Viscera Cleanup Detail Preview

The influx of simulation games has escalated to an uncontrollable amount in the past few months starting with Farming Simulator and culminating with Goat Simulator. Well, it’s become quite a mess and so what better way to clean up the situation than with Space Janitor Simulator or, as it’s better known, Viscera Cleanup Detail.

Not everybody can be a hero, but everybody has to pull their weight. Viscera Cleanup Detail puts you in the wellington boots of a janitor whose job it is to wash down all the blood, gore and body parts after what you’re sure was an epic sci-fi battle where the hero reigned victorious, tearing aliens limb from limb. At least, that’s what the leftovers look like. Using your trusty mop, water bucket and, fantastically named, muck-gyver, you have to get the space station, jail cells, sewage tunnels and any other setting you’re given, into tip top shape so the hero can do it all again.

Viscera Cleanup Detail has got a fantastic premise and it’s such an amazing idea, we just had to give it a go. Luckily, multiplayer has recently been added into the game so the whole cleaning crew hopped in and, well... pandamonium ensued.

Your primary ‘weapon’ is your space mop that you dunk into your space bucket (obtained via the ‘slosh-a-matic’) which you then have to wash the space walls with and, of course, dispose of the space bodies into the space furnace to get the space station space clean. Space. The thing is, the more you wash the blood away, the more blood gets into your bucket; this means that instead of having a lovely pool of pristine H2O, you’re left with a gloopy mess of entrails and slightly diluted viscera (we also had to Google what it meant). Should you, or any of your diligent crew, accidentally knock over said bucket, you’re back to square one as your lovely clean floor soon becomes a scene from a slaughterhouse.

You may not think that a lot of fun could be had from cleaning corridors but that’s where you’d be wrong. It’s something we can’t quite put our finger on but it takes a mix of communication, organisation and due diligence to get your team organised, and that’s where the fun is. We had to assign each other roles so that we didn't get overwhelmed but, of course, that all went down the toilet and guess who had to clean it up?

For a game still in its alpha stages, Viscera Cleanup Detail is fantastically polished. The environments look great and you really feel like you’re cleaning up somebody’s mess. It’s the attention to detail that we really adored though, such as the squeaking of your overalls as you go about your tasks or the ability to operate certain machinery that you might assume is just there for aesthetics.

Not only is it very polished, it was also very easy to pick up. We had next to no issue with learning how to play and were soon making tidy work of the destroyed corridors and rooms. There were a few bugs here and there, especially with the multiplayer aspect (such as your teammates becoming invisible until you rejoin) but the potential for fun really masks these and, in time, they will be buffed out and tidied away.

Grab a few friends and apply elbow grease liberally because you’re going to be playing Viscera Cleanup Detail for hours upon hours, believe us. We’re hoping to see a lot of good things come from this title and so far, it hasn’t disappointed!