Suda51 and Swery were with our comrades at IGN Japan on October 23 to chat about how they wanna make something together. The event took place at Loft9 in Shibuya. Swery was there only for the first part of the event, for around an hour. Together with Suda51 they chatted about a possible side-scrolling, indie-like horror game they wanna make, Hotel Barcelona.

Note that Suda51 and Swery kept mentioning most of what they said isn't set in stone. There was even stuff they decided literally during the event. None of this info is final, except that it'll be a horror game. Devolver publishing the game isn't 100% certain either.

Here's a full summary of the talk show:

Suda51 and Swery started by mentioning how some years ago they were working on a PlayStation VR project. The project gathered many different developers and they were each asked to make something related to food. Suda51 was making something related to ramen, and Swery was doing something pancakes-related. But things happened and the project got canceled. So in 2018, following this project, they decided to do something together.

They could never really get to it though, or start having ideas but would forget them after getting drunk. The main reason they did this event was to finally sit down and chat about it, to force themselves to work on it.

As for what this "something" will be, they still have no idea besides that it'll be a horror game. They're not sure yet if it'll be gory horror or psychological horror. Suda51 joked it could be a "(Gundam) Narrative horror game" too. Or how it could be similar to a certain super popular creature collection game. The players would visit various underground places in Japan and overseas. Or go to a fantasy world. They kept shooting out ideas like that. They also want it to be an indie-like game with a small budget.

Suda51 thought up a name too, it'd be titled Hotel Barcelona. He already talked about this project with Devolver, and Devovler said they could give them around 1 million $ to do something.

Swery and Suda51 also spoke about how Hotel Barcelona would be easy to pick up and play, so it'll probably be on a portable system like Nintendo Switch and/or  Stadia. Hotel Barcelona's main theme would be time distorting and/or a parallel world. As if multiple guests are staying in the same hotel room or different ones at the same time, and you'd see their different perspectives. Suda51 said it'll be something similar to Keiichiro Toyama's Siren series.

Swery said he tends to laugh when seeing "normal" horror movies, and that from a religious way of thinking death can be a happy thing, assuming the characters go to paradise. He prefers horror media with a lot of suspense and uncertainty, like David Lynch movies or the end of the third season of Twin Peaks. So these could be inspirations for Hotel Barcelona as well.

Hotel Barcelona's characters might be modeled after fans who ask to be in the game. The Hotel Barcelona in the game's story possibly won't be in Barcelona and could be any popular hotel in the world. And the story could be about a journalist reporting on that hotel. Swery said there are a lot of characters recently getting backstories explaining why they're evil, like "J", so he wants to do a character that's just evil for no reason. The player might need to control this evil character at some point too, and get forced to pick between choices that would all be horrible. The hotel's employees will also appear, and obviously some characters will die since it's horror.

The culprit will either be human or something supernatural. Suda51 really likes this movie called "Kurowan" which has some kind of unkillable monster that ends up beaten by the character played by Matsu Takako. So Suda51 really wants her in the game. Maybe she could fight using promo seals found on bread on sale too. They also joked about how she does Elsa's Japanese voice and how her husband is famous anime composer Toshihiko Sahashi, who recently did Kamen Rider Zi-O's OST.

As for the gameplay, Swery said it'll be side-scrolling. "Because it's fun and is indie-like". That's everything they wanna do with the game right now. And they'll tell all this to Devolver when meeting them the week of October 28th and see if they're interested. During the event, Suda51 also told Swery to make some concept art, while he makes a logo, so they'll probably publish them next week.

Lastly, Suda51 said he'd like to add more people to the project too, people used to horror games. He'd like to ask Keiichiro Toyama to join them. "And that guy who made Gravity Daze, you know, Keiichiro Toyama". Suda51 and Swery ended up both mailing Toyama live, asking him to join them. A few minutes later, Toyama answered he's "totally okay with it". They all mentioned he's probably drunk at home right now though.

Before leaving, Swery said that while they had a pretty wacky talk, they're seriously trying to make something, so we should look forward to it assuming it does releases one day.

As you can see it was a pretty fun event. The only thing 100% sure is that Swery and Suda51 are making a horror game. Swery was only a guest on the first part of the event, and he left to go home, to help out with his family's Buddhist temple. Suda51 continued the talk show to talk about Travis Strikes Again. The stream is still ongoing with this second part.