Fresh Start (PS5)
Sadly, environmental pollution is not a problem that can be solved with just a hose and vacuum, but at least in Fresh Start this optimistic and simple approach to restoring nature can make for a relaxing first-person cleaning game. Contextualizing your clean-up as helping plants and animals makes for a feel good experience, although it may be taking too much of the focus away from the typical satisfaction found in this zen subgenre.
In Fresh Start you’re a member of a group called CLEAR who goes around the world cleaning up areas that have been absolutely coated in trash. You’ll receive postcards petitioning for your help that utilize some cute puns, but the situation when you arrive seems to be pretty dire. Huge mounds of garbage coat much of the ground, structures are in disrepair, and the local fauna often has either abandoned the place or is in a bit of a rough spot. The colorful art style keeps things from looking bleak, and there is meant to be some enjoyment found in turning what looks almost like a landfill back into a place animals happily inhabit. There is a good range of locations you’ll be visiting too, so you can find yourself scrubbing a beach, tidying up a Japanese hot spring, dousing fires in the Australian outback, and even cleaning places you might not expect in such an environmentally conscious game. While every location seems to have a sign about some sort of rejection or exploitation of animals that you spray to turn into something positive, you’re also tasked with finding tools to repair things like train stations or a lighthouse. Fresh Start clearly has some harsh thoughts about things like circus animals, but it doesn’t completely reject human and animal cohabitation, some areas even encouraging it so long as it is supporting the wildlife instead of trying to turn it into a tourist attraction.
Fresh Start’s first person play will involve the use of a cleaning device that can both suck things up and spray out water for maximum cleaning utility. Those giant garbage piles placed all about with little thought for interesting placement are initially too clumped up for vacuuming up, so you need to use your device’s water spray function to break them down. What this mostly means is the gameplay loop for a good deal of Fresh Start is seeing a pile, spraying that pile, and sucking up the debris it left behind. It’s not too surprising a cleaning game doesn’t want to overcomplicate what is meant to be a relaxing task, but it does feel like the trash design being universal can sap some of the sense that you truly are cleaning an area.
There are some other systems in place at least to make you feel like you’re actually engaging with the locale you find yourself in though. Another part of your work involves helping ailing plants recover, the player needing to spray foliage for a while so it can grow into something nice, lush, and green. The plants do change with your location and seeing actual flowers appear in a location does feel like you’re doing more than just tearing down piles of trash to help the environment. When you reach certain percentage thresholds for how well the area has recovered, you’re also able to see a shift in the area’s appearance. Animals will come back to the space, many of which you can pet, and stretches of dirt or ragged trees will now be green and healthy. These milestones leading to a sudden surge of recovery would probably have been more satisfying to see gradually happen in response to your actions, but you can at least say that the place you found and the place you leave look different beyond the removal of trash mountains.
When Fresh Start begins, you do have a few limits on how quickly and efficiently your work can be done. To fill up your hose with water involves finding water sources and sucking up some liquid, this slowing down work a touch but not to the point it’s too annoying to do. However, your cleaning will gradually earn you some coins that can be spent on upgrades that can make for more convenient and quick work. Three different upgrade trees let you invest in different options and even abilities, so while it’s likely smart to invest in bigger water tanks and stronger nozzles to speed things up, you can also get helpful tools that will also assist with your work. A radar pulse will highlight plants that can be watered, although it does seem a touch imperfect as it might not highlight a whole plant or stop highlighting them after they’ve grown a bit but not fully. Sprinklers and hooverbots can be used to automatically water an area or automatically suck up nearby trash respectively, although the sprinklers sometimes can’t line up their water right to hit a plant no matter how hard they try. The little issues aren’t too much of a bother since they’re not too frequent or your own efforts can quickly work around them, but the game does have some outright issues like a trash pile appearing inside of a rock that can be a touch annoying. Thankfully, you can finagle your gear to still get to it, but this can lead to some rough searching if you have a level 99% clear and don’t know what’s missing.
The areas you’re cleaning in Fresh Start often have more goals than just cleaning, a list of tasks encouraging you to help in ways beyond using your device. Picking up fishing nets near a whale-filled bay, repairing helpful machines, or even just finding a hat for a cat can be necessary jobs to complete before you can move onto the next level, and while it’s often just as simple as finding the object and then pressing a button to use it elsewhere, it does give you something extra to think about beyond just spraying and vacuuming. In some areas you even need to do something like open gates with keys or repair bridges before you can do more cleaning, and perhaps it is good in a way these aren’t deeper interactions since Fresh Start is definitely more about accessible and easy cleanups than involved or difficult tasks. It is a bit of a shame that if you try to return to a previous level it will completely reset it, but there are at least a good amount of levels and some fairly large ones that help the game achieve a mix of traveling to new areas often enough while having some areas of greater scope.
THE VERDICT: Fresh Start isn’t a very adventurous cleaning game, its approach to placing trash to clean up is often just large heaps of garbage scattered everywhere, but it’s still a relaxing enough experience with its environmental theme leading to nice if simple touches. Seeing the animals return gradually and helping plants rapidly grow with your hose help with visualizing the progress of your work more than just the trash mounds being absent and tiny repair and collection tasks lightly break up your rarely changing cleanup job. Upgrades do give you something to work for and helpful tools even if there are little issues in how some things interact, but mostly this nature-focused cleaning game is about good vibes even if your involvement can feel a touch basic even in a genre usually about simple satisfaction.
And so, I give Fresh Start for PlayStation 5…
An OKAY rating. The trash pile approach to mucking up the environments does feel like it holds back the game’s creative potential a good deal. While it doesn’t have the PowerWash Simulator advantage of being able to believably just coat the entire area in a layer of grime, spraying piles of garbage and then sucking up the remains isn’t what one would imagine if you’re angling to do some environmental clean-up, although the rare bit of noxious goo you clean up feels like a step in the right direction. Sometimes a level specific task does lead to a more relevant type of cleaning for the area you’re in and the tasks in general do feel useful in breaking up your standard cleaning work a touch so it doesn’t get too stagnant. However, an area like a beach feels like it has a lot more room for varied cleaning work. A litter picker pole for individual object clean-up, bathing minigames for animals, or other little quick tasks could help Fresh Start’s activities feel more unique and involved without breaking away from the simplicity that is meant to keep it relaxed and easy. The range of environments is at least right where it needs to be to tap into the expected beauty and brightness one would hope to see in a freshly cleaned location and the upgrade system is smart if hampered a touch by some things not working 100% of the time, but a little more creativity in the standard work feels like the hump Fresh Start needs to get over before it gets more than a casual recommendation.
It is nice to see Fresh Start acknowledging nature and humanity can and should get along as you clear away our negative influences but repair things that aren’t necessarily always helpful to the wildlife but don’t harm it either. It could have just been a pleasant cleaning game about making nature look nice again and that is mostly what it’s going for, but it does put some appreciated touches in other areas and has a decent understanding of how involved its work should be that levels don’t overstay their welcome. There’s still room to grow in its design and you can’t just train a hose on it for a few seconds to get it there like you can the plants in-game, but in a genre that isn’t exactly teeming with alternatives, Fresh Start works well enough for scratching that cleaning itch.