Created as a collaborative effort between Japanese gaming legends SWERY and SUDA51, Hotel Barcelona has a unique premise in which your present and past self fight alongside each other. It is an action game in which previous defeats can lead to victory.
The backstory has a simple, The Purge-adjacent premise: While once a luxury hotel, today Hotel Barcelona is a place where serial killers gather from all over the United States. It is a nightmarish place where the nastiest criminals come and do whatever they want.
I got to play a stage set at a camping site where I had to deal with a devilish homicidal maniac named Jacob. His face was covered by not only a hockey mask, but also a football face guard, reminiscent of Friday the 13th killer Jason Voorhees.
Hotel Barcelona’s base is an orthodox 2D action game. You place as Justine and can use both melee and long-range attacks to defeat enemies, until you reach a giant boss at the end of the stage. Collecting resources along the way allows you to permanently upgrade your character. Like a roguelite, Hotel Barcelona has a high difficulty and expects you to retry stages over and over. Those stages unfold over multiple branching paths, with healing items and stat buffs that can be obtained along the way. Hordes of normal enemies will stand in your way, and there are some additional foes hiding behind tufts of grass for surprise attacks as well.
Luckily, Hotel Barcelona, due out later this year for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, introduces the Phantom mechanic to help you on your way. When you die, you have a chance to make upgrades before embarking on your next run, with the ghost of your previous run fighting alongside you. While you can’t control this phantom, it will attack enemies based on your previous life when you were controlling them, and it also draws aggro from your enemies. Since the phantom only repeats a previous run, its attacks can often miss as well, but since there are so many enemies on screen, it is often helpful. You can stack up a maximum of three phantoms based on your previous three lives alongside your current run.
You can use tactics such as staying behind the phantom to use it as a shield, or by luring enemies into your phantom’s attacks. I tried to be the decoy myself too, but this proved difficult as there is no skill that has the enemies focus on Justine’s attacks.
Hotel Barcelona puts an emphasis on offensive tactics rather than defensive, with a gauge for special attacks that can be filled by gathering enemy blood. Once the gauge is full, a devastating attack against all enemies on screen can be utilized. This attack is not only effective against normal foes, but deals a lot of damage against a boss as well. The special attack gauge decreases as time progresses, demanding the player to stay aggressive the whole time in order to fill the gauge.
Jacob is a fierce boss with frequent wide range attacks. There’s not much you can do if you fight him by yourself, but your phantoms can lure or attack him, giving you a fighting chance. While I still wasn’t able to defeat him during my playtime, effective use of upgrades, special attacks and the Phantom mechanic should make it possible in the long run.
Written by Ryuichi Kataoka
