So I Tried… Doomba

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never played before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time my lovely colleagues and I got down to some serious cleaning in the free-to-play title, Doomba.

What I thought it was

A general rule in our biweekly streamcasts is to go in as blind as possible to make the experience as fresh (and funny) as possible! As such, I didn’t know what I was about to get into. Based on the name and cover art alone I imagined some kind of DOOM-themed cleaning simulator or FPS where we would take out aliens on a spaceship with giant weapons. That, or a humorous game about cleaning up after Doomguy’s ferocious brand of carnage.

What it actually is

Well, I was kinda right? We play as Doomba, a cleaning bot in a spaceship. We wake up to a snarky AI (we named her SadOs) berating us and telling us to clean up all this weird mushroomy gunk left by some alien or other. The main gameplay was running over dirt until your cleaning fluid ran dry, then getting some more. We also unlocked a squeegee for those hard-to-reach stains on the windows and ceiling (why would you put a window on a spaceship anyway?) The relatively short experience culminated in coming face-to-monitor with an alien lifeform and having to manoeuvre around it.

Will I keep playing?

Well, we kinda played through it on the stream! Since the game doesn’t have any achievements etc, I probably will label it as complete and leave it as is. It’s a fun little game and definitely worth a look, especially considering it was done by students as a thesis. Just be careful; we found out that pressing a certain numerical key made the gameplay the ending cutscene early.