Best hope you've got a good stain remover
"Grab your detergent. Grab your dryer sheets. And don't forget...the fabric softener."
— Narrator, Steam Release Trailer
Bloodwash is a first-person retro-style horror game created by Black Eyed Priest and Henry Hoare, and published by Puppet Combo under his Torture Star Video sub-brand for third-party games.
Similar to Puppet Combo's own games, Bloodwash combines PS1-era graphics with VHS-era Slasher Movies. Players take the role of Sara, a pregnant college student whose drunk boyfriend has forgotten to do the laundry, forcing her to leave the apartment late at night and travel to the 24/7 laundromat at a strip mall on the edge of town. Unfortunately for Sara a serial killer known as the Womb Ripper, who targets pregnant women, is on the prowl.
Has a character page here.
Bloodwash contains examples of:
- 11th-Hour Superpower: At the game's climax when Sara is trapped in the burned-down laundromat with the Womb Ripper with little chance of escape, she finds Officer Burton's gun and is able to fight them off.
- Action Survivor: Sara is just an ordinary college student but she's able to stay calm in her horrific situation, evade the killer and take her down with a gun in the climax.
- All There in the Manual: A post-game epilogue posted by the developers reveals the fates of the characters; Sara, with the help of Stan, breaks up with her Lazy Bum boyfriend for her child's sake, moving in with Stan's sister till she can afford her own place. Peepaw, Pizza-Dude, and the Appliance Store Guy all survive the events of the strip mall.
- Alas, Poor Villain: Implied at the end. Upon discovering that Samantha was the Womb Ripper, Sara speculates that she was driven insane by the trauma of the fire and losing her unborn child, and her tone of voice suggests she pities her to some extent even though she brutally murdered many people and tried to do the same to Sara.
- Alone with the Psycho: The fact the laundromat and strip mall are still sparsely occupied might give you some small sense of safety. Then the Womb Ripper kills the attendant and the other customer at the laundromat, leaving Sara alone with the killer.
- Ambiguously Bi: Not only does Sara get a kick with some light flirting with a callgirl she prank calls, she remarks while in a store's porno section she wouldn't mind having the lewd acts from the movies being done to her by "the men and, for that matter, the women".
- And Now for Someone Completely Different: After Sara calls the police, you suddenly take control of Officer Burton as he investigates the strip mall 20 minutes later, and the epilogue has you play as Coroner Doug.
- Asshole Victim: Louis Kennedy doesn't come across as sympathetic at all, given he tried to murder his young mistress when he found out she was pregnant and thus drove her to murderous insanity.
- Bigger on the Inside: All locations are like this, but the abandoned laundromat takes the cake, as it's a large dungeon easily bigger than the entire rest of the strip mall combined, including the parking lot.
- Black Dude Dies First: Officer Burton is black and is killed by the Womb Ripper at the end of the chapter in which you play as him. He's actually not the first victim though, as the attendant was Killed Offscreen first. Sara later finds his severed arm and takes his revolver to fight the Womb Ripper with. Averted with Sara's neighbor Stan, who survives the events of the game due to being completely uninvolved in the drama at the strip mall.
- Bottomless Magazines: The revolver you ultimately acquire can fire an infinite number of times without needing to reload. Tension is maintained during your showdown with the Womb Ripper as they attack out of nowhere at close range and will stun you with their scream for a few seconds whenever you land a successful shot.
- Deliberate VHS Quality: The game is presented with CRT and VHS filters, though there is the option to turn them off.
- Destructive Romance: The few hints we get about Sara and Liam's relationship suggests it's not a healthy one. Liam is extremely lazy and unsupportive of Sara, even though she's studying full-time, trying to find a job and pregnant with his child. Sara is so angry with him at the start she can't bring herself to talk to him. Sara also indicates he drinks a lot; Stan expresses concern he could become abusive towards her and offers to help her leave him if she needs to. Post-game, it's revealed that Sara broke up with him afterwards because she realized he was a risk to her child.
- Easter Egg: The game is full of small nods to other Black Eyed Priest projects and Puppet Combo in general.
- Endearingly Dorky: The call girl. She's trying to sound sexy to the point of going overboard, but gets thrown off because Sara is a woman rather than a man as expected; she eventually breaks character and apologetically admits it's her first night on the job and she doesn't really know what she's doing.
- Final Girl: Sara is a clear example; she's a resourceful and assertive young woman whom the Womb Ripper intends to make their latest victim. She manages to kill the Ripper (well, temporarily at least, going by The Stinger) and escapes with her life, while the other victims were not so fortunate.
- Full-Frontal Assault: The Womb Ripper is completely naked except for a face mask made from human skin.
- Giallo: The plot is inspired by Giallo movies, featuring a murder mystery involving a serial killer who targets pregnant women and graphic violence.
- Hate Sink: Louis Kennedy, despite being long dead, is shown to be a horrid person who burned down a laundromat with his pregnant girlfriend to hide his affair
- Hidden Depths:
- Sara turns out to be a big fan of horror movies and video games, and also laments that her boyfriend isn't adventurous enough to try some of the moves seen in porn videos.
- Peepaw seems to be nothing more then a Grumpy Old Man, but if you take the time to talk to him, he's revealed to be very knowledgeable of his neighborhood's history, and is by far the most reliable of the information sources Sara can interrogate.
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: The call girl Sara talks with over the phone. She gives Sara a big speech about how she shouldn't be at the laundromat this late because of the Womb Ripper and sounds genuinely concerned for her well-being, even though they're complete strangers.
- Imperiled in Pregnancy: The premise is made of this: a serial killer who specifically targets pregnant women is on the loose and the police have no leads so far.
- Jenny's Number: The women's bathroom at the laundromat has the number scrawled in one of the stalls.
- Lazy Bum: Sara's boyfriend Liam. He never cleans up after himself and lets Sara do all the housework. The fact he didn't do the laundry as he was supposed to ends up kicking off the game's plot, because Sara needs clean clothes for a job interview she's attending the next day.
- Made of Iron: As expected for a slasher villain, the Womb Ripper is hard to put down needing at least four shots from a revolver to defeat. The coroner in the epilogue even notes how abnormal it is for the killer to have survived multiple fatal gunshot wounds before finally dying, in addition to the fact that she survived being caught in a fire years earlier. If that wasn't enough however the epilogue also shows that she still isn't down for the count and ambushes the coroner, mind you she had just been autopsied.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The Womb Ripper comes across as this. On the one hand, there's nothing overtly shown to indicate they're anything more than a human psycho. On the other hand, they demonstrate a degree of Made of Iron and Super-Strength that's impossible to explain. Especially after they come back to life after being shot four times and being partially autopsied. A sacrificed victim suspended above a crib surrounded by a pentacle scrawled in the victim’s blood that can be seen in the Womb Ripper’s lair suggests darker forces may be in play, as the Womb Ripper may have sold her soul to Satan in order to wreak her vengeance.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: the "Womb Ripper" is up there in being one of the most sinister Serial Killer nicknames out there.
- Nice Guy: Doubling as a Cool Old Guy, Stan stands out amongst the seedy scumbags as a genuinely compassionate and all-around decent man who cares quite a bit about Sara's home situation, begging her to tell him if Liam graduates into a full-on Domestic Abuser. Sara even notes how much of a great guy Stan is. True to his word, after the game he helps Sara move away and get her own place.
- Period Piece: The game was released in 2021 but is clearly set decades before then given the lack of cellphones, the boxy computers and TVs, and Peepaw's store selling video cassettes and featuring an X-rated video section (which became increasingly obsolete with the advent of internet pornography). Given that Sara can pick up a Gameboy to play with and Gameboys are being advertised, it can be assumed the game takes place no earlier than 1989 (when Gameboy was first launched). Sara also has a black and white television in her room, when most TVs moved to colour in the 1970s; given she's a cash-strapped college student she may not be able to afford a newer TV.note
- Prolonged Prologue: Most of the game is spent exploring the strip mall and interacting with the few remaining late night inhabitants, learning the eerie history of the location. The Womb Ripper doesn't actually attack until about halfway through the game, kicking things off in earnest.
- Police Are Useless: Called out early in the game. It seems to subvert this with an ambiguous fate for Sara shifting into taking over as Officer Burton, but this becomes a double-subversion as even while playing as him, really doesn't do the best job, vindicating this with failing to take a shot at the Ripper as they were killing a man, and ultimately just getting himself killed. His death however isn't entirely in vain since it leads to Sara getting his gun and killing the Womb Ripper herself.
- Pregnant Badass: Sara's pregnancy doesn't stop her from being a hardy woman, managing to defend herself and take down the killer with a cop's revolver in the game's climax.
- Red Herring: The creepy guy on the bus who tells you that you're going to die isn't the Womb Ripper. Neither is Louis Kennedy, the missing owner of the abandoned laundromat who's wanted for questioning by the police about the disappearances.
- Retraux: Uses a similar blocky, low-polycount graphics style as Puppet Combo's own games. This also helps conceal the sex of the killer until The Reveal at the end.
- The Reveal: Upon killing the Womb Ripper, Sara discovers the killer was Samantha Rhodes, one of the missing women. Louis Kennedy was having an affair with her and, after discovering she was pregnant with his child, tried to kill her by locking her inside the old laundromat and burning it down. Samantha survived but was badly burned and lost the child, making her go completely insane, and started killing women who had what she didn't.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: Sara eventually gets her hands on a revolver (formerly belonging to Officer Burton, who the Womb Ripper killed), and uses it to confront the killer, it manages to put them down in at least four shots.
- Serial Killer: The Womb Ripper targets pregnant women, dumping their mutilated bodies and taking the fetuses.
- Shout-Out: At the game's climax: The female protagonist is trapped in a dark cavernous room filled with murder victims armed with only a revolver and goes toe to toe with a serial killer, not unlike the climatic scene between Clarice and Buffalo Bill in The Silence Of The Lambs.
- Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: There are several in-game activities the player can partake in that have nothing to do with the main story including two minigames; the Game Boy-esque handheld at the laundromat and the arcade machine at the pizza parlor. There's also a few comic books that can be collected and read throughout the strip mall and a TV in the laundromat. This seems to be deliberately invoked by the game itself since you have to wait several minutes in real-time for your laundry to be done.
- Suspect Existence Failure: If you explore the strip mall gathering evidence and talking to the residents about the disappearances, the name Louis Kennedy will frequently pop up, and Sara will begin to suspect that he's the Womb Ripper. You find his desiccated corpse inside the Womb Ripper's lair, revealing he was another victim of the Womb Ripper.
- Tragic Villain: Despite the horrid crimes It’s clear that the crimes of The Womb Ripper are spurred due to her miscarriage and scarring due to her boyfriend, Louis Kennedy.
- Trashcan Bonfire: There's one in the alleyway next to Sara's apartment.
- Traumatic C-Section: Evidently from their name, this is the Big Bad's modus operandi.
- We Sell Everything: Peepaw's store has a fairly wide range of merchandise covering several different categories; movies on tape, video games, game consoles, comic books, records, snacks, drinks, popcorn, t-shirts, aquarium fish, cereal, and laundry detergent. Sara asks the proprietor what kind of store it's supposed to be and he just responds with "It's Peepaw's. I'm Peepaw. This is my store."
- Would Hurt a Child: Upon exploring the Womb Ripper's lair, Sara finds that besides killing pregnant women, the Womb Ripper lives up to their name by ripping out and skinning the fetuses in order to make a gruesome face mask of fetus skin.
- Wrong Side of the Tracks: The part of the city the game is set in is bleak and grimy, with rundown apartment blocks and lots of residents struggling to make ends meet (if they're not outright homeless). Almost every other person Sara encounters is sleazy on some level - even the local bus driver assumes she's looking to score drugs and offers to deal her some for sex - has a more than few screws loose, or both (though there are some genuinely kind and helpful people). And that's without mentioning the serial killer roaming around...
