Some of My Favorite Games

This game is kinda janky, but that just adds to its charm. You know all those video games where you run through a space station, research lab, or evil underground lair, blowing things up and shooting aliens and aura farming? This game is what happens after: sci-fi janitorial staff come in and clean up all the bug guts you spilled everywhere. Aerospace Sanitation Inc. employs janitors of all ages (I've gotten everything between 16 to 64) to clean up bodies (or what's left of them), alien eggs, Chinese takeout containers, boxes, barrels, union graffiti, and anything else that might dissatisfy the corporate owners of whatever facility was trashed.

You can find various "Easter eggs" (references to other games, or sometimes actual Easter eggs) throughout the levels, and bring them back to your office as decorations. When you return to the office after a long day of cleaning, there will be various reports plastered all over your walls and shelves informing you of anything you missed (blood, soot, bullet holes, body parts, overturned barrels, etc.), communicated via amusing news stories from "The Station Times". E.g., if you forget to weld all the bullet holes shut, you'll get: "A BULLET HOLE A DRUG HOLE...Investigations into drug use on the Station finally led to the arrest of a worker who hid his Spice [in-universe drug name] in a bullet hole in the wall". Amusing, creative, and informative. There's lots of fun flavor text like this throughout the whole game.

The physics in the game (how objects move around) is really where the jank comes in; trying to carry the large square biohazard bins full of random bits of debris and viscera (:O) often ends up with the objects clipping into each other and subsequently falling out of the bottom of the bin or exploding out of the top. Although this can be infinitely frustrating, it can also be wonderfully amusing when playing with friends. It really lends something to the gritty, corporate hellscape setting. Of course, cleaning games aren't for everyone, but if you enjoy them and you have a decent amount of patience for things going wrong, you'll probably enjoy it; there are twenty-two main game levels, plus several DLCs (downloadable [extra] content), so I find it to be worth the cost even at full price.

Blue Prince follows in the grand gaming tradition (and really, storytelling generally) of having an older (usually male) relative die and leave you his estate (almost always an old manor) filled with things you need to figure out. Puzzles, in this case. I have not played this game through to total completion, but I did play the first main story and the first thing that comes after it. That might sound confusing, and it should because it is. Blue Prince is one of the best puzzle games to come out in the last few years, maybe ever.

The game is a "roguelike", meaning you do lots of "runs" of the game over and over, seeing what you can do along the way. In this case, the rooms of the house reset every day; you open doors throughout the house, and each time are presented with three potential rooms you can draw. These rooms might contain resources for your current run, lore for the game, puzzles, hints to other puzzles, new locations, and probably some other things I'm forgetting. (It's been almost a year since I've played this game haha.) There's deep, somewhat complex, political lore for the story and history of the region, in which your family is deeply involved. If you like puzzle games, this is definitely worth your time.

As wonderful as VCD is, Crime Scene Cleaner is the best cleaning game I've ever played. Not that I've played a ton, but they can be hard to get right, and based on the reviews, many are simply not worth playing. CSC, however, has not only good cleaning gameplay, but good environmental storytelling, an iconic protagonist (Mr. Kovalsky), nice graphics (though my Steam Deck struggles on the higher settings lol), and somehow, a pretty intensive plot despite nothing happening throughout the game besides you cleaning up other people's messes.

Kovalsky has an appropriately sad backstory: his wife is probably dead (or else left him, I suppose) because we don't hear anything about her, and his daughter is sick with a very severe illness resulting in enourmous five-digit hospital bills. These fall solely on Kovalsky, whose above-board janitorial work simply isn't going to be sufficient. So he goes to work for the mob.

I really think this game is best experienced blind, so I don't want to include too much more here. Perhaps I'm biased because that's how I experienced it; bought it on launch day, immediately played several hours a day for several days straight, no internet tips to help out when you get stuck or confused, just pure vibes.

They've released one major content update so far, and although there were only two new maps (large ones, to be fair), it was totally free, and inspired by suggestions from the community, which is always great to see. AND, there's another update coming in six days (as of 26-03-20) which I'm only learning about now because I'm writing this review and checked out the Steam page to see what was up. If they release paid DLC in the future, I would certainly buy that too. Anyway, definitely give this game a go.