Space Janitoring--It's a Hard Knock Life

I've had moments in my professional life where I've just wanted to pull a Kevin Spacey ala American Beauty.  If you're unfamiliar with the classic 90's film you should definitely give it a Netflix (or one of the other streaming services).  In the movie Spacey's character is having a bit of a midlife crisis--his wife is cheating on him, his daughter hates him, and he's miserable.  Part of that misery comes from his job, which he hates, and which he gets fired/quits early in the film.  After quitting from his job he decides that rather than getting another professional job that he was happiest as a teenager working at a local fast food joint.  It's laughable seeing Spacey as this former professional working the drive-thru window.  The plot in the movie is much deeper and complex than just Spacey's midlife crisis, but doesn't everyone have thoughts about how much easier life would be if our jobs were simpler?  As a teacher I sometimes look at the janitors and think about how much stress they have in their job.  I'm sure that I'm oversimplifying their job--I very much appreciate what they do and I'm sure it's a tough job.  Thanks to the magic of video games and their seemingly random topics we can all experience the joys of janitorial duty.  Viscera Cleanup Detail gives everyone the chance to truly delve into the janitorial arts.  It turns out that being a space janitor is not as easy as it seems.

In Viscera Cleanup Detail you play as a randomly generated janitor who is tasked with the cleanup after some sort of particularly nasty sci-fi encounter.  It could be an alien attack on a science facility, an underwater research station besieged by sea monsters, or a mine overthrown by deadly enemies lurking in the jungle.  Each level has the same objective--clean up the resultant gore and rid the area of any traces that the event ever happened.  At the end of the level you receive a score based on how thoroughly you cleaned the level.  This sounds very simple but each level could take many hours to completely clean.

Your janitor character comes equipped with some basic gear--a mop to cleanup those troublesome blood pools (human or alien) and a "sniffer" that helps you detect the cleanliness of an area and find any areas that you may have missed.  The controls are very simple and act similarly to switching weapons in an FPS--you hit 2 and switch to your mop and then hit 1 to switch back to your hands.  Each level contains three machines that are vital to the task at hand--the incinerator, the "what-a-load" bin dispenser, and a bucket dispenser.  You will establish a close relationship with all three of these items.

Each scenario requires your janitor to pick up and destroy all items tied to the crisis at hand.  You will pick up shell casings, garbage, body parts, entire bodies, used buckets, and anything else that is just laying around.  All un-needed items must be tossed into the incinerator and destroyed.  The best strategy is to grab a bin from the dispenser and pile in as many items as you can.  This can be quite humorous as you load up your bin with dismembered arms, legs, and various other...chunks.  Being physics-based means that you will constantly struggle to keep your bins from overflowing and causing even more of a mess.  During the time that you are picking up items you also have to be mindful of the fluid puddles on the ground--every time you walk through a puddle of blood you will track more blood over the floor which will require more mopping.  Once you've picked up the many items scattered around the level you are ready to move onto mopping.  Mopping requires you to fetch buckets of water from the bucket dispenser.  As you mop up an area your mop becomes dirty and you must dip it into the bucket to clean it.  The water in the bucket also gradually becomes dirty and requires you dispose of it (and the bucket) in the incinerator.  Similar to the bins the buckets are also physics based...bump into a bucket filled with dirty water and you will have a new puddle to clean up.

If you pay close enough attention and read the datapads scattered around the various levels you can piece together the story of each location.  If you want to raise your score at the end of a level you can take flash-drive like ID's to the "clock" and write up a report about how each person died.  When there can be ten or more bodies on a level...well, it's a lot.  There are tons of small details that you must catch in order to raise your final score--did you repair all the bullet holes on the walls?  Did you dispose of every shell casing, piece of garbage, or chunk of flesh on the level?  Did you mop up every footprint?  Did you stack all the crates and barrels in their designated zones?  Certain levels also require you to do something a little extra--planting seeds to re-grow some very destructive plants or re-arming malfunctioning turrets.  This little chunk of variety keeps each scenario fresh even though you are basically performing the same tasks.

There's something oddly soothing about Viscera Cleanup Detail.  The hours spent virtually cleaning fly by and that final vision of a completely clean area gives you a sense of pride.  If you're looking for a strange indie game to help you relax, this is the one.  No shooting, no yelling, no stress....just hours of sweet mopping action.