HOTEL BARCELONA

The work put into Under New Management can't be understated. In a sea of games where developers are happy to just leave their work broken and abandoned, it's clear that the team at White Owls really wanted to make something good and refused to stop until they'd addressed all the initial issues.

fun!! however, i wish the fps limiter allowed you to set the target framerate

I bought the game on release, and played it up to the first boss clear, and it was definitely a less than stellar experience. BUT, after the touch-up patches the game feels much more responsive and fluid. In its current state, I would absolutely recommend giving this game a go. I played 95% of the game on normal (dubbed ingame as "veteran") difficulty, and the early game definitely feels unforgiving. As you start upgrading your skills and weapons, it becomes much more fun to play. The game mechanics are more detailed in the meta aspects (time of day, weather, paths and doors, phantoms, and their respective buffs and debuffs), but the combos and the fighting itself is not super deep. The story and the characters are 100% SWERY grade, if you like his stuff, and / or horror movies and horror pop culture in general, then you will enjoy it for sure. All in all, if you can tough out the first few hours of the game, it becomes easier and more fun as you go along. (Or just crank the difficulty down to easy until you get the hang of things.) The game has a multiplayer part as well with invasions (a la souls games) but I did not do any of it, partly because of the low playercount.

Absolut banger. Not as thought provokingly cool as Deadly Premonition or D4 but right up there with the best of 'em. Swery's still got it.

Love it I waited to buy it and I enjoy it so much

Hotel Barcelona is gallons of SWERY's offbeat originality in a more compact package than usual. DR. CARNIVAL in particular stands as his best protagonist since Francis York Morgan, and while its systems can be overwhelming and obtuse at first you learn their logic with a bit of time. While the 3D models are passable, the 2D art by Hiroaki Hashimoto is absolutely stellar and adds tremendously to the atmosphere of the game. The vocal performance and script in Japanese is likewise laden with flavor, and the dialogues are punchy with no wasted space. Ultimately I appreciate a scrappy game made with creative control and vision, in an era of 200 million dollar focus grouped crapshoots made for everyone and thus no one.

I put too many hours into this game, hopefully I'll be able to get a refund, just having too many crashes, or sprite/character freezing issues (me, enemies, and replay ghost would freeze, but sound , background movement and pausing all worked) would have to alt+F4 and restart, would ruing a full stage run with splatter boosts, movement boots, and what not. basically causing me to lose the chance and getting a run through all story stages without a break achievement, For a 2d metroidvania style game, it didn't really feel like a metroidvainia, more of a stage speed runner with crappy hit boxes and parrying mechanics.