Final Game Sketch: Club Baths

Club Baths is a walking simulator set in a gay bathhouse. The title is a reference to one of the four gay bathhouses that were raided by the Toronto Metropolitan Police in 1981. When the game starts, you find out that you’re a researcher who’s doing work in the office and the owner calls you to propose that you take the night off and explore the bathhouse instead. At this point, any choices you make will still result in the owner directing you to where the keys to the door is located and it is up to you whether to take up his offer. There are certain things in the office that you can interact with, such as a Grecian statue, some documents lying on the floor and on the shelves and some books. Once you are ready, you can find the key and open the door to the bathhouse. As you walk through the hallways, you find other statues and things you can interact with scattered throughout the space. Most of the statues are snippets of poetry There isn’t a clear structure or linear narrative and you are free to wander and discover all the pieces of the puzzle on your own. Once you have interacted with most of the things in the space, you will be able to solve the last puzzle, which is big piece of marble that, once you’ve selected all the correct answers, opens up to a waterfall which leads you to a black room, and the music changes once you enter the room.

Water as Virtual Reality, or some initial thoughts on why I like liquidy, watery, slippery things.

In the science fiction film Solaris (based on the novel of the same name by Stanislaw Lem), director Tarkovsky tells a story of a psychologist who gets sent to a space station to check up on a group of scientists who have fallen into separate emotional crises. The space station is orbiting and conducting research on an aquatic planet called Solaris but its mission has been stalled due to the fact that the scientists on board are suffering from what appears to be emotional comas. Not long after the psychologist’s arrival to the space station, he becomes distressed by the presence of his late wife, or a virtual version of her. After her insistent reappearance after each time he kills her, he finally accepting her presence as reality and slowly descends into an emotional crises just like the fate of the other scientists. In the last scene, the psychologist is shown back at his father’s country home, but as the camera zooms out, it appears that he is actually on an island in the Solaris ocean.

Turns out the oceanic planet of Solaris was studying the scientists instead, and the source of all the virtual disruptions that caused the scientists psychological distress.