The Bathhouse | 地獄銭湯 Restored Edition

Chilla's Art has built a genuinely prolific catalogue of Japanese horror job-simulators — quiet, mundane work shifts that gradually curdle into something deeply wrong — and The Bathhouse Restored Edition takes one of the studio's earlier entries and rebuilds it entirely from the ground up: new visuals, a new storyline, new mechanics, and a notably expanded cast of patrons. This review's sample draws heavily on reviewers who've followed the developer closely across many prior releases, and their verdict is unusually enthusiastic — with one significant, specific, and widely shared caveat about how the finished remake actually runs.

The studio's own fans call this a high point

Reviewers with deep familiarity with Chilla's Art's back catalogue don't hedge their praise. "By far the best chilla's to date. An IMMENSE visual update from their previous works, the longest playtime... and their most fully-realized narrative imo," one writes. Another, having played most of the studio's other releases, states plainly: "so far this is one of my favorites... completing all endings brought me a lot of joy." That's meaningful praise coming from an audience with a genuine basis for comparison — these aren't first-time players judging the game in isolation, they're longtime fans measuring it against a substantial body of the developer's own prior work and finding it holds up well.

A remake that earned trust before asking for money again

Worth noting directly: the developer offered this remake for free to anyone who already owned the original release, a specific, verifiable gesture of goodwill toward the existing fanbase rather than treating longtime supporters as a captive audience for a fresh purchase. That context matters for understanding some of the review sample's warmth — several reviewers explicitly frame their enthusiasm in terms of appreciating a developer that clearly invested real additional effort into revisiting and expanding an earlier work rather than simply re-skinning it for a second sale.

A performance problem serious enough to define the negative sample

Set against that goodwill, the single dominant complaint in this review's negative sample has nothing to do with story or design — it's raw technical performance. "It's really really really tremendously unoptimized, I got frequent massive gameplay-breaking slowdowns on my 1660ti," one reviewer writes, a complaint echoed by numerous others reporting stuttering and frame drops on hardware that should comfortably handle a game of this visual scope. The install size draws its own specific bafflement: "not to mention the game size — 25GB? What's going on here, man?" one reviewer asks, a question several others raise independently without receiving a clear answer from the game's own description or patch notes.

Specific bugs beyond raw performance

Beyond frame-rate complaints, reviewers report concrete, reproducible bugs: one describes a camera system that breaks entirely on interaction, preventing screen-switching and forcing repeated forced restarts; another reports the game crashing reliably during a specific cleaning task, blocking progress past an early point in the story. These are the kinds of specific, repeatable technical failures that go beyond ordinary launch-week jank, and they're serious enough that at least one reviewer who otherwise loves the game explicitly withheld a positive recommendation until they're addressed.

An honest note about fan bias, and this review's own read on it

At least one detailed reviewer argues the game's strong review score partly reflects a fanbase supporting the developer broadly rather than judging this specific release on its own merits, writing that positive reviewers "simply love the developers and support them in everything." This review takes that concern seriously as a general principle, but found no specific, named-source evidence of coordinated or inauthentic review activity here — the pattern described is closer to ordinary developer goodwill and brand loyalty than a documented manipulation claim, and this review treats the broader sample as a genuine reflection of audience reception rather than discounting it.

A developer that responded quickly, even if not completely

To its credit, this review can confirm Chilla's Art responded to early feedback with real urgency: ten numbered patches shipped in the month immediately following the 9 August 2024 launch, an unusually dense cadence for a small studio. A further update followed in January 2025. That's a genuine, verifiable effort to address early problems — though the persistence of performance complaints in reviews posted well after that patch window suggests the underlying optimisation issues weren't fully resolved by that initial wave of fixes.

What the achievement data adds to the completion picture

Steam's own completion figures offer a useful independent read on how far players actually get. An early milestone sits at 71.3%, showing most buyers do engage meaningfully with the opening stretch, but completion falls steadily toward the later achievements, with the rarest sitting at just 6.3%. That's a real drop-off, and it's consistent with two different explanations this review's sample supports simultaneously: some players genuinely losing interest partway through, and others being blocked outright by the specific crash and camera bugs described above rather than choosing to stop. Without more granular data this review can't separate those two causes cleanly, but the completion curve at minimum confirms that finishing every ending — the achievement most positive reviewers specifically praise reaching — remains a genuinely uncommon outcome relative to how many players start the game.

Content specificity worth naming directly

Beyond the technical concerns, at least one reviewer describes specific narrative content they found genuinely uncomfortable rather than simply unsettling in the intended horror sense, citing sexual harassment content within the story as a dealbreaker for their own recommendation. This review flags that directly for readers who may want to research the specific content further before purchasing, without independently verifying the reviewer's characterisation of that content one way or the other — it's the kind of concern best confirmed against detailed, spoiler-aware content guides rather than adjudicated in a review written without direct hands-on playtime.

Final verdict

The Bathhouse Restored Edition earns real, specific enthusiasm from Chilla's Art's own dedicated fanbase, who consistently rank it among the studio's strongest work — a meaningful endorsement given how much of that audience has a genuine basis for comparison. But a serious, widely reported performance problem, including stuttering, crashes, and a puzzlingly large install size, is a real and current barrier to recommending this without reservation, even after a dense wave of early patches. Worth playing for horror fans with capable hardware and existing goodwill toward the developer; go in cautious if your PC is on the modest side.