What happens when a game-breaking bug turns out to be harder to fix than originally thought? If you’re Chilla’s Art, remove game from steam and release a remake a year and a half later. Bathhouse: Reissue has been rebuilt from the ground up, and now it’s time to get back in the game. Time to find out if the supernatural can outdo the nightmares of working in customer service.
You play as Maina, a 23-year-old woman who has swapped city life for a rural bathhouse. She is forced out for reasons unknown to her and takes the position via an internal transfer that provides her with housing as part of the job. All in all, it sounds like a pretty good deal and is one of those things that are completely doable in your early 20s.
Upon arriving at the ever-stormy street where her up-to-date apartment and workplace are located, we meet the Landlord. He’s a super-pervert whose face looks like it was modeled from a tree bark imprint on Silly Putty. In addition to owning the apartment building Maina lives in, he manages the bathhouse she’ll be working at. It’s a thinly veiled power animated that carries over into the rest of the game, where nothing is done to subvert expectations.
Baths is as subtle as Blunderbuss in every other aspect of its narrative. The patrons are downright hostile for no reason, there’s a ghost in the place, and Maina is objectified and harassed without recourse. All of this combines with the gameplay mechanics to emphasize the point: Maina’s voice and desires don’t matter, and she’s just a “thing” for NPCs and the story to exploit.
The foundation of the story, Maina’s arrival in this village and the larger narrative are great concepts. However, nothing is built on this foundation, making it feel incomplete. Baths clocks in at around three and a half hours, which is plenty of time to tell a compelling story. Instead, our time is spent on disposable NPCs and trite scares.
I understand what Chilla’s Art was trying to do here, because the concept itself is brilliant. I’m an absolute sucker for simulators like House Flipper AND PowerWash Simulator. Add a hearty dose of horror and you have to actively try not to like it. So you can imagine my disappointment when Baths managed to be below average in both respects.
The simulation aspect is more substantial than the horror aspect, which is not saying much, because running a bathhouse is just as satisfying, the infamous bread meal shared by Mickey Mouse, Donald, and GoofyCustomers come in, you take their money, give them the goods they ordered, and then you watch them like a hawk while keeping the bath balmy.
It’s this constant running that eliminates any sense of fear or anxiety. Sure, there are scary things happening and the occasional jump scare, but I’m too busy holding off sex perverts and fighting off temperamental water heaters to care. The scenery is fantastic, but the story and atmosphere never get enough time to breathe and do their job.
It’s strenuous to say that simply adding features will make it better, because that sounds dismissive of the effort that went into creating this artwork. It seems like Chilla’s Art was so focused on the main idea that it forgot to add the detail and flourish that other titles in both spaces utilize to make them so engaging.
Even if the pacing has been adjusted, the character models and animations are so weird (not in a good way) that they destroy any sense of horror. Faces and features are distorted enough to enter the valley of unease, but never reach the other side of the artistic intent. Walking animations are artificial, and some characters who are not ghosts at all simply disappear.
These flaws are only exacerbated by a litany of display bugs. Playing in full-screen mode is not an option due to truncated frames, motion blur cannot be turned off (which is an unforgivable sin), overall performance is inconsistent with periods of stuttering, and several game-breaking bugs occur when trying to achieve certain endings.
Baths is a victim of underdevelopment. It feels like it’s afraid to step outside the box and ultimately fails to succeed as a simulation or horror game. If Chilla’s Art had really put in the work and incorporated horror elements as part of the simulation, it could have been amazing. There was real potential to mess with the player’s head in a Hideo Kojima style that was wasted on a faint story focused on violence against women.
Chilla’s Art has a long history of creating games in this style and has built a cult following. The developer’s games are bite-sized adventures in the digital world of pulp horror. While they serve as inexpensive, unpolished gems that a few people are thrilled with, I’d like to see a few more versions of the title and see how it really shines. As it stands, even this “restored edition” feels like a first draft, not a finished product.
