If you are constantly looking at folk with tattoos and thinking ‘god, I wish I was charismatic and brave enough to get a tattoo – maybe then people would take me seriously/sleep with me more’, please spend a few moments playing Tattoo Removal Simulator, a game of whimsical cosiness and regret.
It sees you lasering away people’s unwanted ink, trying to do a clean job without exceeding their pain thresholds, leaving any scars, or deleting any tattoos they’d rather keep hold of. Earnings are spent on wider-angle or more precise laser heads and cosmetic sprays, together with fancier digs for your clients to recline in. All told, it’s a curiously poignant addition to the ranks of games trying to become the next PowerWash Simulator. Each tattoo you remove is a life moment the liver now wishes to disembody – “symbols of once-eternal love, mistakes that refused to stay in the past, jokes that didn’t age gracefully, and secrets asking to disappear”.
In practice, the writing is often jauntier than the Steam descriptions make it sound. I’ve just had a crack at the demo (which, amongst other things, runs fairly comfortably on my puny work laptop), and the dialogue consisted mostly of barks like “ooh this feels like a spa day”.
Your clients are by and large limber hotties, and the art direction is glossy and cheerful – even the scar tissue looks like a layer of pastels. Fear not, Captain Butterfingers: there is no Steam content warning about any representations of terrible laser burns. It’s just people saying “ouch” and paying you less.
Still, erasing these mementos is unavoidably a source of melancholy. “Every tattoo erased reveals a story worth remembering,” the Steam page notes. It’s possibly better when you’re imagining that story, rather than reading or hearing it. Your second client in the demo is a lady with a child’s doodle of a gurning face on her left knee – the kind of ham-fisted, ugly design that can only carry huge personal significance. Consider my heartstrings plucked.
The developers are 20-person Lithuanian team Uraga, whose other projects include support work on Star Trek: Resurgence. They’ve done a PR interview for 80.lv in which they talk a little about the game’s inspirations. “Some team members had friends who worked as tattoo specialists and shared funny or memorable stories,” comments CEO and former tattoo artist Andrius Gricius. “Others had considered opening a real tattoo removal clinic. Many of us have tattoos ourselves, with histories and meanings that still matter today.”
The full game includes VR support, and a choice of sandbox, casual and story modes. There’s obviously a great opportunity here for a crossover with some kind of tattoo application simulator. Perhaps an asynchronous multiplayer mode. I had a quick look for a candidate on Steam, but the two I came across seemed a bit rubbish. Anyway, do you have tattoos? How have your feelings about them changed over the years, if at all? Have you ever had one removed?
