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.
There’s a forbidding air to the Faroe Islands, an isolated fishing community where No Rest for the Wicked is set. The year is 1862, and Baldur Joensen (Egor Venned) has a quiet, simple life. The young man lives with his religious, conservative, widowed mother Ásla (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen) in a comfortable cottage, spending his time picnicking with her or fishing with the other men on the island.
But he yearns for something more.
The easy answer is that he wants to go explore the world. Despite being isolated, the islands are frequented by ships that stop for trade, and there are 19th-century equivalent seasonal workers who pass through, which provides Baldur with a glimpse of the outside world that he’s missing out on.
When Baldur rescues Danish man Helge (Pilou Asbæk) after the latter has an accident in the foggy waters, the young man’s life begins to expand. While the two aren’t fluent in the other’s language, they can communicate on a rudimentary level, and Baldur quickly becomes entranced by Helge’s transient stories. To say the other man is more worldly is an understatement. The appeal becomes more significant and complicated when Baldur and Helge begin to act on their mutual attraction, sneaking in bouts of lovemaking under Ásla’s nose.
Obviously this is where the film’s conflict lies, but screenwriter Rasmus Birch’s languid script takes its time, chronicling dinners and late-night talks between the men in order to develop their romance. As the intimacy deepens and Baldur becomes increasingly enamored, he imagines a life for himself away from the islands and his mother.
Ásla inevitably discovers what the men have been up to, but the issue truly comes to a head when Baldur declares his intent to ship off with Helge. Ásla protests, laying the emotional blackmail on thick to the point that her son relents, leaving Helge to go off on his own.
Then a massive storm strikes. And Helge dies. No Rest for the Wicked shifts gears dramatically because the dead man begins to come back to haunt Baldur – continuing their nocturnal dalliances with such intensity that Baldur’s body is left bloody.
No Rest for the Wicked is teased as a vampire narrative, but it is unlike other predatory queer horror texts. Helge’s return is damaging, yes, but it is clear that the intent is romantic; these are men whose love was cut short, and that connection persists after death via supernatural means. Of course, the other islanders don’t react as such when the truth comes out, resulting in some classic visual tropes of the subgenre, albeit with several intriguing subversions.
The film is more than content to take its time, though, which means that the hour and forty-minute runtime can occasionally feel narratively rudderless. When an unexpected development arises in the last act that dramatically affects the other townspeople, it’s genuinely exciting and unusual, but it also makes it clear how intimate and contained the story has been. We barely know these other characters, which makes their fates less involving to audiences.
It’s also challenging to distinguish between several of these men, a fact not helped by cinematographer Jacob Møller’s dim lighting. It’s candlelight romanticism, but there are several points where I was happy that the film was in Faorese because the subtitles helped to identify which character was which.
Writer/director Kasper Kalle has crafted a beautiful and atmospheric supernatural romance that capitalizes on the beauty of the Faroe Islands. Seriously, the scenery is so stunning that large swaths of the movie play like an advertisement for the tourism board. Aside from being gorgeous to look at, the film lives and dies based on the relationship between Baldur and Helge, which is romantic and forbidden in the film’s first half and melancholy and tragic in the back half.
It’s also quite hot, with great chemistry between the innocent, naïve Venned and the more experienced and worldly Asbæk. When Helge returns after the Biblical-level storm, the result is unnerving, sure, but it also feels like the universe correcting a misstep. In this capacity, the film plays like a sweeping historical romance about the lengths that true love will go to persist.
Despite the laggy pacing, due to a strong romantic component and the fascinating complications introduced in the film’s last act, No Rest for the Wicked is an easy recommend for fans of queer horror.
No Rest for the Wicked had its world debut at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival.
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