Goichi ‘Suda51’ Suda – creator of No More Heroes – and Hidetaka ‘Swery’ Suehiro – creator of Deadly Premonition – are bringing their pseudonyms and reliably weird development sensibilities to a new joint project. It’s called Hotel Barcelona, and it’s a horror title inspired by the likes of PlayStation 2 classic Siren and David Lynch works like Twin Peaks.
It’s all a bit “fuzzy, in the air right now,” according to the panel the two appeared on (via Nibel on Twitter), but the plan is to build this as a sort of indie title. It’ll be small-scale enough that it might hit mobile in addition to other platforms, and the developers have been in talks with Devolver Digital to build the game at a budget of $1 million USD.
Except Devolver says on Twitter that “this is news to us,” and follows up with “gonna need Suda51 and Swery to pitch us this mysterious game we’re supposedly publishing. Name a time and place, gentlemen.” We asked the publisher directly what exactly is going on, and got back, simply, “as suspected, Devolver has never heard of it.”
Suda51, at least, has done a bit of collaboration with Devolver in the past, as several of the publisher’s titles appeared on T-shirts in No More Heroes spin-off Travis Strikes Again.
Yes. It’s the law.
— Devolver Digital (@devolverdigital) October 23, 2019
Now it seems negotiations are ongoing on Twitter.
Suda and Swery texted Keiichiro Toyama (creator of Silent Hill and Siren) live on stream to ask him to get involved with their indie horror project
..and he said yes pic.twitter.com/5dj8251a8m
— Nibel (@Nibellion) October 23, 2019
It seems that Suda and Swery both texted Silent Hill and Siren creator Keiichiro Toyama during the panel to ask if he wanted to join the project, too. (He said yes.)
Hotel Barcelona might be one of the best indie games on PC, if this apparent supergroup of developers and publishers can manage to agree on what they’re making. The possibilities, at least, sound grand.