Review: Viscera Cleanup Detail

Viscera Cleanup Detail is a 2015 first-person janitorial simulation game released on Steam. You assume the role of a janitor who works for the company Aerospace Sanitation Inc. - a company that specialises in cleaning up the gory remains of homicide, suicide, alien invasions, bloody rituals, mutations etc - and as you learn by reading clues sprinkled throughout the game, has a tendency to cover up the truth using somewhat underhanded methods.

You control the janitor from a first person perspective and have a wide array of tools at your disposal for cleaning up an area. Your main tool is your mop - which is used to clean up blood, soot, dirt etc. Your mop must be cleaned regularly or you'll end up making more mess. You also have a broom for sweeping up bullets and trash, biohazard bins for collecting body parts, buckets for rinsing your mop, a laser welder for sealing up bullet holes and a huge incinerator for destroying all waste items.

The objectives for cleaning an area will vary by location but all require that you dispose of any dead human and alien bodies and remains, incinerate trash and waste items, mop up any blood or liquid spills and repair any broken items. Some levels require you to scrub graffiti from walls, reload gun turrets, tidy up parcels or barrels into a designated area and planting new seeds to replace dead plants.

Viscera Cleanup Detail can be played alone, split-screen co-op with up to 4 players or can be played online with up to 24 people to a server. Larger levels are easier when tackled with a partner or group, as each person can assume a different role or tackle a specific area. The levels range in size and length from anything to around 45 minutes all the way up to 3-4 hours. Obviously larger levels can be saved and returned to at a later time and the game will periodically autosave to ensure you don't lose any progress.

The levels are themed around science fiction and horror games and movies - namely games series like Dead Space - where a futuristic setting would be ruined by all the potential death, blood and gore. Other levels feature obvious references to classic horror films, such as Overgrowth referencing Predator and Frostbite referencing The Thing. All of the employees found in the levels will have been killed in some horrific manner, such as being skewered, decapitated, eviscerated, skinned, burned or liquidised and it is up to you to clean up the mess left behind.

As boring as a cleaning simulation game may sound, Viscera Cleanup Detail is actually very addictive. It's perfect for people like me who are completionists and perfectionists - as reading your results and learning you didn't miss a single thing is immensely satisfying. It's fun to play co-op, far more fun than working together on housework as you can balance your different skills and playing styles to improve your overall efficiency and beat your previous times and scores over and over again. And for the real obsessives, each level features a bunch of paperwork where you can use a mixture of investigation and educated guesswork to determine what happened in that level and how each employee died in order to earn bonus points.

And for players who enjoy exploration and uncovering mysteries, a lot of levels feature secret areas and unique items (most of which are references to other games and movies) that can be collected as trophies. Also hidden in levels are literal Easter Eggs and notes from a fellow janitor Bob who went rogue. Tracking Bob down using the clues found in his letters also awards you a bunch of unique items and unlocks a large secret area to explore. 

Trophies and items you want to keep can be transferred to your own personal office - a player home like area you can decorate using physics control. You could hoard weaponry, unique items or if you're a total psychopath like Bob, severed heads and limbs. Your office comes decked out with 4 rooms and several large shelves you can fill up with your level spoils.

As the game is rather large and frequently features a large amount of objects on-screen, glitches are prone to happening frequently, usually involving physics or items becoming stuck in the walls - though to me, these are more funny than annoying. To make up for its faults, the game does not penalise you if you need to use console commands to work around a glitch.

Viscera Cleanup Detail has 3 DLC packs, each of which can be played as part of the main game or as standalone games. House of Horror is Halloween themed and is essentially a gigantic mashup of 1980s slasher movies. Santa’s Rampage deals with the aftermath of good ol St Nick going on a murderous rampage in his workshop and Shadow Warrior is based around the ninja game of the same name, cleaning up a pagoda full of dead Yakuza.

It's a fun little game and surprisingly cheap - when I first picked it up, I certainly didn't think I'd be sinking over 200 hours into it - nor did I know it would become a major staple of my co-op gaming sessions with Shelly and Ash. And I haven't even tried any user submitted stages from the Steam Workshop yet! I'm going to be mopping up blood for a long while to come...