Swery-led studio White Owls Inc. and Suda51 of Grasshopper Manufacture, the studio behind the No More Heroes Series, have teamed up to develop Hotel Barcelona. Revealed during Xbox’s 2023 Tokyo Game Show broadcast, the team describes Hotel Barcelona as a “2.5D slasher film parodic action” game, and it’s out next year. 

In Hotel Barcelona, serial killers from all over the United States gather to do serial killer things, presumably. The player must defeat them all and check out of Hotel Barcelona before “all the blood is spilled.” It’s due out in 2024 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam.

Check out the Hotel Barcelona reveal trailer for yourself below: 

In an Xbox Wire blog post, Swery says the idea was born during a Suda51-hosted event called “Travis Monday Nitro 2” in Shibuya, Tokyo, in October 2019. The two discussed creating a game together, announcing then and there that it’d be called Hotel Barcelona. Later that year, the two worked out the plan and game details “in one fell swoop over dinner, together in Canada.” 

Swery describes Hotel Barcelona as a horror-themed, side-scrolling action game, where melee weapons, like an enlarged surgical knife, are your primary weapon, and other items, like a shotgun or Molotov cocktail, serve as your subweapons. “You will go on missions equipped with each of these weapon types,” Swery tells Xbox. “Weapons are basically obtained from treasure chests that drop during missions.”

He describes Hotel Barcelona as the place where “all the action takes place” and as an integrated leisure complex with facilities like a casino, camping ground, and more. In total, there are seven “smaller worlds” inside the hotel. Each of these seven smaller worlds has a serial killer boss to defeat. Swery notes that the serial killer bosses are not tributes to any single historical character and more so “an embodiment of a subgenre of horror films.” So you might see bosses inspired by slasher movies, zombie horrors, summer camp b-movies, babysitter films, and more. 

There’s an interesting mechanic called the Slasher Phantom at play in Hotel Barcelona, too. 

“Simply put, the player’s past character will move as it did in the last run automatically, while still retaining all hitboxes,” Swery says. “Something close to this would be the ghost feature in racing games, but with hit detection; it will feel like you are fighting your past self. You can hold up to three Slasher Phantoms, which will help your adventure in each level.

“[Each] of the seven worlds consists of several areas to be cleared, and the boss appears in the last area. When you clear an area, you can choose a power-up, which may restore your health or increase your attack power. However, if you get hit and are sent back to the beginning of the area, you may find it appealing to choose a different route than the previous one, say, to increase your attack power. When you do so and choose a different route, the Slasher Phantoms will reset completely.” 

Hotel Barcelona is due out on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC sometime in 2024. 

Are you excited to check out Hotel Barcelona? Let us know in the comments below!