figuring out than main story mission stuff, but even then, it doesn’t push the needle for me to think of this game at a higher echelon for the roguelite genre. Unfortunately, there are just too many games that have done it better than this.