Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro’s oddball roguelike Hotel Barcelona didn’t impress us when it dropped last year, but there was something charming and earnest about it. But months later – and many updates later – Swery and White Owl appear to have turned opinion around.
Swery shared the news that Hotel Barcelona has left behind a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam in favour of ‘Mostly Positive’ reviews. In fact, at the time of writing, recent reviews are showing as ‘Very Positive’, which is, um, very positive.
“Since Under New Management in March, every player, review, and bit of support helped us get here. The curse of MIXED is broken,” Swery said, thanking players who’d checked it.
Under New Management is an update that marked the game’s “re-opening” with improvements to combat, flow, and player control, as well as stage and enemy rebalancing across the board. Moreover, it took care of the invasion-based multiplayer experience and deployed quality-of-life changes – including user interface tweaks and localisation fixes – that upped the game’s level of overall polish.
More recent Hotel Barcelona patches have iterated on these changes further while adding more free new skins and skills and removing AI-generated voices from the game’s VHS segments, which explains the game’s steady rise when it comes to reviews. Nevertheless, work on Hotel Barcelona is said to be far from done.
Hotel Barcelona is currently available on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. Nintendo Switch 1 & 2 ports are in development.
