Swery's oddball roguelike Hotel Barcelona isn't exactly good, but its janky jaunt through horror movie history is endearing all the same

Ten seconds into Hotel Barcelona, you’re watching an aerial shot tracking a car through the mountains, The Shining-style; a couple of minutes later, a gas station attendant is giving you an ominous warning about the campsite up ahead where a young baseball player drowned. Even the bar you eventually visit has nicked its décor wholesale from the Overlook Hotel. If nothing else, Deadly Premonition developer Hidetaka “Swery” Suehiro’s latest oddball endeavour – an action-roguelike created in collaboration with No More Heroes’ Goichi “Suda51” Suda – is an endearing love letter to horror movies, even amid the jank.

Hotel BarcelonaDeveloper: White OwlsPublisher: Cult GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on Xbox, PC

You play as perpetually flustered US Marshal Justine Bernstein, whose deceased father made a pact with a serial killer named Dr. Carnival long ago. And while the specifics of the deal remain mysterious, the upshot is you’re now possessed – very much against your will – by the evil doctor’s surprisingly chatty soul. But silver linings and all that; it turns out being able to call on the formidable bloodlust of a notorious serial killer is quite handy when you’re battling through waves of undead B-movie rejects on your hunt for the witch that murdered your pa.

It’s a premise that’s compelling in its preposterousness, but Hotel Barcelona doesn’t exactly make a strong first impression as a game. It’s essentially a side-scrolling roguelike where you move from left-to-right bludgeoning monsters until you reach the big boss five areas later at each level’s end. Death means starting over, but you can at least use the spoils of your most recent attempt to expand and upgrade your repertoire of skills for another go. As with most games made by Swery’s White Owls studio, though, it feels pretty rough. Movement is slippery and weightless; its mushy, strangely spartan visuals – which have the air of something assembled using assets from a budget PS2 game when the art director was on holiday – are often completely unreadable, and the chain of responsibility has faltered so much, even the script’s typos have made it into the voice acting.

But as with White Owls’ previous games, there’s an earnest can-do spirit to Hotel Barcelona’s delirious nonsense – its larger-than-life characters, its wild conversational asides, and its pinwheeling sense of mad invention – that’s easy to like. This is a game where ability upgrades are doled out by a monster – sorry, a monster – called Tim who lives in your hotel room closet. There’s a suspiciously friendly barman called Grady (what else?) who’ll happily supply useful upgrade materials in exchange for severed ears, and there’s a possibly haunted pinball machine in the corner that’s already hoovered up a significant amount of my time. And while the fundamentals of its roguelike action will be extremely familiar to anyone who’s played Dead Cells and its ilk, it’s got ideas of its own here as well.