Making mistakes and inadvertently causing accidents are, for better or for worse, ubiquitous aspects of human nature. When such mistakes and accidents occur, I’d like to think most ordinary people would do what they can to make amends and rectify any ill will to which their actions may have led.

Certain groups of less-ordinary people, however, often make their living by orchestrating events to which they euphemistically refer as “accidents” and “misunderstandings.” As you might have gathered from that general concept, I’m referring mostly to one aspect of the darker underbelly of modern society, namely organized crime.

As you might be well aware, various aspects of organized crime have been romanticized to some degree within popular culture by such films and television shows as The Godfather and, to something of a lesser extent, Breaking Bad (as well as its more recent spinoff series, Better Call Saul).

I specifically mention Breaking Bad because one of its critical characters, Mike Ehrmantraut, serves as a perfect example of a certain line of work which can be experienced firsthand within the game I’ll be reviewing today. The game in question is known as Serial Cleaner, published by Curve Digital and developed by iFun4All S.A.

Within Serial Cleaner, you control a man known only as Bobby. Your character possesses a certain set of skills which have made him a valuable part-time cleaner in the direct employ of an entity to which the game rather generically refers as “the mob.”

Essentially, whenever your in-game employers are involved in one of the aforementioned “accidents” or “misunderstandings,” you’re called in to clean up the resulting mess as thoroughly as you can. The cleaning process usually consists of the removal of bodies, incriminating evidence, and copious amounts of blood.

As you might reasonably expect considering the circumstances of each cleaning job you accept, there’s typically some degree of police presence around the site of each mission. Thus, a degree of stealth is key as you go about your work. Fortunately for me, the majority of guards I’ve encountered while on the job are remarkably inattentive, usually to a comical degree.

By that, I mostly mean that although any guards I’ve observed searching one of my job sites will eventually notice if I move or dispose of evidence or bodies, they don’t tend to interpret the disappearance of any evidence as a sign of my presence. That means they typically don’t actively come looking for me while I’m working unless I happen to walk directly into their field of vision.

Even then, if a guard happened to see me and give chase, I’ve often found myself able to simply outrun them remarkably easily. Once I’ve been out of their field of vision for long enough, it’s as if they somehow completely forget I was ever there. I still find that amusing to a certain extent.

This rather accommodating AI played a significant role in allowing me to get the hang of the main gameplay mechanics during the first few missions. However, in my experience, this AI behavior prevented the guards from posing much of an actual threat as I progressed to later missions. Instead, I honestly felt that the guards were merely there to serve as more of a potential annoyance than anything.

If outrunning any pesky pursuers proves particularly problematic, however, you can also take advantage of any sufficient hiding places located around a given crime scene. You’ll likely find that any mission’s available hiding spots are exceptionally useful because as far as I can tell, you can’t be apprehended by any guards while hiding, even if any guards are actively chasing you when you enter a hiding spot.

In order to help you locate these hiding places, you can use an ability which the game calls your “cleaner sense.” I’ve found that this mechanic works somewhat similarly to the “instinct” system present within the more recent Hitman games.

Cleaner sense allows you to survey the entirety of your environment and reveal the locations of such things as hiding places, bodies, and evidence that you haven’t dealt with quite yet. I would recommend only using your cleaner sense when you’re not at risk of being discovered by any guards, however, as you’re forced to remain motionless while cleaner sense is active.

As I stated earlier, stealth is highly encouraged on your part as you go about your work, despite the apparent near-complete ineptitude of most guards I’ve encountered throughout my time with Serial Cleaner. Because of that, you would do well to strive to remain not only unseen, but ideally silent as well.

The amount of noise you make during a given job doesn’t really become a factor until a few missions in, when the game begins to require that you clean up certain amounts of blood in addition to disposing of bodies and collecting evidence. Your main tool for removing blood is a standard vacuum cleaner, which will obviously generate quite a bit of extra noise around your immediate vicinity.

To conclude, I decided to review Serial Cleaner because I personally think various aspects of its gameplay put a fairly unique spin on certain ideas, and I think it deserves at least some time in the spotlight for doing so. Obviously, finding employment as a cleaner for an organized crime syndicate of any description is a dangerous, gritty proposition. However, I feel that Serial Cleaner manages to make light of that concept through, for example, the fact that your character seizes any opportunity he gets to deliver a series of puns related to the circumstances of the crime scene he’s currently cleaning.

I specifically brought up Breaking Bad’s Mike Ehrmantraut because I think his character serves as a perfect antithesis to Serial Cleaner’s main character in certain ways, while still highlighting the degree of risk one must be willing to take in order to succeed in a cleaner’s often-illicit line of work.

While I suspect Mike would be much more thorough during a cleaning job and take his work much more seriously than Bobby appears to (by perhaps using something more practical than a vacuum cleaner to remove blood); Bobby seems to have found ways to make his occupation at least somewhat less gritty through such mechanisms as his aforementioned arsenal of one-liners.

It seems to me that someone in his position would have to find ways to make each job less depressing for the sake of their very sanity, and I think Serial Cleaner manages to highlight ideas like that in its own unique way.

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Serial Cleaner

$14.99 USD

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Accommodating AI May Prove Helpful to New Players
• Difficulty Curve is Primarily Easy to Grasp
• Enjoyable, Time-Period-Appropriate Soundtrack

Cons

• Some May Find Gameplay Too Easy