chilla's art's winter streambait offering this year centers around an unnamed employee of a film company. it's unclear what kind of film company this is beyond the higher up wanting him to get some "interesting footage" at an abandoned home. the set up seems to exist primarily only to explain the use of a camera and vhs tapes through out the game; on steam, the game is described as a "found footage mockumentary."

what follows is a trip through a house littered with blood, feathers, and strange tapes documenting a young boy's stay with his grandparents in the home. much of the game reminds me of nana825763's "my house walk-through", other parts harken my mind back to "ring-u". there's a particular segment where, while wandering down a hall, you're forced to consider just how alone in this abandoned house you are-- a brief scare that reminded me of, surprisingly, the conjuring. the overall presentation, though, largely feels unique to jisatsu, a title built from the characters meaning "self" as in "self"ie and "suicide."

some of this game feels like the scariest chilla's art has gotten to date: jumpscares that actually feel earned, the intriguing use of a censor bar, the classic claustrophobic thriller minute. the tense anxiety that's built up through the game pays off, though it never really gets to the heights you really want it to.

it's hard to describe what it is that bogs this one down: is it too long? too short? too ambiguous? does it lean into it's inspirations too much? it is a sudden and awkward bumble at times, but it never loses it's tense atmosphere. it's good, just not as good as some of chilla's catalogue. it's fair; i'd recommend it if you have around two hours to kill, and miss j-horror from a decade ago.

like, i've dumped over 150 hours into this. but also, i don't know why i did that. the interplay of mechanics is nauseatingly both underwhelming and overwhelming, like a candy bar gone rotten the day before you unwrapped it. each character is alienating merely on the thinnest part of the surface, just enough to all generically imply depth. every day in the mines is just another pointless moment enrobed in feigned principle, all while the idea of simply standing next to your crops until they grow in taunts you from afar.

haley best girl anyway

i am genuinely fascinated by how they managed to adapt the cheesy 90's action horror movie vibe of the original to match what would come out in a modern cinema now. it's still cheesy fun, but i couldn't shake the feeling i was part of a cheesy action horror blockbuster released in the dead heat of the summer. it feels good, it progresses well, and the backtracking never hurt or felt like padding. reworks of certain bosses and set pieces work so well in some respects that i'm genuinely glad i took my time with this re4make.

my only objection is the voice acting; leon's voice actor does some great work in bringing the remake timeline's version of the guy to life. there's a lot of nuance and care put into bringing leon to a modern audience. while gao's performance was (arguably suitably) stilted, it's apostolides as leon who sometimes misses the mark, erring too close to genuine hero and not close enough to tongue in cheek. considering what a big fan he is of the original, i imagine this is less of a problem with him as a performer, though, and more in line with issues the voice director has had.

ballet as combat, sleek shmup minigames, and a blend of narrative and game design that other games still struggle to get right; what makes nier automata worth your time is the parts that come together and get tossed back out at you with all the pomp of someone spitting their blood and teeth into your face. theatre is the heart of the game, operating fully on the fringes of a b movie space opera. it is, in fact, that good, and the deconstruction of philosophical ideas is not even the core of it but rather a familiar means to discuss the ideas present at it's core.

as a port, it's a damn fine one: it plays exactly like a 2016 playstation title, looks about as well as it can on the switch and usually runs smoothly. that said, the switch can't really handle playing it for long periods of time - i experienced two notable crashes in game. once immediately following the grun battle in route A and again just before the emotional climax at the beginning of route C. additionally, the joycons just don't feel like the ideal controller for this game. everything is mapped to the very top of it, and unless you wanna fiddle with it for several minutes, you're pretty much stuck holding your controller awkwardly. finally, i don't think that handheld automata is the optimal way to experience it.

but it's worth your time in every way you can imagine and more, really.

the latter half of december is home to a number of traditional holidays. one of them, the ancient roman festival of saturnalia, drums up images of debauchery. dedicated to the god saturn, it was a week long festival of gift giving, gambling, good eating, and masters recognizing their servants for their work by waiting on them for once.

when you first look around the game's setting, a fictional sardinian village called gravoi, "debauchery" isn't what comes to mind.

cavernous yet claustrophobic, saturnalia is an autopsy of gravoi and it's nightmarish history in the throes of it's final night. you're introduced to four characters, all of them playable, each of them with deeply ingrained roots to the village.

over the course of the game, you rip those roots out.

it's not an easy task. the game makes use of it's serpentine map to confuse you: it's full of dead ends, bizarre loops, narrow pathways that are easy to miss or mistake for something else, and has the audacity to penalize you by procedurally regenerating everything if your entire party dies. you can't trust the villagers, and you can't trust the architecture. to cap it off, you're pursued by a bizarre monster that wants to sacrifice you; interestingly, it wasn't entirely uncommon for gladiator fights to happen across the week of saturnalia. rumors persist that fallen gladiators were offered up to the god saturn himself.

the visual design calls to mind both the dreamlike stages of expressionists and giallo films; vivid pinks, purples and blues color the village. a purple fog rolls in, bleeding primary blue and the world goes magenta while your character's breathing grows ragged from running, and the sound design is stupendous with a soundtrack that absolutely kills it, somehow blending 80's synth with the atmosphere of an old, forgotten sardinian village to triumphant measures. roberta valle's vocals in the opening theme are haunting, but none of these reasons are likely what will keep you going through the game. they may haunt you later, but in the moment, with the controller in your hands, it's the mystery hidden beneath the pathways of gravoi that keep you running.

it is, unfortunately, bogged down by the camera, and how sensitive the map and AI can be. it's easy for a character to get stuck even when the monster is in pursuit. the camera makes use of fixed angles occasionally, painting the game vintage. it really feels like a classic ps2 horror game when it tries to use the camera in that way. visually, it's appreciated, and it theoretically adds to the experience, but in practice, it's jittery and tends to be frustrating. the storyline and how it unfolds can be confusing, but if you're careful and take your time, what's laid out for you to turn over will make sense easily-- besides, piecing it together on your own is half the fun. with the mind map, it's made all the easier to figure out what's going on beneath the surface of quaint little gravoi.

modern day anxieties are propped up for discussion, the suppression of people's needs a constant thread through out the game. just beyond the festival's bloodletting: homophobia, racism, and even unions. saturnalia uses an ancient ritual to harken in the new world, sinking the old ways to make something of what remains. the bones of the game is the survival horror, but it's the storylines you close up over the game's run that shine.

chilla's art finds supernatural horror in the most mundane of every day tasks. maybe over half of their games deal with something terrible happening to the protagonist while they're on the clock: the closing shift, the convenience store, the caregiver, night delivery-- and many more, but each of these titles takes place in some form of workplace environment, or leads you somewhere because of work that turns out to be dangerous. the aforementioned titles are also some of chilla's arts best; being forced into situations because of work, i guess, is it's own kind of horror.

the bathhouse is no different. the protagonist character finds herself in the epicenter of a haunting when she stumbles upon an ad for a job: live in an apartment in the country-side, rent free, as long as you work at the local bathhouse. craving freedom from the current state of her life, she jumps onto it, not realizing that the tiny village is a spiritual vortex that plans to swallow her whole. on paper, it's got all the markings of a chilla's art game that should succeed: atmosphere, fun characters, cheeky scares, interesting visuals, and a gooey, ghoulish center.

in execution, the game flounders on more than one level. the most egregious is performance, which also affects how the game looks; the eerie trademark character models look wonky in a way that doesn't feel intentional, but rather like a mistake. more often than not, it's hard to really tell what you're looking at, as the game feels like a blob of neutral tones. it stutters, crashes, fails to keep itself together. i'm not tech-y enough to guess why this is the case, but it's a shame: the lighting system this time around looks very refined, and like they're trying something new.

maybe if the game were functioning, it would be something you could lose yourself to, but the atmosphere never clicked for me. i didn't care for the storyline as much as i tried, and i found that what was conveyed about the story was done so in a way that left me confused. it isn't particularly hard to follow, but maybe the speed and progression is to blame here; the game runs for around two and a half hours if you decide to go back in for both endings, and with the job simulator portions feeling both too fast and too slow. the simplicity of it perhaps is to blame: the closing shift had you memorizing and checking how to make certain drinks, but there's nothing here but clicking and running back and forth. it's monotonous.

every once in a while, usually after dropping a Big title, chilla's art will drop another game that reminds me of the end of the week dinner you make to stretch your grocery run. it tosses in all your favorites with a few extra seasonings for flavor, but the mish-mash of them never quite harmonizes. this is that game. maybe it'll work more for you, than me, though.