there's a bit of a floor that Puppet Combo/Torture Star Video and associated released games will sit at quality wise. there will be examples that go above and beyond of course but nothing will go below fine short of some of their more off kilter or arcade gameplay based works. in the case of Bloodwash, things started off really well but wasn't able to hold it together in the end.

i once again got a lot of mileage out of these nearly empty late night settings. whether it was the quiet apartment building with the dilapidated basement or the laundromat and surrounding shops in the shopping center the bulk of the game takes place in, there's a great sense of terror in the mundane. there's a bigger variety of characters to interact with than other games of this type that i've played and the scattered items and clues were a nice bonus as well.

i guess my complaints with this were generally the structure and the impact (or lack thereof) of things as they unravel more in the climax. in short, Bloodwash sees you heading across town to a 24 hour laundry facility so you can wash clothes for a job interview after your apartment's utilities fell through. (of course being a horror game there's more to it than that and this takes place within context of a series of disappearances and murders around the game's broader settings.) the progression in the earlier parts quite literally follow you on your quest to do your laundry. the problem for me came with the movement of time in game. waiting for your laundry to wash so it can be moved to the dryer or for it to finish drying is put on a real time based timer which is all well and good for slight immersion or whatever but it left me with quite a bit of down time just waiting to be able to progress. i wasn't rushing through the game by any means (i did all achievements, talked to and showed evidence to everyone, explored the different shops at multiple points to check for changes) but i still found myself needing to wait around 8 minutes for the clothes to be done in the dryer. not a massive amount of time or a big deal in the end but it definitely hampered the pacing.

which leaves me with the climax. the twist here wasn't much of a surprise, it was clearly telegraphed both in some of the investigations you can do but also in some of the wider mechanisms of the game's narrative. this is fine and wasn't my issue, what i did struggle with was the way the sense of tension completely deflated the more things unraveled. this isn't a flaw that's unique to this game when it comes to the genre but it's a bummer to watch yet another one squander its fear factor the more it shows. they were onto something a bit with the Silence of the Lambs fumbling through the dark with the gun as your assailant closes in but the up close reveal was comical and it repeats itself a handful of times. it was so close.

probably my least favorite of the Puppet Combo (and associated) games that i like so far. it's solid enough and i'm glad to have played it but it could've been so much more.

Short and cheesy as hell, but I like that kind of thing. The majority of the gameplay is interacting with things, but there's an action sequence or two near the end. A cast of bizarre characters with charmingly OTT voice acting, and a dingy setting ehich pairs very well with the blocky graphics. A pretty short game that you can bang out in a single evening, but the price point is okay for that.

Rad