Picking Up Steam: Serial Cleaner (PC)

Once crime starts getting organized, you have to account for more than just the trigger men. After the people you want gone are whacked, the evidence needs to be cleaned up too, and that’s where Bob comes in. Bob C. Leaner is the guy you call to get rid of the bodies, blood, and anything else incriminating at the crime scene, although it’s no easy task when cops come sniffing around before he arrives. Still, Bob’s a professional, so in the stealth game Serial Cleaner, you need to make sure to clear away all the evidence without being the one who gets caught by the cops yourself.

 

Serial Cleaner is set in the 1970s, something that makes it a bit more believable there isn’t going to be more detailed forensics to catch crooks so you really can just dispose of the bodies and mop up the blood to keep Bob’s employers from getting caught. Bob himself really does seem to be in this line of work purely for the money though. Insistent on taking care of his elderly mother and having very poor self-control when it comes to gambling, Bob can’t help but put himself in the kind of hole that requires big paying jobs to accommodate, although the game’s short story does see the particular type of work he takes on shift a bit. Cleaning up after gangsters kill each other is a lot easier to stomach than the serial killer whose messes Bob has to start cleaning up, Serial Cleaner able to mix more routine jobs with ones that build up to some heightened drama around the cleaner wanting to get out of the business despite being in so deep.

The main game of Serial Cleaner has you undertake 20 different jobs, the main concern when you hit the scene being to weave around the patrolling police men to rid the crime scene of whatever your client asked you to dispose of. Amusingly enough, the cleaner decides the best way to deal with blood splatter is to bring a large vacuum cleaner, although while it makes some noise, noise is rarely the thing that will catch the attention of the cops. Instead, you need to avoid the cones of red that represent their visual range, the player needing to make use of covers, shortcuts, and distractions to help better get around the area without getting caught. However, Serial Cleaner is unusually forgiving. If a cop spots you, he still needs to run over and catch you for the mission to be a failure. At first, the cops are so easily winded or easy to outmaneuver they’re almost not worth worrying about. If you’re carrying a body it slows you down, but you can drop it and run and then just come back for it later without it being moved. Even stranger, there are places Bob can take cover like inside plants or dumpsters, but even if a policeman is right beside you as you jump in, he will make no effort to pull you back out, instead eventually losing interesting and going back to his usual patrols.

 

This can definitely make Serial Cleaner much easier than you’d expect at times, although this choice might have been made to avoid making the stealth too difficult. Some later levels introduce surveillance cameras and gunmen that will instantly lead to a loss if they spot you, these used lightly or in puzzle contexts because a full level restart because of such a quick defeat can be disheartening or annoying. There is some randomization in Serial Cleaner, the exact placement of bodies and evidence mixed around on retries, meaning you can’t even necessarily learn how to best approach a level through failure. You can at least get a lay of the land and learn some unchanging elements like doors to unlock or where the hiding spots are though, and you can even use Cleaner Vision to view the entire level at once so you’re not rushing into the unknown each time. Serial Cleaner does at least eventually introduce a somewhat decent middle ground between the bumbling cops you can flagrantly run in front of and the instant losses, some more capable lawmen able to sprint towards you in a hurry or whistle for back-up to make it harder to scurry away.

One fun touch about doing your body disposal work is how it will shift based on the stage you’re in. In most levels, you pull up in your station wagon and can put any corpses in there. When you’re breaking into an indoor space like a newspaper office or night club though, the cleaner has to be more creative, doing things like dumping them out the window or making use of the club’s fish tank full of piranhas. Figuring out how to do your work without getting caught is the main challenge, but there are collectibles to be found like unlockable costumes and bonus levels, both of those based on media from the 1970s. You can dress Bob up like Bruce Lee as he tackles extra challenges based Alien, Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the bonuses usually worth the extra effort in terms of scouring the game’s story levels. The plot does take you to a good mix of locations like a swamp, campsite, and gym as well, and if you’re interested in going for extra credit, you can try to clean up every speck of blood for a 100% rating on a stage.

 

While some levels do eventually mix up the goals a bit as the story progresses, Serial Cleaner does feel a little locked in by its stealth mechanics not being too complex. After beating the game you can replay levels with challenges enabled to try and change that. The game does open with a weird message about wanting your real world location that just ties to whether the game will be set during night or day, night limiting your visibility some, but other challenges involve things like hiding the visual cone from guards, making it so you can’t hide if a cop can see you, and adding a time limit to stages. The mild randomization can make these harder than they should be to clear so it’s apparent why some of these aren’t already in place, although something like a time limit could have been an interesting bit of extra pressure in a plot that otherwise lets you rather leisurely clean up bodies. Levels can often be swiftly completed because they often don’t squeeze you too hard with their present dangers, and instant restarts make tackling the tougher ones again and again still help the game not become too slow save for when you have to wait on patrols to be just right.

THE VERDICT: Serial Cleaner lays out a good range of bloody crime scenes to try and surreptitiously sweep up, but it can’t quite hit the sweet spot when it comes to how competent to make the cops. When they’re too capable and cause an instant loss, the mild level randomization can become a bit frustrating, but when they’re too easy to outrun, you barely have to take them seriously. There is some excitement in slipping into a hiding spot or trapping a guard so you can better do your work and the references to 70s pop culture are a fun extra touch, but the stealth mechanics can lead to some levels being over in a flash while others you ram your head against until you finally get things to work out.

 

And so, I give Serial Cleaner for PC…

An OKAY rating. The levels being bite-sized does make Serial Cleaner good for a quick jump in for a little action, the task of disposing of bodies and vacuuming up huge blood splatters surprisingly swift and low commitment. The idea sounds much more difficult than the game’s representation of it, and even elements like noise distractions or the cops that whistle for back-up can end up less important to the formula than they sound. The wise introduction of the more competent cops who can actually outrun you does keep the game from feeling too easy though, and level layouts do shift around enough that you will still need to do some planning to get in and out while doing your work properly. Serial Cleaner does show that instant failure is generally not a good fit for its approach to stealth gameplay and the challenge options at least let it toy with certain suggested changes like not making hiding so easy, but some concepts like timed levels or not being able to hide when a cop is right behind you feel like they could have at least been standard in some cases. Serial Cleaner does seem to want to be a bit casual, few levels requiring much advanced planning, and ones that do like that bonus Alien level are harmed a bit by some visual ambiguity like the visual cones of cameras being hard to see in Cleaner Vision.

 

Despite the work of Bob Leaner being such a sensitive task, Serial Cleaner portrays it in a pretty relaxed way. You can rush a body over to your car and plop it in and the cops won’t care, which mean it does work better as a low pressure stealth game but it comes with the sacrifice of the specific fantasy it promises. You’re cleaning up after murders but don’t really need the deft touch that might involve, and while sometimes absurdity like bringing a vacuum to deal with the blood makes up for broken expectations, it also feels like this game should have applied some stronger pressures even if it wasn’t trying to be too difficult. You can sometimes feel the thrill of being sneaky when you outfox the more competent cops or slip through a shortcut just in time, but just as often you’ll not take the threats seriously as you run around a desk until the chasing policeman forgets what he was doing. It’s an imperfect mix but at least you aren’t impeded from getting to better challenges, Serial Cleaner not too often feeling frustrating even if that comes at the cost of less jobs where you truly feel slick for clearing the crime scene of all evidence.