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Onsen Master is a fast-paced indie game where you’ll be tasked with managing your very own traditional Japanese bathhouse. In this frenetic management sim, you’ll need to keep moving by mixing various bath scents, cleaning the floors, guiding customers around hazards and dealing with the various mischievous creatures from Japanese mythology who look to interrupt your business.

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Although Onsen Master will teach you its relatively simple control scheme in the opening tutorial of its story mode, you might find yourself quickly overwhelmed by the amount you have to do and the new enemy types that are regularly introduced. If you need some tips on how to handle the mayhem of onsen mastery, here’s some useful advice that the game doesn’t teach you.

Dedicate A Tub To Each Flavour

Onsen Master Four Tubs and Four Scents

This technique won’t work for every level, but a good general principle to adopt is to have one of each of the scent flavours in each of the four tubs on the map. There are four different scents (Red, Green, White and Blue) that customers will request, and most stages will have four tubs, meaning you can easily dedicate one to each.

As a tub runs out of its particular flavour of scent, you can top it up. Keeping each scent in a designated place will make it easier to remember where they are.

If you’re going to use this technique, you should do it right at the start of a level by mixing the ingredients as your immediate priority, then dumping them into the tubs. You can usually do this in enough time to swoop in and get the first customer before they time out.

The problems with this technique are when enemies like the Bozu are introduced, who can spawn in tubs before you’ve managed to assign a flavour. You’ll also need to stay vigilant for the excited customers who hop into tubs before being guided, as this may need to influence which tub contains which flavour.

Defeat Bosses Before Serving Customers

Onsen Master Big Bozu

Onsen Master is made up of short levels, with three levels per zone. For every third level, you’ll encounter a boss - usually a large version of an enemy that you would have encountered previously.

In these stages, a health bar will appear, divided into segments equal to the number of times you’ll need to correctly bathe them in order to defeat the boss.

If you don’t reduce the health bar before the end of the stage, you won’t be able to progress, so it’s essential to prioritize dealing with the boss monsters before dealing with the other customers.

If you’re really skilful, you can obviously do both at once (using both your hands to hold an ingredient and lead a customer to, but if you need to make a choice between making the correct bath for a boss monster and making the correct bath for a regular customer, focus on the boss.

Prioritize Unique Creatures

Onsen Master Dealing With Monsters

Although it might seem like a sensible idea to prep ingredients and start creating baths to begin with as per the first tip in this list, when you have a Kappa wandering around, they’re going to make a mess, so you need to deal with them straight away.

To keep your bathhouse traversable, you’ll need to engage some Kappa control methods. In particular, you'll need to put them into a bath tub as soon as possible. After they're in a tub, you'll need to clean up their messes on the ground by holding the Y button whilst moving around their spillages.

For Bozus, all you can do is respond to them as quickly as possible. When they spawn in a tub, you can change that particular tub to the flavour they need by first cleaning the tub and then adding the new ingredient. Bozu will spit water out in a radius surrounding the tub they enter, so be ready to clean up the floor.

Skeletons are essentially another type of customer to deal with as you would any other, whilst Sudama are a menace but not necessarily a threat to your bath operations, as long as you spot them and deal with them before they start moving your ingredients.

Use Both Hands

Onsen Master Rotate The Stick

Onsen Master allows you to perform two key actions at once. You can always guide two customers to baths at the same time. You can also hold an ingredient in one hand and guide a customer with the other by using both shoulder buttons.

Although at first you might want to take one action at a time, your processes (and as a result, your score) will improve a lot if you remember that many actions can be performed simultaneously this way. It takes some getting used to, but once you become accustomed to this method of play, the game will become much easier.

Designed For Co-op Play

Onsen Master DaiKappa

Despite having a comprehensive single player Story Mode, Onsen Master is clearly inspired by indie games like Overcooked in its task-juggling gameplay style. As with Overcooked, Onsen Master can be a lot more fun when playing with a friend in co-operative play, as tasks can be divided up evenly between the two players.

Playing in co-op means each player can take responsibility for specific baths or even specific tasks, which can make managing a level and getting a high score a lot easier. If you're having difficulty getting through Onsen Master, try teaming up with friend, as the entire story can be played with two players.

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