Serial Cleaner
You’ve got a corpse in a car - minus a head
Developer iFun4All publisher Curve DigitAl price uS$ 15 AvAilAble At SteAm, gOg ifun4all.com
So you’ve just beaten a level in Hotline Miami. Good job. But, hang on a second. There’s a dead body sprawled on the floor in every room. Murder weapons abandoned where they fell after use. Blood just everywhere. Someone’s gonna have to clean this all up before the cops arrive. Huh, looks like that someone is you.
Serial Cleaner takes this premise and adapts it into a fast and fluid stealth game. You play the titular cleaner sent into a series of increasingly gruesome crime scenes to clean up the mess. In each level you have to dispose of the corpses and murder weapons, mop up the blood (typically a certain percentage of the total spatter), and pocket any trophies you’d like to display on your bedroom shelf.
Serial Cleaner also seems to misunderstand its premise. You know the bit in Pulp Fiction where Harvey Keitel is called in to help “clean up” the situation after Vincent shoots Marvin in the car? They get the cleaner in to ensure no one suspects a crime has been committed. Here, by the time you arrive at a crime scene it’s already crawling with cops. You have to run around the level, grabbing bodies and whatnot while staying out of the vision cones of the patrolling police. It’s weird and doesn’t make a lick of sense, but I guess at the same time it has to be this way for the stealth gameplay to function.
Levels are small, generally no more than two screens high and wide, and take place in office spaces, warehouses, trailer parks and other down and out locales. You’re able to hold down a button and zoom out
if you get spotted you have a few seconds grace to find a hiding spot before you’re caught
to see the entire level and plan your approach. This doesn’t pause the game, mind you, so you’ve still gotta think quickly. Maybe you’ll wait for that cop to walk past the window then you can duck through the door, hide in the closet for few seconds, head out the back, quickly move that pallet crate, grab the body and you’re… Shit! They spotted me. Restart.
Despite being a stealth game, it’s fast. You move quickly, make mistakes and quickly jump back into the level, just like Hotline Miami. Bodies and items are semi-randomly respawned each time you restart so, while you can learn police patrol routes, you’ve still got to improvise to a certain extent. I just wish there was more variety. If you get spotted you do have a few seconds grace to find a hiding spot before you’re caught. But it’s annoying when an off-screen cop suddenly turns around and sees you, giving you almost no time to react. Still, it’s really satisfying to clear a level, disposing of everything without being spotted even once.
Between levels there’s an attempt at a story where you’re living with your mum who’s seemingly oblivious to your chosen career, and the two of you chat about bills and watch TV together while an ominous cloud drifts by. It’s odd and had me playing through all 20 levels with a degree of curiosity I’m not sure the fairly simplistic gameplay would’ve matched.