One Night, Hot Springs: Playing as a Feminist
One Night, Hot Springs is a free visual novel developed by indie creator npckc, released in 2018. You play as Haru, a young transgender woman in Japan who is invited by her best friend Manami to spend a night at a hot spring. The game takes about thirty minutes to complete and has seven different endings depending on the choices you make. It was originally created for the Trans Gal Jam, and that origin shapes everything about how the game is built and what it wants you to feel.
My Experience Playing the Game
Going into this game, I did not know much about it beyond the premise. Within the first few minutes, I was already struck by how differently it framed player choice compared to most games I have played. The decisions are not about combat or strategy. They are about navigating social situations that feel low-stakes on the surface but carry real emotional weight. At one point early in the game, Haru has to fill out an intake form at the hot spring that asks for her gender. It is a small moment, but the game lets you sit in Haru’s hesitation. I found myself actually pausing before selecting an option, thinking about what each choice might mean for her rather than just optimizing for a good ending.
There is another moment where Haru has to decide which bath to use. Again, something that would be completely unremarkable in any other game becomes tense and meaningful here. I played through multiple endings, and what surprised me was that the game does not moralize or punish you for choosing cautiously. Sometimes Haru protects herself by avoiding conflict. Sometimes she is met with unexpected kindness. The variability felt honest rather than didactic.
The game does not shy away from showing that Haru faces real difficulties. Even as a cisgender person, I felt the weight of those moments in a way I did not expect. The game gives you a firsthand window into how Haru moves through the world, and while no single story can speak for all transgender experiences, it surfaces obstacles that are real and worth understanding. That tension is reflected in the heart counter mechanic. While there are no objectively wrong choices, letting Haru’s anxiety take over drains the counter and closes off options, straining her relationships with both Manami and Erika by the end of the night. For instance, Erika is well-meaning but asks questions that come across as uncomfortable and uninformed. It is a small but effective way of making emotional labor visible as something with actual consequences in the game world.
Connection to Class Concepts and Readings
In MDA terms, the mechanics here are deliberately minimal. You read, you choose, you repeat. But that simplicity is doing real work. Chess writes in Play like a Feminist that feminist game design often uses mechanics to make players actively reflect and replay, rather than just consume. The seven endings in One Night, Hot Springs serve exactly that function. Each playthrough reframes the same night from a slightly different angle, and returning to the same scenes with new choices makes you more attentive to what Haru is actually experiencing rather than just what outcome you are steering toward.
The game also fits cleanly into what Chess describes as intersectional feminist design. Haru is not just a woman protagonist in the conventional sense. She is a trans woman navigating a specifically Japanese social context, where the pressure to avoid causing inconvenience to others is deeply culturally loaded. The game does not flatten that specificity. It draws on it as the primary source of tension, which is a meaningfully different approach from games that simply swap the gender of a hero without changing anything else about how the world responds to them.
Ethics and Critique
One Night, Hot Springs succeeds as a feminist game in large part because it centers a perspective that games rarely engage with seriously. Haru’s inner life is the entire game. There are no enemies, no scores, no systems rewarding performance. The game treats her experience as worth sustained attention, which is itself a political act.
Nevertheless, there is a fair critique to make. The game tells one trans woman’s story, and that specificity, while a strength, can also risk presenting a single experience as representative of something much broader and more varied. Playing like a feminist, as Chess frames it, means staying attentive to whose stories get told and whose do not. Haru’s story is warm and ultimately hopeful, and while that is valuable, the trans experience is far more diverse than any one narrative can hold. A fuller feminist design might find ways to acknowledge that multiplicity rather than leaving it to sequels and related games to fill in. Still, as an entry point for players who may have little context for what Haru is navigating, the game does something genuinely meaningful. It does not ask you to fix anything. It just asks you to pay attention.
