This review contains spoilers
cw: allusions to suicide, self-harm, and bodily harm. discussions of mental health and social phobia included.
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All around my house, there is a garden made of glass. It looks so beautiful outside my window. During the day, the light from the sun shining down on it refracts through the trees made of twisting and flowers made of tiny perfect shards, a dazzling kalidescope of colours dancing through the garden. And at night, the light from the stars shines down on each one of the mirrorleaves that make up the bushes and trees, each one twinkling and dazzling with the light of an entire sea of stars.
I want nothing more to get closer, to see the forest with my own eyes, feel it with my own hands, hear it with my own ears. But every time I get close, every time i try to venture outside and into the world beyond my window, it hurts. I try to walk through it, as carefully as I can, but thorns that others can see but I can't cut into me. I shatter fragile flowers into a thousand tiny jagged shards with a single clumsy footstep. And sometimes I catch my face in reflections in the glass, reflecting a twisted, malformed image of the self that exists in the mind's eye, all the imperfections and flaws cutting all the deeper for their concreteness. Each time I try to walk through the garden, each time I try to exist in that space, in that moment, I shatter beautiful things around me at every turn, without intending, without meaning, and hurt myself in turn.
And so, I flinch. I retreat. I walk away, back behind closed doors. Where I can't break anything else. Where I can't hurt anymore.
And I stay there.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've always been fascinated by the relationship visual novels have with space and time. Almost all of the ones I've played - from serious personal reflective pieces to light-hearted romances - contain within them multiple parallel worlds, different realities of the same story spiraling off in their own directions. Romance stories that contain within them a dozen universes where the main character dates each member of the cast, stories with countless detours and Bad Ends on the way to a True Conclusion...it's not unheard of in literature, but it's ubiquity within the VN space is striking. Even Umineko, the most notable VN I have played (some of) that does not have branching routes or choices, plays extensively in a field of alternate possibilities and routes in a way that assumes familiarity with forms and rhythms that simply isn't given outside the Visual Novel. Even setting aside my lingering university Grant Morrison Phase giving me Multiverse Brain Worms that only the media environment of 2022 could entirely rid me of, there's something entrancing about a work that contains multitudes of itself within it, rivers that break off and flow in altogether separate directions from a source they all draw from, answering the same questions in different ways.
And yet, even in games like Zero Time Dilemma that are absolutely lascivious in their interest in parallel worlds, rarely has this aspect of a visual novel truly affected me. The ways in which the different branches and routes do, certainly, but the act of choosing itself rarely strikes me in such a way. It's connective tissue, not a beating heart in and of itself.
This cannot be said for one night, hot springs, a game I played last year, and have attempted to write about multiple times, only to fail each and every time. A game where the use of these choices, the use of these other realities, and other possibilities, existing side-by-side, affected me more than I could have ever imagined.
Mechanically, one night is simple. You simply read the story of Haru, a trans woman, and her friends visiting the hot springs for a birthday party, dealing with the frictions and relationships that Haru confronts along the way. Through that story, you make little decisions that branch the narrative in different ways. Some choices will simply move the narrative along in a different direction, while other choices will make you lose one of three hearts on the top of your screen, and if you lose all three, you get a "bad" ending. Classic visual novel stuff. But how one night presents these choices, how it presents the consequences of getting a game over, and how I responded to both...it was...
it was more than i could take.
i thought i knew. i thought i knew what i was getting into. i had played another of npckc's games, tomato clinic, before this one, and it was mostly just, well, cute. that's not to say there was nothing there, it felt very true to the awkward role of educator average queer people are often forced to play for well-meaning but uninformed cishet people, but overwhelmingly what it did was make me smile and not much else. and y'know i was expecting the same thing here. i was expecting to smile, to have a nice time on my lunch break.
that didn't happen.
what happened instead was that this game hit me with incalculable force, all the stronger for how completely unexpected it was, it's deliberately small presentation cutting deep into in ways that left me genuinely shaken and deep in thought about who i am and why i act the way that i do.
that's a hyperbolic statement. and i expect, for many people, it won't ring true. but it did for me. and articulating why requires articulating...myself, somewhat.
full disclosure, i first played this about a year ago. and i've tried to write this review multiple times before. but I just found no way of doing so without talking explicitly about why it made me feel the ways that it did, what about it that caused it to hit so hard. excessive auto-biography is a bad habit i fell into far often when i was writing more regularly on letterboxd and i have tried to avoid that here, to not treat a work's relation to me as the beginning and end of its critique. i am simply not a very interesting person, and saying "i personally related to this work" for a piece of criticism doesn't make for compelling writing by default. i don't think i've always succeeded, but it is something i have tried to aspire beyond on backloggd. i just found that impossible for one night hot springs. and i still do. and yet, i still want to talk about this game, what i think it does and has to say, and if i have to talk about myself to do so, then that is what will have to happen.
so, apologies. this is One of Those.
i am a non-binary trans person. i am also autistic, described to me then as "asperger's syndrome", and was diagnosed at a young age because I was a particularly...noticeable case of it. in addition, i was also diagnosed at a relatively young age with social anxiety disorder, then described to me as "social phobia". autism manifests in myriad different ways for myriad different people, and what is true for one person will not ring true for others. one autistic person i knew in university was one of the most socially capable people i have ever known, effortlessly charming and quick-witted in a way i am not or never have been. i struggle immensely with tone, expressions, and conversational flow, of knowing when to say the right thing, or how to say it. i speak without full confidence that my meaning will be expressed, only having hope that it will land how i intend to, without hurting anyone around me, and if i do, i hope only that i can recognise it and make amends for it immediately. whether this creates or simply feeds into my social anxiety disorder i can't say for certain, but the way others will speak in ways in ways i don't entirely understand i will respond in ways that i less comprehend and more simply Hope are the way one is Supposed To Respond certainly does not help the fact that i approach most conversations with almost everyone in the world with a certain degree of nervousness, if not outright fear, whether it's hoping to make a good impression on someone new, or hoping i don't accidentally hurt the feelings of someone i care about, there's always a reason to feel nervous about the very simple act of interacting with another human being in the world. being non-binary doesn't help much either, as in the majority of situations that take place in areas where i am not able to make my pronouns clear up front, misgendering and misrecognition isn't so much a possibility as it is a certainty.
if you've interacted with me personally at all you almost certainly think of me as oblivious or distant, speaking clumsily, awkwardly, stand-offishly, or any combination of these or any other, for which I apologize, because even reaching this level of capability requires a level of effort on my behalf that often leaves me completely exhausted from even basic interactions. none of this means i don't enjoy being with others, for me, no interaction is natural or free-flowing, it's a panicked and practiced effort to keep my head above water with immense effort.
so, often? i will flinch. i will shudder. i will apologize - for any unintended slight, for my existence as a whole. out of fear, out of resignation, out of the crawling voice in the back of my skull that tells me that no one - no one - wants to be around me, ever - i will find ways to extricate myself or excuse myself from situations, sometimes from all things altogether. faced with friction, it is easier to simply relent, to stand aside, rather than to speak up, because my voice is coarse and harsh and i cannot stand the noise it makes as it crawls out of my throat.
time and time again, i have taken the path of least resistance, so, when i played one night hot springs...i did the same. when haru suffered the routine emotionless deadnaming that is the common result of interactions in the world, i instinctively picked the options that made her flinch, shudder, to take the path of least resistance, to allow herself to be walked over rather than assert herself. as i do each time i play through a vn like this for the first time, i picked the options that struck as natural, and each and every time, it led me down paths that ranged from self-humiliating to outwardly self-destructive, to erode away at Haru's confidence because i had none, until eventually she can't take any more, and retreats into herself mid-party, until she vanishes, leaving the concern of her friends in her wake.
this is my world. this is the world i have made for myself. this closed-off, tiny thing, where i slam shut every door i have to knock on out of fear of what i might find on the other side. playing this game forced me to confront things about myself that part of me might have thought were natural, or even noble, boldly self-sacrificing myself, excusing myself from the company of others for their own good. but really, it was just cowardice, in the face of a world that is difficult, that is challenging, that hurts and where, yes, you can cause hurt in turn. but there's nothing noble about hiding yourself away in a dark corner of a distant room, afraid to even speak. one night, hot springs, despite it's incredibly warm, soft visuals and gentle music, is absolutely uncompromising in what it revealed about the way i so often choose to live my life.
it's a depiction made all the more heartbreaking by the results of resisting my natural instincts, peering into the alternate worlds in this story, and seeing for myself the words i have left unsaid, the friends left unmade, the closed-off hearts that could have been opened, but remained sealed out of fear. there are some really warm, beautifully written scenes in one night, hot springs, and it's only by seeing every path, by walking down every door, by availing yourself of the power visual novels grant you to see every possibility in this single night at the hot springs in a way you never could in real life, can you see the full shape of these people and the feelings they have for one another. something is always left unsaid, unheard.
each time i leave my house, each time i meet with friends, each time i poke my head around to my roommates, each time i log on to this website or any other, i am haru, and her choices become my choices. to risk walking barefoot through a garden of glass for what i know to lie on the other side, or to remain behind it, and make of it an insurmountable wall that grows smaller and smaller as my world contracts more and more into that darkened corner in my room. but there is a wider world out there, full of people i want to see, full of potential great memories and warm moments. not every night at the hot springs will be good. there will always be opportunities i cannot take, things left unsaid, and things left unheard. but if i flinch and retreat every time i face difficulties, every time it seems like this might be a bad night at the hot springs, then i'll never have a good one. i'll never have that night where i make a new friend, reconnect with an old one, or tell someone how i really feel about them.
the cringey, melodramatic thing i wrote at the top of this review? that's the best picture i can paint about what it feels like to live behind my eyes, of trying as best as i can to communicate fully and completely with the people i love because i want to be with them and enjoy their company more than anything else in the world, but knowing that it will always be difficult, knowing that it requires constant, agonising effort. it's not the same as feeling that, every day. i do not think writing, or video games, are true empathy machines, despite assertions to the contrary rising in both gaming journalism and academic spaces in the past couple years. i don't think video games can make you feel what it is like to be trans, or autistic, or socially anxious. neither this review, nor one night, hot springs will make you feel like what it feels like to be me.
but do they have to? i don't think they do. i think all they have to do, in the sounds they make chiming with another, in how they look matching an image etched into your heart, in the words they speak, and how they feel to play, to produce some kind of image that resonates, some kind of emotion that resounds...to reach someone, anyone, and maybe even be reached in turn.
and it isn't easy. believe me, i know.
but when it works? when you reach out a metaphorical hand, and meet another? it is so, so worth it in the end.
there is no reason to believe npckc will ever read this. but, i'll knock on that door anyway, speak up anyway, just in case my words reach theirs.
Thank you for your game!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All around my house, there is a garden made of glass. It looks so beautiful outside my window. During the day, the light from the sun shining down on it refracts through the trees made of twisting and flowers made of tiny perfect shards, a dazzling kalidescope of colours dancing through the garden. And at night, the light from the stars shines down on each one of the mirrorleaves that make up the bushes and trees, each one twinkling and dazzling with the light of an entire sea of stars.
I want nothing more to get closer, to see the forest with my own eyes, feel it with my own hands, hear it with my own ears. But every time I get close, every time i try to venture outside and into the world beyond my window, it hurts. I try to walk through it, as carefully as I can, but thorns that others can see but I can't cut into me. I shatter fragile flowers into a thousand tiny jagged shards with a single clumsy footstep. And sometimes I catch my face in reflections in the glass, reflecting a twisted, malformed image of the self that exists in the mind's eye, all the imperfections and flaws cutting all the deeper for their concreteness. Each time I try to walk through the garden, each time I try to exist in that space, in that moment, I shatter beautiful things around me at every turn, without intending, without meaning, and hurt myself in turn.
And so, I flinch. I retreat. I walk away, back behind closed doors. Where I can't break anything else. Where I can't hurt anymore.
And I stay there.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've always been fascinated by the relationship visual novels have with space and time. Almost all of the ones I've played - from serious personal reflective pieces to light-hearted romances - contain within them multiple parallel worlds, different realities of the same story spiraling off in their own directions. Romance stories that contain within them a dozen universes where the main character dates each member of the cast, stories with countless detours and Bad Ends on the way to a True Conclusion...it's not unheard of in literature, but it's ubiquity within the VN space is striking. Even Umineko, the most notable VN I have played (some of) that does not have branching routes or choices, plays extensively in a field of alternate possibilities and routes in a way that assumes familiarity with forms and rhythms that simply isn't given outside the Visual Novel. Even setting aside my lingering university Grant Morrison Phase giving me Multiverse Brain Worms that only the media environment of 2022 could entirely rid me of, there's something entrancing about a work that contains multitudes of itself within it, rivers that break off and flow in altogether separate directions from a source they all draw from, answering the same questions in different ways.
And yet, even in games like Zero Time Dilemma that are absolutely lascivious in their interest in parallel worlds, rarely has this aspect of a visual novel truly affected me. The ways in which the different branches and routes do, certainly, but the act of choosing itself rarely strikes me in such a way. It's connective tissue, not a beating heart in and of itself.
This cannot be said for one night, hot springs, a game I played last year, and have attempted to write about multiple times, only to fail each and every time. A game where the use of these choices, the use of these other realities, and other possibilities, existing side-by-side, affected me more than I could have ever imagined.
Mechanically, one night is simple. You simply read the story of Haru, a trans woman, and her friends visiting the hot springs for a birthday party, dealing with the frictions and relationships that Haru confronts along the way. Through that story, you make little decisions that branch the narrative in different ways. Some choices will simply move the narrative along in a different direction, while other choices will make you lose one of three hearts on the top of your screen, and if you lose all three, you get a "bad" ending. Classic visual novel stuff. But how one night presents these choices, how it presents the consequences of getting a game over, and how I responded to both...it was...
it was more than i could take.
i thought i knew. i thought i knew what i was getting into. i had played another of npckc's games, tomato clinic, before this one, and it was mostly just, well, cute. that's not to say there was nothing there, it felt very true to the awkward role of educator average queer people are often forced to play for well-meaning but uninformed cishet people, but overwhelmingly what it did was make me smile and not much else. and y'know i was expecting the same thing here. i was expecting to smile, to have a nice time on my lunch break.
that didn't happen.
what happened instead was that this game hit me with incalculable force, all the stronger for how completely unexpected it was, it's deliberately small presentation cutting deep into in ways that left me genuinely shaken and deep in thought about who i am and why i act the way that i do.
that's a hyperbolic statement. and i expect, for many people, it won't ring true. but it did for me. and articulating why requires articulating...myself, somewhat.
full disclosure, i first played this about a year ago. and i've tried to write this review multiple times before. but I just found no way of doing so without talking explicitly about why it made me feel the ways that it did, what about it that caused it to hit so hard. excessive auto-biography is a bad habit i fell into far often when i was writing more regularly on letterboxd and i have tried to avoid that here, to not treat a work's relation to me as the beginning and end of its critique. i am simply not a very interesting person, and saying "i personally related to this work" for a piece of criticism doesn't make for compelling writing by default. i don't think i've always succeeded, but it is something i have tried to aspire beyond on backloggd. i just found that impossible for one night hot springs. and i still do. and yet, i still want to talk about this game, what i think it does and has to say, and if i have to talk about myself to do so, then that is what will have to happen.
so, apologies. this is One of Those.
i am a non-binary trans person. i am also autistic, described to me then as "asperger's syndrome", and was diagnosed at a young age because I was a particularly...noticeable case of it. in addition, i was also diagnosed at a relatively young age with social anxiety disorder, then described to me as "social phobia". autism manifests in myriad different ways for myriad different people, and what is true for one person will not ring true for others. one autistic person i knew in university was one of the most socially capable people i have ever known, effortlessly charming and quick-witted in a way i am not or never have been. i struggle immensely with tone, expressions, and conversational flow, of knowing when to say the right thing, or how to say it. i speak without full confidence that my meaning will be expressed, only having hope that it will land how i intend to, without hurting anyone around me, and if i do, i hope only that i can recognise it and make amends for it immediately. whether this creates or simply feeds into my social anxiety disorder i can't say for certain, but the way others will speak in ways in ways i don't entirely understand i will respond in ways that i less comprehend and more simply Hope are the way one is Supposed To Respond certainly does not help the fact that i approach most conversations with almost everyone in the world with a certain degree of nervousness, if not outright fear, whether it's hoping to make a good impression on someone new, or hoping i don't accidentally hurt the feelings of someone i care about, there's always a reason to feel nervous about the very simple act of interacting with another human being in the world. being non-binary doesn't help much either, as in the majority of situations that take place in areas where i am not able to make my pronouns clear up front, misgendering and misrecognition isn't so much a possibility as it is a certainty.
if you've interacted with me personally at all you almost certainly think of me as oblivious or distant, speaking clumsily, awkwardly, stand-offishly, or any combination of these or any other, for which I apologize, because even reaching this level of capability requires a level of effort on my behalf that often leaves me completely exhausted from even basic interactions. none of this means i don't enjoy being with others, for me, no interaction is natural or free-flowing, it's a panicked and practiced effort to keep my head above water with immense effort.
so, often? i will flinch. i will shudder. i will apologize - for any unintended slight, for my existence as a whole. out of fear, out of resignation, out of the crawling voice in the back of my skull that tells me that no one - no one - wants to be around me, ever - i will find ways to extricate myself or excuse myself from situations, sometimes from all things altogether. faced with friction, it is easier to simply relent, to stand aside, rather than to speak up, because my voice is coarse and harsh and i cannot stand the noise it makes as it crawls out of my throat.
time and time again, i have taken the path of least resistance, so, when i played one night hot springs...i did the same. when haru suffered the routine emotionless deadnaming that is the common result of interactions in the world, i instinctively picked the options that made her flinch, shudder, to take the path of least resistance, to allow herself to be walked over rather than assert herself. as i do each time i play through a vn like this for the first time, i picked the options that struck as natural, and each and every time, it led me down paths that ranged from self-humiliating to outwardly self-destructive, to erode away at Haru's confidence because i had none, until eventually she can't take any more, and retreats into herself mid-party, until she vanishes, leaving the concern of her friends in her wake.
this is my world. this is the world i have made for myself. this closed-off, tiny thing, where i slam shut every door i have to knock on out of fear of what i might find on the other side. playing this game forced me to confront things about myself that part of me might have thought were natural, or even noble, boldly self-sacrificing myself, excusing myself from the company of others for their own good. but really, it was just cowardice, in the face of a world that is difficult, that is challenging, that hurts and where, yes, you can cause hurt in turn. but there's nothing noble about hiding yourself away in a dark corner of a distant room, afraid to even speak. one night, hot springs, despite it's incredibly warm, soft visuals and gentle music, is absolutely uncompromising in what it revealed about the way i so often choose to live my life.
it's a depiction made all the more heartbreaking by the results of resisting my natural instincts, peering into the alternate worlds in this story, and seeing for myself the words i have left unsaid, the friends left unmade, the closed-off hearts that could have been opened, but remained sealed out of fear. there are some really warm, beautifully written scenes in one night, hot springs, and it's only by seeing every path, by walking down every door, by availing yourself of the power visual novels grant you to see every possibility in this single night at the hot springs in a way you never could in real life, can you see the full shape of these people and the feelings they have for one another. something is always left unsaid, unheard.
each time i leave my house, each time i meet with friends, each time i poke my head around to my roommates, each time i log on to this website or any other, i am haru, and her choices become my choices. to risk walking barefoot through a garden of glass for what i know to lie on the other side, or to remain behind it, and make of it an insurmountable wall that grows smaller and smaller as my world contracts more and more into that darkened corner in my room. but there is a wider world out there, full of people i want to see, full of potential great memories and warm moments. not every night at the hot springs will be good. there will always be opportunities i cannot take, things left unsaid, and things left unheard. but if i flinch and retreat every time i face difficulties, every time it seems like this might be a bad night at the hot springs, then i'll never have a good one. i'll never have that night where i make a new friend, reconnect with an old one, or tell someone how i really feel about them.
the cringey, melodramatic thing i wrote at the top of this review? that's the best picture i can paint about what it feels like to live behind my eyes, of trying as best as i can to communicate fully and completely with the people i love because i want to be with them and enjoy their company more than anything else in the world, but knowing that it will always be difficult, knowing that it requires constant, agonising effort. it's not the same as feeling that, every day. i do not think writing, or video games, are true empathy machines, despite assertions to the contrary rising in both gaming journalism and academic spaces in the past couple years. i don't think video games can make you feel what it is like to be trans, or autistic, or socially anxious. neither this review, nor one night, hot springs will make you feel like what it feels like to be me.
but do they have to? i don't think they do. i think all they have to do, in the sounds they make chiming with another, in how they look matching an image etched into your heart, in the words they speak, and how they feel to play, to produce some kind of image that resonates, some kind of emotion that resounds...to reach someone, anyone, and maybe even be reached in turn.
and it isn't easy. believe me, i know.
but when it works? when you reach out a metaphorical hand, and meet another? it is so, so worth it in the end.
there is no reason to believe npckc will ever read this. but, i'll knock on that door anyway, speak up anyway, just in case my words reach theirs.
Thank you for your game!
poyfuh
1 year ago