We all know cleaning up in games can be just as much fun as making a mess. If you’ve ever mopped up blood and guts in Viscera Cleanup Detail or sprayed gunk off Doc Brown’s time machine in PowerWash Simulator, here’s an offer you can’t refuse: combine those two games and you get Crime Scene Cleaner, where you hose down and scrub up bloody murder scenes until they’re clean as a whistle.
How did you get into this mess? Well, you’re a janitor with an insurmountable pile of medical bills because your daughter has fallen ill, so there’s really only one course of action to take: accept jobs from mafia goons and mass murderers to clean up their messes and conceal their horrific crimes. Your employers may use guns and knives, but your weapons in this sim are a mop, a sponge, some detergent, a power washer, and a bucket. Roll up those sleeves and get to work.
I played a bit last night and can report that it takes quite a while to clean up the scene of a multiple murder. In one house a man had been stabbed to death and his blood was, well, everywhere: spread through several rooms, on the floors, walls, ceiling, furniture, even on the stereo speakers. What’s more, while following the trail of blood around I discovered that this wasn’t some isolated incident: there were multiple bodies on the premises, so I was now looking at disposing of several corpses and gallons more blood than I expected.
I filled up my bucket, squeezed in some detergent, got my mop nice and soapy, and started scrubbin’. Mops and sponges can only hold so much blood before they need to get rinsed, so it was a lot of running back and forth between my bucket and the puddles of blood—and I quickly realized that I was also leaving bloody footprints all over the place, too. I cleverly moved my bucket into the room where I was scrubbing, but guess what? I knocked it over repeatedly, spilling bloody water all over the floors I’d just cleaned. Sigh.
Long as it takes, it is pretty darn satisfying to completely clean a gore-filled apartment, though. Once all the blood has been mopped up, when broken plates or glasses have been collected in trash bags to remove evidence of a violent encounter, when furniture has been sponged off and placed back where it should be, and when the bodies are now wrapped in plastic and stacked in the bed of my pickup truck, it does really feel like a hard day’s work has paid off. Also, I’m a criminal, so I can steal cash from the crime scenes, which definitely helps. I just think of it as a tip.
Crime Scene Cleaner launched this week and it’s gone over well with the cleaning community: it’s currently sporting over 1,000 reviews on Steam with a score of “Overwhelmingly Positive.” You can also try the demo for free.
