Reviews
[Review] Survive a Serial Killer at the Laundromat in Atmospheric Horror Game ‘Bloodwash’
The latest game to be released under Puppet Combo’s Torture Star Video label is Black Eyed Priest and Henry Hoare’s scuzztastic ‘serial killer at the laundromat’ horror Bloodwash, and it’s no washout.
This first-person horror sees a Giallo-infused tale of a weary mother-to-be named Sara, who comes home from a long day to find her deadbeat boyfriend hasn’t done the washing, and she needs fresh clothes for an interview in the morning. Unfortunately, the building’s washer has given up the ghost, so when a sympathetic neighbor tells Sara about a 24/7 laundromat on the outskirts of town, she decides to head there as the clock creeps ever closer to midnight. An unpleasant stranger on the bus ride to the laundromat warns her she’ll die tonight, but Sara ignores it as the rambling of a weirdo. Unfortunately, she doesn’t realize she’ll soon find herself confronting a serial killer known as ‘The Womb Ripper’ and end up in a fight for her life.
Bloodwash embraces the lo-fi polygonal style of early 3D games and slaps a grainy VHS filter on top for maximum effect. This isn’t a new phenomenon in the indie horror space, but Bloodwash is certainly one of the better uses of it because the overall atmosphere of the game is akin to the fever-dream feel of watching a bootleg VHS of an obscure slasher late at night. It also manages to capture the unease of being in a largely deserted public space in the middle of nowhere.
The dingy apartment building Sara lives in, the dark, foggy streets outside it, and the bus that might as well be a tube of rust. This is a world filled with the unpleasant and depressing, which just makes it all the more captivating to me. Add character models that (quite deliberately) look like overstuffed sausage meat in a human-shaped casing, and it makes for a pretty unsettling game world from the off.
When Sara does arrive at the laundromat, a handful of other retail units are still open, and each one can be explored, with items to find, readable comics to pick up (I spent a good chunk of my playtime reading them) and local legends to be heard from a selection of grotty individuals currently using the facilities.
Interestingly, the player has to wait for a while for the wash to finish, and then another chunk of time for the drying, which is when the game really ramps things up. Before that though, it’s a moody, but fascinating place to explore while you wait. You can find a remote for the laundromat’s TV and watch clips and trailers for a bunch of things, including Lon Chaney’s Son of Dracula. Or you could visit the pizza place and play its amusingly puerile arcade cabinet that features a game where a half-naked (the bottom half) vagrant shoots piggy police officers with projectile vomit and when powered up, his own fecal matter. Or maybe a browse of PeePaw’s shop and its library of horror movies, video games, and adult entertainment?
This early build to the arrival of the Womb Ripper plays out in much the same way an old slasher movie will set the protagonist up with a whole bunch of largely harmless weirdos before unleashing the killer. The talk from the locals of a mysterious fire, a missing suspect, and potential victim throw some meat on the simple story’s bones, and taste is not spared in some of the more lurid descriptions of the Womb Ripper’s work (the name is pretty much on the money). By the time you actually get to see the titular killer, there’s a clear image of Sara’s potential demise.
Mercifully, Bloodwash doesn’t turn into a repetitive chase and hide game, as it could so easily have been. In pretty much every instance of the killer appearing, it’s for them to pop out of nowhere to jump you, and you have the means to escape unscathed, and later, do some damage. There’s no fat to be trimmed in these encounters, they come to do a job, and get on with it at a decent pace. Yes, the interaction and item finding is rudimentary in the closing 30 minutes, but it’s the right choice to keep the flow at the proper speed. By having the sort of stuff you could attribute as padding (though I feel it’s all valuable to the experience) in the tone-setting opening, it allows for that more effective manic finale that largely pays off everything you’ve learned about the Womb Ripper to that point.
All in all, Bloodwash takes a couple of hours to finish, with a little of that time put aside for finding its rather ace comic books, and chatting to all the locals about the latest scrap of evidence you’ve found. Again, this is just right. A movie-length experience that really nails a lot of the cheap, scuzzy, mean-spirited tone of a certain kind of slasher film, whilst still very much behaving like a video game. When you hear of games trying to be more cinematic or movie-like, the way it’s meant is usually in terms of acting, or blockbuster set pieces. Bloodwash encapsulates the unseemly, dead-of-night accidental discovery of a rude, crude horror flick, and that is, for me at least, a far more appealing way to go about it.
Bloodwash is out now on Steam PC.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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