It takes so much for me to do a double take at a video game nowadays. We’ve gone through the gamut of obscene, absurd and outright offensive titles across the spectrum, from visual novels to alt history thrillers and everything in-between. Yet an especially long title always gives me pause, if only to ask “why?” And here we are again, trying to justify the existence of Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs: The Thrilling Steamy Maze Kiwami.

This is not even close to the longest title we have seen come across the desk, and it also, thankfully, isn’t the most anime title I’ve even seen this week. In theory, it’s fairly straightforward as a tie in game. After all, we see entries for Dragon Ball, Naruto, and One Piece with reasonable regularity, and newer animes, such as SpyXFamily or Demon Slayer crop up with games from time to time. So it’s quite reasonable for fans of Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs to want an excellent continuation of the story that concluded four years ago.

The idea is this: you’ve got Kogarashi, a dude who is trained in the physic arts and ends up boarding at a haunted inn/hot springs. The springs are primarily haunted by Yuuna, who died a long time ago and can’t move on. For no particular reason, we then get ninjas, other yokai, and the occasional normal person in the mix, and hijinks ensue. For the plot of this ridiculous game, Kogarashi finds a box with a miniature garden inside, a ghost in the garden, and then everyone gets sucked into this garden. Yuuna now must quest through the shifting, ever changing garden dungeon to try and save Koga-Kun, as well as all the other fools who ended up here.

The Thrilling Steamy Maze Kiwami is three games in one, when you break down the mechanics. Our main aspect is a mystery dungeon crawler a la Shiren, but with more focus on chibi girl sprites than anything else. Like all dungeon crawlers, the enemies move when you do, you have to be aware of your hunger and inventory levels, and dying means leaving all your stuff behind. You can run a chance to recover your gear as long as you can reach it in time with a respawn, but dying again means your old loot is gone forever. There’s weapons to find, outfits to wear, items to throw, traps to discover and skin to be shown through strategic tearing.

This is where Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs starts to show its true colors, and fans of the show/manga should not be surprised. After all, when your manga gets parents in Japan riled up over sexualization, you have to know who the audience will be. Yuuna and her cohorts will have access to spells that aid and abed with the dungeon crawling at the cost of their costumes becoming damaged in all the right places. To be honest, you really need these spells after a certain level: the inherent nature of the mystery dungeon crawler means resetting level progress with the inception of each run, and you often don’t have the energy/resources to overgrind your level before progressing past the 10th floor or so. Thus the magic needs to happen to keep you afloat, and with it comes the bare flesh.

Players who are here for the dungeon crawling should keep in mind that this PC port is a little awkward at best. While the original Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs game was for PlayStation 4, there seems to have been some miscommunication in controller mapping, resulting in certain actions only doable with the keyboard. It gets better, but the instructions that the screen give you are often wrong for what to press on the controller. Moreover, things like diagonal aiming, stomping to search for traps, and speed travel seem to hit or miss when it comes to trying to use a controller. If possible, you really want to relegate things to the keyboard.

The way the dungeons are set up are interesting enough, and I have to give credit that the difficulty progression spikes quite suddenly. Whereas the first two missions will be a cakewalk, anything higher than eight floors will have players very aware of inventory management, the scarcity of food, and the difficulty of dying with ideal equipment on hand. Bringing a second character along for support is a great idea that allows for multiple attacks to come (albeit at the behest of the CPU), but also runs the risk of potentially twice the chance of death. In a handheld setting, I imagine this is a fantastic crawling experience, though it’s a little tough to work out all the combinations on the keyboard. For whatever reason, I immediately forgot how to enter a footbath, and that hampered my goal completion.

The Thrilling Steamy Maze Kiwami also creates excellent replay incentives. Besides having multiple quest targets per level, there’s also incentives to do more exploration for both personal and game growth. Not only is there a chance to discover additional side stories through full dungeon completion, but there’s also the fact that the sheer number of characters you can use all have customized appearances with the different outfits. So, if you think Yuuna looks cute in the school uniform, but think you would rather see Nonko in the Santa outfit for this particular level, go ahead and run it again! Yes, that’s more of a “you” thing and not a game thing, but we’re not here to judge.

Additionally, the number of items that crop up in the game are a tad imbalanced. To make up for the scaling difficulty, the storage box in the main base is chock full of horribly imbalanced weapons and armor to make the movement ahead an absolute breeze. Like my time with Mugen Souls, this OP equipment is purely optional, but it’s always fun to dip a toe in and see what comes up in terms of making the game the easiest path possible. It’s probably not a coincidence that outfits like “Bath Towel” or “Battle Lingerie” are the best armor, but you get the feeling the game knows exactly what its doing. Still, it felt defeatist to overpower too early, and should only be utilized if you’re absolutely struggling OR are just in a hurry to get to the hot springs minigame.

Ah, the hot springs minigame. Once you saw Hot Springs in the title, you knew something like this would happen, didn’t you? Sure enough, every female character has a chance to dip into the fabled natural waters, wearing only a clingy towel, while you fight off evil spirits that are trying to invade them or whatever. While you combat the nasty invaders, the character of your choice will keep yelling weirdly sexual things (ah…it tickles…) until you turn off the game in embarrassment. You WILL play this mini game at least once, and it’ll blow you away both how over the top it is and how much your characters become powered up as a result. I won’t even mention the bottled bathwater you get afterwards for future use. Wait, I just did.

Look, I completely get fanservice for fanservices’ sake. It’s 2024 and people are unabashed about playing games with a more risque element to them, and I say good for you. It’s not like no one played The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, or Persona 5 without trying to get some kind of romantic element going, hypersexualized or otherwise. A vast majority of our PS Vita ports onto the Nintendo Switch are just oozing fan service, and fans are buying them up in droves to say “thank you, please do this more.” Zero shade to anyone.

But a game needs to be able to stand on its own, and I don’t feel like The Thrilling Steamy Maze Kiwami does that successfully. There is zero introduction to the characters or their relationships: if you haven’t read or watched Yuuna previously, you’re lost. Second, the dungeon crawling element is decent but also rather lackluster. Even with the roguelite elements baked in to keep things different and new, a lot of the enemies and room tiles are repeated significantly for the first half of the game. It’s already a bit tepid, and that’s only weakened by the fact that I kept being forced to use the keyboard. I could use a controller, but the button combinations to activate the same number of actions were maddening to remember.

I’ve gone back to Pokémon Mystery Dungeons, Izuna, and even the Chocobo series to get my top down, roguelite, dungeon crawling experience, but I’m hard pressed to consider Yuuna as a mainstay. There’s plenty to explore and do, but I’m constantly reminded that this game is for players who really need a strong dose of innuendo and sexual overtones in their gaming. It honestly becomes distracting, and that feels silly to say. When you pick up a game like Gal*Gun, you see what’s happening from the drop, but the rail shooting mechanics and surprisingly complex story arcs keep you coming back. It’s very amorous, but with purpose.

Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs:The Thrilling Steamy Maze Kiwami feels like it’s for fans of the show and not much else. Great voice work, good dungeon design, but distracting amounts of fetishization and silliness, plus the lack of explanation for anything that happened prior to the game’s beginning. If you know and love the source material, this feels like it’ll be a great time for longtime enjoyers. If you’re like me and didn’t know Yuuna and her crew until this moment, you might have a blast, but be warned: the tone is as hot and steamy as you might imagine.

 

Graphics: 9.0 Fantastic design of characters and excellent chibi representations within the dungeon. Impressive level of customization as each sprite changes with weapons and outfits given. Battle damage changes appearance for avatars, but not dungeon sprites, which is probably for the best. Enemy sprites are repetitive, but colorful in variation to represent strength.	Gameplay: 7.0 Dungeon crawling is legitimately difficult both in terms of intent and control. Many facets (traps, throwing items, maintaining hunger) require strategy and planning. If it was only dungeon, it would be higher. The inclusion and incentives of the bathing minigame are a bit off kilter and really take you out of the momentum of the game.
Sound: 8.0 Solid speaking delivery and wide range of emotions, phrases and quips from all characters. Soundtrack is sufficiently evocative of the mystery dungeon aspect with a heavily “old-Japan” themed sound. Uncomfortable moments of protest when the characters’ clothing is damaged makes me want to stop listening to anything.	Fun Factor: 6.0 A competent dungeon crawler that is frustratingly devoid of preamble or purpose, and a longform journey is spurred on with very little reason or rhyme. Yuuna and her crew seem to appeal to every niche fetishism throughout the game and random screenshots, and the pacing feels too off to enjoy it overall.
Final Verdict: 7.0

Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs: The Thrilling Steamy Maze Kiwami is available now on PC, Nintendo Switch, and PS5.

Reviewed on PC.

A copy of Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs:The Thrilling Steamy Maze Kiwami was provided by the publisher.