About the Game
One Night, Hot Spring is a visual novel about how a transgender woman navigates her childhood best friend’s invitation to a hot spring trip. The game was developed by an indie game developer named npckc. I played the game on PC. The target audience of the game is players who like visual novels and those who are interested in transgender women’s stories.
Analysis
Since the game is a visual novel, the gameplay mechanics are simple. You advance through the dialogue to learn about the protagonist and others that the protagonist interacts with, and occasionally you get two choices of action to choose from. Different choices lead to different endings, and there are a total of 7 of them, all of which I played through.
This game is uniquely situated in the realm of feminism, because it goes beyond portraying the different things that make women women. The protagonist being a transgender woman in a relatively traditional country like Japan makes the story very thought-provoking and even educational. It serves as a good reminder that while cisgender women feminists are banding together to tell their stories and fight for the rights they deserve, there may be a group of woman-identifying people who are still fighting their own battles because of their transgender identity. Due to various complex reasons, they may feel still feel alone after deciding to go with the gender they identify with more rather than the one they are expected to conform to based on their sex, and they may still not feel comfortable sharing their feelings and experiences even with those who they know truly care about them. As a cisgender woman, playing this game was an eye-opening and empathy-building experience. In the “The Mechanics of Feminism” section in chapter 4 of the “Play like a Feminist” book, the author says that the design of mechanics that make the players actively replay and reflect is one key component of feminist games. As I retried the game with different choices in order to get to different endings, the game prompted me to reflect on possible consequences of a person action to their own experience and others’ experiences. In the context of this game, I began to ponder what it might be like to be a transgender woman and what it might be like to have a friend who is a transgender woman.
The relationships between the protagonist and her old and new friends, as well as her encounter with a hot springs staff who really understands her, are the best part of the visual novel. The backstory, new developments, and interactions are simple enough to keep the visual novel short, but they are also complex enough to make the player feel many different emotions. Playing this game as a feminist, I experienced a wide range of emotions including sadness, excitement, curiosity, gratefulness, and empathy. My feelings of sadness mostly stemmed from seeing how the protagonist still is unable to be fully honest with her friend (though very reasonably so). My feelings of excitement came from seeing the protagonist form a meaningful connection with a new friend who has her own way of making the protagonist feel better. Lastly, I felt so grateful when it was revealed that the hot springs staff who had been very kind to the protagonist actually had a sister who was also transgender. Seeing all these women trying to help the protagonist, in their own best way possible, was very moving and heart-warming.
I do have one critique on the design choice of the choice limits represented as hearts (on the upper left of the game view). When I picked certain choices, I would lose a heart, and when I have lost all hearts I would have no second options in subsequent choice scenarios. Because hearts are often used to represent health or number of lives remaining, I feel that the lost of a heart here could signal that a wrong choice was made, which I believe was not the intention of the game. The choice limit seems to simply be a mechanic of story development, so it would be better represented as something more neutral.
