It’s not every day you get an email from a known groundskeeper at a cemetery called “Pete” Sutcliffe about the upkeep of your dead wife’s grave. President Studio and PlayWay’s Crime Scene Cleaner is just the latest in the long line of cleaner/renovation titles since RuneStorm’s Viscera Cleanup Detail and Draw Distance’s Serial Cleaner. Much like the latter, the story of Crime Scene Cleaner puts you into a very trope-y, over-the-top “man in financial trouble has to clean up crime scenes for the mob” storyline that is, at the very least, serviceable.

Like most PlayWay titles in the sim-ish genre, Crime Scene Cleaner has a sense of “jank” about it, but in that fun way some simulators do. There isn’t the atmosphere of a funeral despite the grim circumstances of Mr. Kovalsky, the disembodied voice that mumbles something as you most likely listen to music or one of the half a billion podcasts out there by people who have nothing to say. There are moments where the story does try to hammer home a dark reality, but truth be told, there isn’t enough that hasn’t already been played out time and time again before.

Similar to PowerWash Simulator and beyond, you have a number of tools to help mop away the obscene amounts of claret thrown all over the walls, floors, in the carpets, and sometimes on the ceiling. You wouldn’t think an ice pick could spread blood half a mile up the A629, but somehow the mob can easily do it with anything they get their hands on. Leading you to roam around crime scenes collecting tapes, finding secrets, and occasionally mopping up blood and swearing when your bucket doesn’t rinse the many sweeps of a dead man’s vampire juice.

Being serious for a moment, Kovalsky is tasked with making money via the mob’s increasing propensity for killing as he needs to make a living, pay for upkeep on his wife’s grave, and pay the medical bills for his terminally ill daughter. Light and fun, isn’t it? If my references to a serial killer held in Broadmoor weren’t enough to bring the tone down, that probably has. As I say, though, the story of Crime Scene Cleaner isn’t new, and I think that’s somewhat fine as President Studio seems to know what kind of game it has made: A dad sim (literally) to play while listening to podcasts.

During your jobs on the scene of crimes, you will stumble upon keys to unlock doors, keys to sell for others to snort, objects that might tell the story of the locations, and on occasion some tapes like it was 1989. Each tape being another song for the soundtrack to play, including some “classical” compositions so you can act like a true psychopath listening to Wolfgang Amadeus’ Lacrimosa from his Requiem K collection in D minor. Psycho is exactly the word for it.

Kovalsky isn’t a full character and fits sociopathic tendencies as he blindly works for the mob and mumbles, “Oh that’s a thing,” while cleaning up a friend’s body – the very friend who got him into the work with the mob in the first place. Typically I’d try to avoid story elements like this when giving a review, but honestly, the story is the worst part of the latest cleaning sim with a story focus. Kovalsky is bland, his motivations are a blinking neon light saying “cancer” in big bold font above his daughter (who you never see) , and there is no break-up between the pizza sauce cleaning missions.

The backstory on Kovalsky is that of a high school janitor who wants more money, but where there could be something to expand on that and make it interesting, Crime Scene Cleaner doesn’t bother. While that’s a detriment to President Studio’s title, it doesn’t make Crime Scene Cleaner a bad game as the actual cleaning is arguably more interactive than PowerWash Simulator and Viscera Cleanup Detail. Between soaps and other such, you’re forced into thinking about how you clean instead of blindly whittling away the hours before you need to go to bed to get up for actual work in the morning.

In terms of performance, I’ve seen a couple of drops in the frame rate here or there, mostly when doing something stupid. Be it throwing a dead body out of the window on the fourth floor or throwing trash bags into places that are unrecoverable, typically. Sometimes I’ve had to build towers of furniture like I was Daniel Stern in a condemned building in New York around Christmas, which did result in an odd jankiness to complete a mission. Though for the most part on a 30-series RTX and generally running on hardware above the recommended specs, I’ve seen 60 frames at least 80% of the time.

Ultimately, Crime Scene Cleaner is a fantastic expansion of the gameplay for this cleaning genre we’ve got going on right now, but its story forces itself on you like it was part of the cartoonish mob you work for. Maybe if the story of Mr. Kovalsky was a touch more direct instead of dancing around how depressing it is, I’d have given President Studio a touch more credit. Though for the meantime, I’m left both wanting more of this gameplay by the red-soapy bucket load and less of this forgettable, trope-laden story.

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$19.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Oddly relaxing and fun gameplay.
• The story is serviceable, but not gripping.

Cons

• For the love of all that's holy, dead wife and dying kid is short-hand for no decent story.
• Some jank that can't be recovered from.