A confession: the only Suda51 game I’ve ever played is Flower, Sun, and Rain on the Nintendo DS, which I enjoyed despite having no clue what was happening at any given time (I think it had something to do with The Silver Case?). A second confession: I love—non-ironically—Deadly Premonition, Swery’s 2010 opus that does a lot of individual things quite badly but somehow amounts to something incredible.
So I was pretty interested in Hotel Barcelona, a 2.5D action roguelite that emerged—like Athena from Zeus’ skull—from a hot collabo between the two creators. And then I stopped being quite so interested: reviews weren’t great—the game currently stands at a 56% Mixed user rating on Steam, and critics weren’t in love with it either.
Now, in another blow to my interest Hotel Barcelona has updated its Steam page to feature an AI disclaimer. The disclaimer bashfully admits that “VHS tapes can be found in the late stages of the game that use voice overs from an AI text to speech service” and that “A logo is featured on these tapes that has utilised generative fill AI to complete the image.”
In an update published earlier today, Hotel Barcelona publisher CULT seemed pretty abashed by the whole thing. “We are working with White Owls to replace this content in a future patch with fully human-made work. Once patched there will be no GenAI content in Hotel Barcelona what-so-ever,” wrote the publisher. “CULT Games’ stance on generative AI is clear: we are opposed to any professional GenAI use that has disproportional environmental impact, takes work away from real people, or has been trained on unethical datasets.
“We sincerely apologise for this failure in vetting the game content and want to thank the community for raising it so clearly.”
It’s not much content, but I admit that any AI-made content leaves a sour taste in my mouth regardless of quantity. Still, the good news is that, in addition to the disclaimer, the devs say “These features are being removed in an upcoming patch in favour of non-AI generated content.”
It almost reads to me like—much as 11 bit claimed with the AI-generated content in The Alters—some placeholder stuff snuck under the wire and into the full release, and the devs are now heaving a sigh and diving back in to yoink it out. I’ve reached out to CULT to ask about that, and will update if I hear back. If that is the case, you’ve gotta wonder if using AI is worth the effort.
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