Spilled! (PC)

Cleaning games can often afford to be quite long, the gradual progress of the work part of the appeal. Seeing a nasty, dirty place turned spotless through your efforts scratches a common itch in our brains, the satisfaction making the time investment feel worthwhile. Spilled!, despite dealing with the environmental disasters that are oil spills, manages to condense the appeal of a cleaning game down into an hour long experience, hitting similar beats despite not achieving the same scope.

In Spilled!, you are in charge of a little tugboat that finds itself in heavily polluted waters overnight. The seas nearby look dire, black gunk filling the waterways and turning the once crystal clear blue waters into dark clouded messes. Your tug has a helpful attachment to begin fighting back against the pollution though, a red bar on the front working like a vacuum to suck up any oil you sail through. Most of the game, as a result, is taking your little boat through the bays you find yourself in, vacuuming up oil and then taking it to a larger recycling ship to turn in for a bit of cash. That cash, in turn, can be used to buy upgrades, the player able to work towards increasing their vacuum’s size, improving their tugboat’s speed, and making it so that their ship can carry more oil at a time before it needs to head back and turn it in.

Spilled! has a few simple tricks to make this work much more satisfying than the quick task it turns out to be. When you first enter a new area, the water is putrid and discolored, almost nothing visible in those tainted seas. As you begin scrubbing the area though, you’ll see the water return to a pristine state, the sealife starting to make a comeback while the seabed becomes easier and easier to see. What was once water so murky you couldn’t see anything beyond the surface turns into a lush and gorgeous underwater habitat. All sorts of colorful coral as well as subtleties like shifts in the ocean floor’s surface give it an appearance with some depth, but the real treat is seeing which animals return to their aquatic homes after the area’s been purified. While above the water the different places you’re cleaning will have some visual variety like a desert or snowy area, underneath the water you’ll also see new wildlife unique to that area. Sea turtles, eels, and even penguins can be seen swimming through the waters, and gradually having these splendid underwater sights come into view gives an extra layer to the satisfaction found in clearing out the oil spills.

Admittedly though, the game does include some animals that are stranded in the oil spills that aren’t quite as interesting. Every now and then a more cartoonish creature will be found surrounded by gunk that you can go over and pick up, these working a bit like collectibles but they’re not really hidden. In Spilled!, the next area will open up once you’ve cleaned up most of the oil in an area, and while the 16 special animals above the water’s surface are usually in small alcoves, they’re often surrounded by so much oil or barely off the main area that it feels harder to miss them than to find them. They aren’t really harmful in their presence, a cute touch if anything, but Spilled! does gradually introduce a few new considerations along its short journey so it isn’t just progressing into gradually larger waterways. Oil isn’t the only worry when it comes to pollution, another way to earn money and clean the water being to scoop up floating litter and shove it to the recycling boat. A water hose is introduced to the mix as well, letting you engage with land-based pollutants or issues like raging fires. These additions still are pretty quick and simple to address but do gel nicely with the general relaxed pace of the game, the player not needing to work too hard to clear an area even if they go for trying to purify it completely of all pollution.

The game only being an hour long might end up being the game’s main sticking point though, and the game actually feels like it goes by even more quickly than that. That is mostly thanks to a pretty smart approach to the gradual ramping up involved in moving from area to area. Since Spilled! doesn’t expect you 100% clear an area before you move on, you’ve often unlocked the path ahead before you’ve considered the work complete yourself. You scrub up what you can find, buy your upgrades, and it’s already time to move onto the next area with no delay where you can immediately get to work again. Besides some lingering to bask in the beautiful sights beneath the water after the clean-up, Spilled!’s design does encourage pretty swiftly continuing on since its doesn’t really establish any tough barriers to progress nor does it have any sort of failure state. Your oil capacity sends you back to the recycling boat now and again for turn-ins, you buy your upgrades, you go back out to scoop up more oil, and the cycle repeats, Spilled! even making sure you’re not often too far from those other ships to the point you can sometimes see two of them on-screen at once.

It wants to keep things brisk and that works well, even small side quests just about pushing an object over to another boat. Even though you’ll be a little disappointed when the credits play because you could have easily sunk even more time into it, Spilled! doesn’t waste that short runtime because it knows how to condense its work into something easy to manage with no rough points. However, it does feel a little slight, like the game could have easily kept going since the cleaning work does feel a little underfed in its currently small state.

THE VERDICT: Spilled! is a quick little cleaning game that works well for the hour it lasts but it feels like it stops before it needed to. It generally manages that length nicely, the flow of play keeping you moving along to new seas without the work being demanding or rushed. Little extra cleaning tasks get added without really complicating things, although that does also mean you’re mostly moving through oil spills without much thought besides which upgrade to grab next turn-in. The beautiful sights that serve as your reward for each clean-up do make things satisfying, but Spilled! would have really benefited from not ending the cleaning adventure so early.

And so, I give Spilled! for PC…

An OKAY rating. Spilled!’s size is really the major knock against it despite how well it manages that hour. In some ways, it’s because it does so well transitioning you from area to area that you are left still hungry for much more than what is offering. The cleaning does remain pretty basic even when things like the hose or later a crane are thrown in the mix, this not necessarily a bad thing for a cleaning focused game, but that does mean it isn’t rising above the simple thrills despite putting a lot of artistry into making those underwater ecosystems look so lovely. Even independent of considering its pricing, Spilled! feels like a game that wraps up a bit too swiftly while clearly having the room for iteration. More areas, maybe randomized ones in an endless mode, or other little reasons to return to the game could let that itch to clean find more substance to work with. Even just multiple small campaigns that follow the current game’s nice flow would help it feel like it didn’t show you the door so quickly, and I wager if Spilled! ever gets a sequel it will be the more robust game that can be relaxing and easy to lose track of time during without feeling like the end came too soon.

The developer of Spilled!, Lente, created this game while living on a boat, which doesn’t sound like the most conducive conditions to develop a large game under. It is good that she still managed to get Spilled! out and generally it seems well-conceived, a clear understanding of what would make its style of cleaning play fun coming through despite the simplicity. Spilled! does a good job of building up an appetite for cleaning up more and more oil spills, it simply needed more time to satisfy that craving rather than leave you a bit unfulfilled.