When a player has a good lay of the land, start prepping the map to avoid detection depending on which Cleaner is working the scene. Blood is everywhere, and part of the mission is to vacuum up enough before making a getaway. Using the Vacuum widens the detection radius, which alerts the Cops, so stop and crouch to check where they are before turning it on. Every Cleaner has a circle around them that indicates the detection radius. I can’t wait to get my hands dirty and clean up every level.Ĭheck out the other 505 Games I got my grubby hands on: Stray Blade, Miasma Chronicles, and Gunfire Reborn.

The game is out now on Switch, PC, PS4 and 5, and Xbox One, X & S. The developers at Draw Distance have made something that captures the 90’s vibe perfectly while still feeling like a game from 2022. But playing as her, using your computer jacking skills to unlock doors and turn off lights while working your way toward hiding the evidence, was a blast. The only part of the game which didn’t feel awesome was the cringey dialogue from the “millennial hacker” character Vip3r. My breath caught as I dragged a body, slipping around a corner just in time to avoid detection. My heart pounded as I ducked into a closet to hide from a cop sniffing at my trail. Hide evidence, stash bodies, vacuum up blood trails, and outwit those stupid f*cking cops. The characters each have their own skills and styles they use to navigate the top down maps while cleaning up crime scenes. In the game, you take on the role of four cleaners, the folks big crime hires when they need a crime scene to disappear. The soundtrack kicked ass, the graphics were artful, combining to hit me with a powerful wave of nostalgia for the decade everyone seems like they want to re-visit the halcyon, low tech days of the last years of the last century.

The game looks a bit like Disco Elysium, but charged with radical 90’s drenched swag. My brain felt enormous and my joy knew no bounds every time I succeeded at the game’s core task: outsmarting cops. The game was Serial Cleaners, the follow up to 2017’s stylish crime scene clean-up game, Serial Cleaner. I didn’t know that one of those games would give me the greatest gift a game can give: getting to feel smart. When I got invited by 505 Games to check out a slew of new offerings, I knew I’d be getting free beer, free lunch, and the chance to play some games I’d never tried.

Cleaner serial