‘The curse of MIXED is broken:’ Suda51 & Swery65’s Hotel Barcelona claws its way to ‘Mostly Positive’ on Steam after Hail Mary patch and scrubbing AI assets

As reported by Automaton, action platformer Hotel Barcelona has finally pulled away from “Mixed” user review status on Steam to “Mostly Positive.” This came after developer White Owls Inc. updated the game in a number of ways, including cleaning up its controversial deployment of generative AI.

The sidescrolling roguelike action game is notable as a collaboration between two eccentric, much-beloved Japanese auteurs: Goichi “Suda51” Suda (No More Heroes, Killer7) and Hidetaka “Swery65” Suehiro (Deadly Premonition). It was a dream team for a certain kind of PS2-brained freakazoid (complimentary), which made its rocky launch all the more painful.

Hotel Barcelona received a tepid response from critics and players⁠—PCG news writer Joshua Wolens accused it of “trying too hard”—and the bad vibes were sealed with the discovery of AI-generated audio and visual assets tucked away late in the game. Hotel Barcelona’s publisher, CULT Games, was quick to respond to the discovery, and apologized for the generative AI assets.

Swery65 himself took to Twitter to celebrate the improved user reviews, crediting them primarily to the big “Under New Management” patch that came out in March, and declaring that “The curse of MIXED is broken.” The patch in question looks like a real Cyberpunk 2.0 sort of Hail Mary, changing everything from enemy balance to basic movement and tossing all players five free skins to boot.

As a big Deadly Premonition fan who’s Suda-curious by reputation, Hotel Barcelona seemed right up my alley until shit hit the fan⁠—now I think I’m going to give it another look the next time it goes on sale. You can grab Hotel Barcelona over on Steam, where it also has a demo if you’d like to see whether those balance changes are to your liking first.