Developed by Draw Distance and distributed by 505 Games, SERIAL CLEANERS He proposes a really new and interesting idea: this time we are not in charge of eliminating all our enemies, but our function is to clean up the mess that remains after that, before the police arrive. The truth is that the concept is more than attractive, and now we are going to see how well such a wonderful idea was executed.
SERIAL CLEANERS It is available for Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series and PC
A SERIES OF FUNNY STORIES
The story of SERIAL CLEANERS it is as bizarre as its concept. A group of “cleaners” get together to celebrate Christmas and begin to tell a series of amusing anecdotes about their beginnings or the most exciting moments of their work. What do you do? Well, to clean up crime scenes. Nothing more and nothing less than that. Different mafia groups hire the services of these guys, whose job is to leave every place where there have been murders, shootings, settling scores and other little things, impeccable. No blood, corpses, incriminating evidence or human body parts. All this before the police arrive to finish investigating the scene in question.
The group is made up of Bob, the oldest and wisest of the group, and the one in charge of recruiting and teaching the rest the little job, Lati, a super agile brunette who can escape the sight of pursuers with movements of the best parkour, Viper, a young hacker who uses all the technology at her disposal not only to make her way through the most remote places but also to confuse or mislead members of the law, and finally Psycho, who, as his nickname says, is a maniac who He likes to dismember corpses with a chainsaw, either to transport them more easily or to throw legs or arms at the heads of the policemen and thus make them pass out.
HOW CUTE YOU LOOK MOPPING, Esperancia
We could define the game as a kind of “stealth simulator”. From an isometric perspective, we control one or more of the characters in each mission, where the objective is to eliminate any evidence found in each crime scene, avoiding being seen by the police at all times. In general, there will be a certain amount of blood to clean up, evidence to recover, and bodies (or pieces of bodies) to dispose of. To achieve our mission we have multiple tools, in addition to the personal skills of each cleaner. A vacuum cleaner to remove blood stains (which makes noise and of course attracts the police to our position), multiple hiding places and nooks and crannies in the environment to hide or hide the bodies, and places to activate sounds or turn off lights that allow us to hide or distract the law.
Our mission is to take each compromising thing to our car or object that serves to destroy evidence, according to each mission, where we can also save the game at all times. As there is no time limit, we can take as long as we want to complete each step, and even record our progress constantly at the point of delivery, so the idea is that we play patiently and take things very easy , doing everything little by little.
Each policeman or security guard has a pre-established movement pattern, but it will change according to whether they see us, the noise we make or if they notice that we moved or picked up a piece of evidence that was previously in their range of vision. The more our presence is made noticeable in each zone, their attitude will also change, from beginning to doubt if they saw or heard anything, going through registering everything more aggressively, to walking around armed and shooting at us at the first opportunity. But we also have the possibility of lowering that level of search if we stay quiet enough or away from danger for a long time, so, and I repeat, patience will be our most valuable tool to succeed at all levels.
RETRO ATMOSPHERE EVERYWHERE
The story of the game starts in Christmas 1999, but the anecdotes told by the cleaners vary from the early 80s to that same year, with the consequent changes in settings, character designs, music and everything else. Despite the isometric view and the large amount of detail in each level, each and every one of them is very well done and is consistent with the year in which each story takes place. In addition to normal vision, each cleaner has a special vision that highlights all the details of the scene while slowing down the movement, so we can see everything in even better definition. In any case, and despite some of them even having several floors, the scenarios are not too wide and tend to have quite limited mobility, so many times the game will be to enter, do a couple of things, leave, record, enter again and so on.
The character designs and their dialogues have a comic-like style, and one detail that particularly caught my attention is that the characters’ faces are immobile during the scenes, and even their voices sound “muffled”, so it feels like they were wearing masks all the time instead of showing their real faces. I don’t know if that was exactly the intention of the developers. Anyway, the voice acting is fine and is suitable for the personality of each of them.
The music, on the other hand, is not as attractive as the rest of the technical aspects. Most of the melodies are quite simple, series of electro or house type tones that in principle go well with the atmosphere of the title, they are not bad but the problem is that they become repetitive too soon, and since sometimes the missions last more than half an hour and require a lot of attention and concentration, they can become annoying once we hear the same sounds all the time we are at that level.
AN IDEA NOT FULLY TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF
If there is something that cannot be denied, it is that SERIAL CLEANERS It is very original in its approach. Added to the classic stealth sequences is a rather black humor (the team takes their work handling corpses as if they were handling, I don’t know, boxes in the mail), a cool art style, a certain variety of mechanics that provide diversity and overall simple gameplay.
Certain morbid details, like some enemies fainting when they see us cut up a corpse with a chainsaw or that we can use severed arms or legs as throwing weapons end up being fun and the game never feels like it abuses the gratuitous gore (in fact when we tear the bodies appears a giant sign with the word CENSORED covering the scene).
Although it is full of cute and cool little details, the main problem with SERIAL CLEANERS it’s that the novelty and excitement wear off too quickly. We can see everything that the game has to offer us in a little while, and since it is also not a short game (there are 20 missions of approximately half an hour each, so the trip will last us more or less 10 hours), having to doing the same thing over and over all the time ends up becoming repetitive.
As I mentioned, there are minor variations to the gameplay mechanics but they hardly add to the variety, so we’re basically going to be doing the same procedure over and over for the duration of the game. As we progress, the only thing that changes is the number of enemies that chase us or objectives to clear, which requires us to be even more patient in each mission.
In summary, the idea is cool and the execution occurs to me that it was applied correctly. But something that a priori sounded very cool (I had all the desire for this game since I saw its first ad) ends up becoming something completely mechanical and very monotonous, and if we are not enough chill to play can even end up boring us.
For my part, I recommend giving it even one pass, mainly because of the morbid of feeling like a corpse cleaner (which I am 100% sure is a job in real life), but the reality is that more than a “barely approved” I do not feel that I can say anything else about SERIAL CLEANERS.