I have a complex relationship with stealth games. They’re some of my favorite games to play, but I rarely enjoy them for the actual stealth mechanics. I love Deus Ex for its freedom of choice and the feeling of being a superpowered cyborg badass. I love Dishonored for its imaginative world and characters, and for the well-done sword combat. But playing these games the way the devs subtly hint that you should, a nonlethal ghost playthrough, is extremely unpalatable to me. I think adding stealth mechanics to a game is like adding a condiment to your favorite meal. It can greatly enhance a game it’s featured with, but it’s a bad situation when all you have is ketchup.
This is why I was a little skeptical of Serial Cleaners, from developer Draw Distance and publisher 505 Games. It’s the purest stealth game I’ve seen in a long time, all sneaking, no action. Unless you count super vacuum cleaning action. Serial Cleaners is a hybrid stealth game/cleaning simulator, perhaps one of the weirdest genre mashups I’ve seen in the longest time, and it’s absolutely not a harmonious mixture.
Serial Cleaners is a pulpy, 90’s infused, organized crime tale about Bob, Psycho, Viper, and Lati, a group of mobsters who deal in the business of evidence disposal. They go to crime scenes and clean up anything that could be incriminating to their employer, namely evidence, dead bodies, and especially blood. It’s not a glamorous line of work, and the cast eventually grows to have mixed feelings over it, but it’s definitely a unique setup.
If there’s one thing I liked about the game, it is the well-crafted story. The game starts off really promising, with a flashy, animated introduction full of style, before segueing into our four protagonists, celebrating New Years’ Eve 1999 by swapping tales of their favorite operations from a decade of being in business. I really like all the main characters, they’re well-written, believable human beings, and their voice actors do a great job at bringing them to life. They’re very fun to hang around, even as their stories go to some very dark places.
The game is structured so that each level is a flashback to one of the gang’s previous operations, though not all of the flashbacks are actual stages. Some of the flashbacks are more intimate moments that reveal the characters’ backstories. I thought all of these story flashbacks were very interesting. I was definitely happy when they came up, as these are definitely the highlights of the game. I like the game’s story quite a bit, but the actual gameplay is less than stellar.
Remember when I said that it’s not a harmonious genre mixup? Neither the stealth nor the cleaning portions of the game are that well done, but the sloppiness really comes off during the cleaning portions of the game. Because you’re not alone in your cleaning escapades. You have to clean up everything while the cops are on your trail. This is where the stealth of the “stealth game/cleaning simulator” comes in. In every level, several police officers are present, and you have to carefully sneak between them as you clean.
I object to this entire premise, for numerous reasons. The police never grow more suspicious as the crime scene magically grows cleaner, and I’ve only seen them call for backup maybe once or twice over my entire playthrough. It leads to a very stop-and-start gameplay loop, as you spend much of your playtime just waiting for the cops to go away so you can clean in peace. And then there’s the vacuum cleaner, which is one of the most poorly designed mechanics I’ve seen in a game in a long time. In most if not all stealth games, making as little noise as possible is a key element to avoiding detection. Guess what this game forces you to do? One of your goals in every level is to clean up blood, lots and lots of blood, and to do this, you need to use a vacuum cleaner, which is one of the noisiest actions in the game. Why not a mop, I have no idea. The only way to avoid detection when vacuuming is to carefully vacuum such that the radius of noise you make doesn’t overlap with any of the guards, which feels like a really gamey mechanic, it’s very immersion-breaking.
You don’t really have to worry about the cops catching you though, because they’re dumb as rocks. Serial Cleaners’ police AI is about as awful as artificial intelligence can be without being deliberately bad or broken. When the player character is detected, the AI’s sole tactic is to run in a straight line towards them, their attacks occasionally whiff with no reason given, and they lose the player’s position very easily. I had one instance where I got caught and escaped the guard by running in circles around a bunch of bookshelves, at which point he abruptly decided that I somehow went downstairs and ran far in the opposite direction from my hiding spot.
Though getting detected really isn’t much of a thing either. Unlike most stealth games, there’s no phase between “Cop is inactive” and “Cop is attacking.” If you are in a cop’s line of vision, you see a white line connecting the two of you, and if the line turns orange, then you’ve officially been detected, and only then will the cop attack. If the cop catches a glimpse of you but you manage to hide in time, they immediately go back to their normal patrol path. In a normal stealth game, an enemy catching a glimpse of you will put them in an alert phase, where they investigate your last known position and more actively search for you. It can take up to five seconds for a cop to actually detect you based on distance, so evading them is really easy, making the game a cakewalk so long as you plan effectively.
Serial Cleaners doesn’t have a normal difficulty curve at all. It only gets easier as the game progresses. The later levels might seem tougher because they’re much larger and have more to clean up, but they’re far more open-ended. Compare Lati’s first level, set in a cramped dry cleaners with very little room to navigate, and one of her later levels, set in a wide-open TV studio with multiple routes and an entire system of catwalks to use. I had a very rough time with her first level because the guard patrol routes kept lining up so that I couldn’t do anything, and the supposedly harder later level was a breeze in comparison because I was more consistently able to plan a route past the cops.
The one thing I did like about the gameplay is that all four characters are very distinct, and you are required to take their different abilities into account to clear their stages. Viper is a master hacker and can remotely trigger distractions to clear a path for herself. Psycho can knock out cops with thrown objects and is the only character capable of permanently disposing of them. Lati is super acrobatic and can jump over cover and other obstacles, sometimes to places where the cops cannot follow her. The only one that I don’t really get is Bob. His only ability seems to be wrapping up corpses so that they don’t leak blood when he drags them along the floor, which is good but not really as important as the other three. He can apparently roller-skate across blood for extra speed, but I never even knew I had this ability until I double-checked the game’s steam page.
That’s the one thing I liked about the gameplay, so here’s the one thing I disliked about the story. You jump between time periods and characters so much, and while this does give a lot of variety, it comes at the expense of the story in the present which takes forever to get started. Also found on the game’s steam page in the story’s description is that it notes “As the details of their stories stop matching up, the ugly truth behind their co-operation begins to reveal itself”. I thought that this would be a really interesting setup, but the narrative just spins its wheels as you go through a massive barrage of filler levels, and the “ugly truth” doesn’t come into play until the endgame, by which point it ceases to be of any impact.
Presentation is very much a mixed bag. The game has style, I’ll give it that. The music is very jazzy and atmospheric, and I loved all the pre-rendered cinematics, they have a very unique aesthetic to them, and I enjoyed getting to see a new one for clearing each batch of stages. This somewhat carries over into the UI, with the screen flashing with color and life whenever you complete an objective, but I wish they went wilder with it. When the game’s UI isn’t denying you information about guard patrol paths, vision cones, or letting you pan across the entire map in this game’s vision mode, the UI is very utilitarian and simple. I think a more bombastic Persona 5-style UI would have suited the game better.
Though it’s the in-game graphics I truly take umbrage with, this game just looks butt-ugly. I think the character models were going for a “Playstation 1 era 3D” look, which would fit with the 90s theming the rest of the game has, but I just wish they stuck with it. The environments don’t look like they were designed with this aesthetic in mind at all, and I very much think they should have been. Texture work is very poor, something that’s immediately noticeable whenever the game zooms in on the environments for an in-engine cutscene. Speaking of those in-engine cutscenes, none of the game’s characters have any mouth movement of any kind. They go for long closeup scenes of people talking, but their mouths don’t open. If the devs didn’t feel like allocating the resources for lip flaps, why make so many scenes where their absence would be immediately obvious?
Serial Cleaners has perhaps the most painful combination any game can have, a good story and awful gameplay. Despite my misgivings with the pacing, it’s still a very solid story, one that I would recommend. But the gameplay is such a tedious bore to get through that it’s effectively a pair of cement shoes that sinks any enjoyment one might get out of this game. If this game were an animated film instead, I think it might have been something pretty decent. The developers know how to craft a compelling narrative, and I’d love to see what visuals they could craft when they’re not shackled to the Switch’s specs. But alas, tis not to be. Such a shame.
For more information, visit: https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/serial-cleaners-switch/
Related: Reviews by Devon Williams
"Videogames have been a massive part of my life since I was three. With a bottomless appreciation for games both modern and retro, I'm always happy to experience something new and wacky. I hope to become a writer someday, to craft wonderful worlds like the ones in my favorite videogames."
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