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.
