You are a janitor. It’s not the most glamorous job, and it’s not like you enjoy being wrist-deep in refuse, but it’s a steady paycheck for honest work. And hey! It could be worse; you could be one of those unlucky scientists whose entrails you’re scraping off of the ceiling…
Viscera Cleanup Detail is a simulation game by three-man South African development team RuneStorm. Still in early access, this game puts you in the role of a janitor cleaning up after one of the bloody firefights that take place in first-person shooter games. Your job begins when the action is over, so it’s fortunate that RuneStorm have put a lot of effort into making the environments interesting.
Despite being the first space-station janitor simulator, Viscera Cleanup Detail isn’t difficult to learn. As for tools, you have a mop, your hands, and other various objects with contextual uses. Nearly every map has the same three gadgets to help you clean: a bucket dispenser known as the Slosh-a-Matic, the bin-dispensing What-a-Load, and an incinerator that will turn everything you put inside it–even full buckets of water–into ash. Once you get your assignment–usually just a minor description of what event happened in the area–you just pick a corner and start to clean. Body parts and other debris go in the bins, while you use the buckets of clean water to dunk your dirty mop into.
What is most intriguing about Viscera Cleanup Detail is not the gameplay itself, but the impassive and objective vision of violence it portrays. When there is violence in video games, you are most often the perpetrator or the victim. You’re the one dodging bullets and killing to survive. Here, you’re a passive observer. The aftermath of violence surrounds you, but you’re in no danger from it. The bullets are just shell casings; the bodies are just debris. There are clues to what has happened in each location: monstrous footprints, trails of bullet holes, and body parts everywhere–sometimes on top of impossibly high structures. Enough exploration and you can discern exactly happened and why, but you’re not a detective–you’re a janitor. So instead of documenting the scene, you mop up the footprints and weld the bullet holes.
In most modern video games, bodies and blood disappear not long after they fall. This is practical, rather than stylistic, because every body on your screen is another object for your processor to render. For the game to run smoothly, the processing power it uses on your machine, be it PC or console, should be devoted to rendering necessary objects. A dead enemy is no longer necessary, therefore the most sensible thing to do is erase it. Viscera Cleanup Detail forces the player to see a more realistic depiction of what video game violence might look like without standard conventions like disappearing blood decals and dissolving corpses. While the over-the-top violence is intended to be comic, there’s something to be said for the way the aftermath is put at the forefront. Every shell casing has to be picked up. Every dead body has to be disposed of. Every blood stain has to be mopped. More than once I found myself picking up shell casings one at a time, thinking about how tedious it was, only to think back to any video game where the submachine gun was my weapon of choice.
This is a game that shouldn’t be fun. It’s tedium: mop that, pick up those soda cans, and watch your step on the way to the incinerator or you’ll end up tracking blood all over your nice, clean floors. Despite that, it’s extremely satisfying to clean a map to perfection. There’s no danger and no stress, outside of the Slosh-o-Matic and What-a-Load occasionally malfunctioning and spitting out body parts instead of buckets and bins. There’s no time limit, no other players (unless you decide to go multiplayer) and despite there being more gore than your average butcher’s shop, Viscera Cleanup Detail is incredibly soothing. It’s noteworthy that each time I logged in to take screenshots for this review, I ended up playing for hours at a time.
Lastly, it is again important to remember that Viscera Cleanup Detail is in early access. While it doesn’t feel incomplete, there are some problems, mainly with the physics engine. Since there’s no mechanic to crush or compact objects, sometimes when you put heavy items on top of light items in the bin, objects will fall out of/clip out of the bin. Body parts occasionally plant themselves into the floor and make a huge mess while you try to pull them out, and I once found one of my pieces of equipment on the ceiling–not on the zero gravity level either. One of my biggest pet peeves with early access games is that they rarely give you enough information to get started, and Viscera Cleanup Detail is no different. There is no tutorial, no in game tips to guide you, and without reading the key bindings in the settings, you won’t even know what button to press to switch between your tools. With such a unique premise, it would have been useful for RuneStorm to throw in a cursory tutorial rather than dumping the player into the world without so much as telling them how to move around.
You’re interested in unusual games
You find cleaning and arranging satisfying
You can handle a few bugs and setbacks
You like exploration games
You’re looking for something to play while watching/listening to something in the background (I play while listening to NPR!)
You’re not comfortable with early access
You’re not comfortable with the level of gore
You’re looking for something with a deep storyline or character interaction
You think this all sounds a little tedious, and are wondering why you’d want to clean something digital when your house needs cleaning too
Viscera Cleanup Detail can be purchased on Steam for $9.99. While still in early access, RuneStorm are actively making improvements and bug-fixes. This game may trigger motion sickness, but there are several settings that can be toggled to try to ameliorate that. There is also a small, but dedicated modding community on Steam, making new levels for when you finish the rest.
