Onsen Master [Xbox]

Developed by Waking Oni Games, Onsen Master is a basic customer management game where you’ve got to manage an Onsen - a Japanese bathhouse - where customers want different bathing ingredients to heal their ailments; and you’ll not only have human customers, but Yokai too! You play as Mu, who is looking after the Onsen for his sensei, The Great Onsen Master, who has gone on a long quest - expecting to be gone for around a year. After you get the Onsen up and running, a Yokai called Hitotsume will come along to give you advice - and they also act as the second player when playing in 2-player mode.

For two player, you can play co-op or Versus, with these modes offering slight differences to the gameplay style. Co-op has you working together with a friend, and makes the game substantially easier - even on the hardest difficulty. Versus is the flip of this, where you and a friend will go head to head, trying to get the highest score. The layout of the Onsen remains the same, but you’ll need to race to be the first to plop customers into baths and get them served correctly - which can prove to be a bit of a challenge if you keep stealing customers off of each other.

With a reasonable level of challenge throughout, you’ll have to manage the patrons visiting your Onsen, and during Boss levels you’ll have to prioritise their needs in order to complete their objective - and allow you to move onto the next Onsen. Levels - and Bosses - get progressively harder, with new customers introduced such as ones that request blessings on their bath, as well as drunken customers that will just barge past the queue and hop into the nearest bath - even if it’s not the one they want - and yokai-possessed customers that will look for a second option after being exorcised in the bath the spirit wants.

There are a few different Onsens for you to manage, with three levels in each. The third stage in each Onsen includes a Yokai boss that needs to be dealt with, and each of these has different needs as well as difficulties for you to contend with, such as adding Kodama to pedestals in order to remove roots from blocking baths, levels that flood and slow you down, etc. Akamiya’s boss, the Kitsune, will possess you during the battle, reversing the controls - and you’ll need to guide yourself into the correct baths to satisfy their needs. This can be straightforward if you’ve already got the bath available, but if you need to set up a new bath for them, trying to go against the reversed controls is a bit of a challenge!

The visuals are very bright and well detailed - with a cute range of characters and a well suited soundtrack throughout. It is fun, but it does feel like there could have been other elements included, such as upgrades as you progress, maybe in the form of spending your points to add upgrades to the baths to auto-clean, etc. The basic gameplay premise doesn’t change drastically as you progress, only adding slight changes as you go such as the introduction of enchantment scrolls to be added to the baths. There were a few odd glitches that occurred as we played, with customers getting caught on the environment, as well as Bosses breaking the level at times and the player characters not spawning - and these all caused a fair bit of frustration.

Able to be completed in under two hours, with a bit of replayability for playing with a friend, it provides a decent level of enjoyment with a simple light-hearted story. A number of the achievements are completely bugged which is a bit frustrating - especially since it’s now been a couple of months after release and these still don’t seem to have been resolved. Overall, Onsen Master was a lot of fun, and provided a decent challenge as you try to stay on top of the customers coming in, but its flaws do bring it down a bit for our rating - so if you want to try it out, you can find it on Xbox for £12.49.

In the end, we decided to give Onsen Master the Collecting Asylum rating of 6.5/10.

Are you interested in Onsen Master? What do you think of it?
Let us know in the comments below!

- V x

Thank you to Whitethorn Digital for the Onsen Master Xbox review code!