Bathhouse Creatures - Review (PC)

An enjoyable light management sim with pleasing pixel graphics

Bathhouse Creatures is a new cozy management sim by developer Sleepy Rock.

I always enjoy management simulators, and there is such a wide variety of them on offer. Bathhouse Creatures lets the player run a Japanese style bathhouse, which is visited by a number of different animals, all with different needs and preferences.

The game is setup into different stages, each one a different bathhouse in need of renovation and repair, and you come in to help get it running. The game progresses by introducing different animals each stage, and giving the player more items and furnishings.

You initially start out by building some baths, of which there are various types as the game unlocks, preferred by different animals. As the day starts, animals come into the bathhouse, and you assign them to a bath. Once they are in, you click on the dragon next to the bath to heat it up. When they are done bathing, you clean and empty the bath, refill it, and assign the next animal, until you have no more customers and the day is done.

Whilst this is happening, animals can drop rubbish which you have to pick up, and in later levels, more things start to occur. This means that the game gets more hectic the bigger your bathhouse becomes, as you have to simultaneously manage several baths and customers at once. If the bath is too cold or they have to wait too long, their rating goes down, which affects how much money you end up making that day.

The game is quite linear in the way it unlocks new items, so you never feel too overwhelmed with choice. You get more furnishings to increase the beauty rating of your bathhouse, ways to change the decor, and eventually methods to help automate the baths so it’s a little easier to manage.

The game is presented with a 2D pixel aesthetic, which I find quite charming. It’s a fairly relaxed management sim - and it’s quite episodic, meaning the aim isn’t to enter a sandbox and build the best business, but to complete the objectives for each level. These objectives range from building a certain amount of baths, to increasing the beauty rating, etc.

It’s not a particularly long game - only around a few hours of gameplay. That being said, I quite enjoyed it. It’s just the right level of hectic to keep you engaged, but cozy enough you can still relax with it. I like the graphical style, and the gentle sense of humour the game has with it’s cast. Overall, this is a fun indie game that will give you a few hours of enjoyment one afternoon.

Rating - 3.5/5