Spoilers for Bloodwash follow.

Bloodwash is a traditional Puppet Combo adjacent, Torture Star published horror game in many ways. In some ways, Jordan King and Henry Hoare’s game is a very strong recreation of the formula that has been established in previous Puppet Combo games.

The story is pretty simple – you play as a pregnant woman who has to do her laundry at a rundown laundromat in the dead of night. But, this is no ordinary laundromat, nor is it ordinary circumstances – for a creepy serial killer called the Womb Ripper has been killing pregnant woman. And they’ve been operating out of the area near the laundromat. Not one to take any hints, of course, you guide the character to the laundromat complex. 

This middle section of the game is mostly really good. It has a real sense of style and place. While it doesn’t get to the atmospheric heights of Stay Out of the House or Murder House, Bloodwash nonetheless manages to make the place feel real. The character dialogue is kind of funny, sometimes pretty gross, but still well done. In just a few lines, you get the mood of the place and the people who live and work there. You can wander around, play a handheld video game (also about a serial killer), mess around on some disgusting arcade machine, and flick through skeevy exploitation horror movie trailers on the laundromat’s television. These moments of immersion and interaction provide real escapism, creating moments of atmosphere so thick one can forget they are “merely” playing a game.

Bloodwash, however, links your progress through this section – an entirely non-dangerous section, mind you – to the timer on both the washing machine and the dryer. And there is more than enough time to see and do literally everything – perhaps twice over. This is fraught, simply speaking, because the last five or six minutes of waiting for the dryer to finish ended in me sitting around, totally bored. And this was a different kind of boredom than the tense waiting in Night Shift, the prologue to Stay Out of the House – this was a gate with a visibly ticking timer. And I suspected that nothing would come out and grab me before that timer finished. And I was right.

The game does that thing that a lot of horror games love to do, which is provide fake jumpscares. This isn’t a bad impulse as a horror game designer – after all, there should be some fake ones that make the player more vulnerable for the real ones to come. But there’s too many fake ones, and almost no real ones – not until the very end of the game. In terms of fake jumpscares, there’s one in the first five minutes of gameplay, there’s another one five minutes after that, and there are several more to be found in the laundromat area. Only one of these was remotely successful. The others were really predictable and a bit tiresome.

Bloodwash has the unfortunate habit of overly scripting everything, which destroys one of the core strengths of these Puppet Combo titles, which is their emergent quality. When a stalker is moving around the area alongside you, with no real way to predict where or when they’ll appear next, the horror game remains much fresher and much more exciting. Most importantly, jumpscares will retain their potent power, as you’ll never know when the next one is going to happen. That’s why Nun Massacre works so well.

Bloodwash, though, really struggles with this. There’s a section at the halfway mark where you play as a befuddled police officer, terribly out of his element. This part of the game is actually really well done atmospherically, with a strong build-up to the first actual look at the Womb Ripper, clutching a bloody fetus. But the game spirals quickly from here. While exploring the office, an office worker asks you to escort them out. The tension is really building – the lights have gone out, there’s a real tension to the game. But then the screen fades to black for just a second, and when it returns, the man is being stabbed to death in a non-interactable cutscene. You can’t run, try to shoot your gun, you can’t try to do anything. You have no choice but to guide the cop up through the ventilation shaft, where you are predictably (and weakly) jumpscared right at the end. There’s just so much to this section that disappoints. I know that coding enemy AI is not easy, and introducing a seriously difficult, unkillable enemy into the game at this point might cause players to walk away – or to become confused later on, when the Womb Ripper does become killable in the final area.

But I just couldn’t help but feel let down. Here was a creepy office building with great pacing, and then all we get after that is about twenty minutes of cutscenes, scripted scares, and reading notes, before everything culminates in a really flat boss battle, which consists of shooting the Womb Ripper as they run in a straight line at you about four or five times. They’re not hard to see coming, and this really gives the game a sad, deflated feel at the end.

The strength of Bloodwash is in its atmosphere, which King and Hoare have tuned perfectly. But it is in the game design of the horror that it struggles. There are so many moments that would have been more effective to watch when I was in control – there’s a lengthy cutscene where the Womb Ripper dismembers a guy you’ve talked to before, who was also using the laundromat. The “cutscene”, even if we couldn’t interact with it, would have been a lot cooler if we were in control, afraid to stare at it, in case the Womb Ripper saw us. Even if the Womb Ripper couldn’t see us, having us in control creates uncertainty.

When a horror game takes control, it signals to us that we’ll either be okay, or that there’s nothing we can do anyway. When Harry Mason is eaten by the fridge monster in Silent Hill, it is one of the few moments in that game out of our control. As frightening as the loud noise is, there’s also a signal that the game is over – you lost. Try again.

But where Silent Hill uses these moments sparingly, Bloodwash is a game littered with these moments of safety, when you’re watching something horrifying. It is far too safe, trying to shock with imagery and thematic content (and loud noises) alone. But these things do not make a horror game great. It is a nasty game, sure – realizing that the Womb Ripper is wearing an infant’s face as a mask is really grim. But this by itself isn’t scary. The game doesn’t let the Womb Ripper earn your fear or your respect, other than from a distant narrative perspective. This might be okay in a shock horror novel – I’ve read a few good ones of those in my time, that rely on vivid, nasty descriptions to build the atmosphere. But a game cannot rely on those alone. A game is different – a single player horror video game cannot be like sitting down and reading a good book… at least, not this kind of horror video game. This is a game meant to be about depravity and evading a serial killer – instead, we get a game about depravity and watching a serial killer do predictable jump scares.

It’s a shame, because the game is evocative and has a villain that could very easily be iconically nasty in some way. A naked lunatic wearing a baby’s face – that’s not exactly marketable, but it is horrifying. It captures the feeling of exploitation films from the period. But the game’s design never allows the Womb Ripper to be anything more than part of a ghost train ride. By the time you actually get to fight them, there’s no fear left. You have a gun, you know this is a boss fight – it just falls apart. It feels like a waste, particularly as I really like the work these developers did in future – Night at the Gates of Hell, and the demo for Sniper Killer, were both really cool. But unfortunately Bloodwash is, well… a wash.