Japanese developers Suda51 and Swery have unveiled the first look at their time looping horror game Hotel Barcelona.
Revealed during the Xbox’s Tokyo Game Show 2023, Goichi “Suda51” Suda – best known for the No More Heroes series – and Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro – known for Deadly Premonition – shared the first trailer for their upcoming collaborative title Hotel Barcelona.
Set to arrive in 2024 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam, Hotel Barcelona is described as a “2.5D slasher film parodic action” game that will feature a time looping system with boss characters inspired by horror movies, including Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
In an Xbox Wireinterview following the announcement, Suehiro said, “Hotel Barcelona, the place where all the action takes place, is an integrated leisure complex, featuring facilities such as a casino and camping ground around the hotel to create a single, living world with seven smaller worlds inside.
“Due to the fact that Suda-san and I are making the game, the worlds each have some twisted tricks, and each of them has a serial killer boss. The objective of the game is to somehow defeat the boss, and clear the seven worlds.”
When discussing the influence of the boss fights, Suehiro explained that they’re not attributed to any single film character, and that “They’re more like an embodiment of a subgenre of horror films.”
“For example, there are many subgenres of horror, such as slasher movies, zombie horror, summer camps, babysitters, and so on,” he said. “We came up with the idea of our bosses through the tropes that each subgenre has built up over their time.”
Swery’s most recent game was The Good Life, the RPG that launched in 2021, while Suda51’s latest work saw No More Heroes 3 join the long-running action-adventure series.
The Xbox Tokyo Game Show broadcast featured a plethora of reveals, including the announcement that Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name and Like a Dragon: Ishin! will be joining Xbox Game Pass, among other games.
In the meantime, you can take a look at our list of the best horror games, as well as our picks for the best single-player games.