So I Tried… Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa’s Rampage

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never tried 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 I went for the PC version of Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa’s Rampage.

What I thought it was

A game that tasks you with cleaning up Santa's workshop after - or during - a massacre of the workers. Mopping, squeegeeing, polishing... All the kinds of things a janitor would do. You know, post-CSI involvement...

And just the other day, they were DOING the packing...

What it actually is

A multiplayer/Let's Play game with an insane physics engine and a mop. Oh, that sees you cleaning Santa's workshop after he's gone on a rampage - much like the title suggests.
As a temp from a cleaning firm, you must scour the wooden surfaces clean of any and all foreign materials. Blood, limbs, TNT... Well, maybe don't put that last one in the fire... It causes several explosions. It is quite deadly…

You do so with a mop that is always wet, but not always clean. Once it becomes blood-stained, it requires rinsing out in a bucket you get out of a machine. After several rinses, the water in the bucket becomes too bloody, dirtying your mop and requiring a new bucket. Body parts go into a biohazard container, summoned from another machine. Put too many in there, and the picture above becomes the picture below as the container boogies its way around the room, dirtying your clean floor and depositing the contents about the place...

Now I need another three buckets...

Will I keep playing

It's a fun game, but no I won't. There's nothing to it when playing alone, and I don't play games just to get the achievements. There is a story to be found in Santa’s Rampage, but I managed to hit the letters with my mop whilst trying to read them, sending them flying about the office. If you regularly get together with friends to play games, one person can host and others can join. I didn't investigate whether this was online-only or could be local, but I can imagine a few people teaming up to tackle the mess. One keeping hold of the bucket, retrieving a clean one every now and then whilst the others move bodies and check loose floorboards. Just be careful with the dynamite...