I’ve never lived in New York, but I’m wholly familiar with the grimy urban environments rendered here. The game opens with a minimalist film-noir cut scene depicting NYC at the turn of the millennium, and the nostalgia it evokes is almost palpable. On the other, it’s a pretty odd stealth game.
On one hand, it’s unique styling, grungy story, and aversion to the rules set it apart from anything I’ve played in the genre.
I spent 16 hours with the game, and as the credits rolled, I found it to have been a far more interesting title than I had initially anticipated. As the player, your task is to navigate them through an array of grizzly crime scenes - to dump the bodies, dispose of evidence, and clear up the red stuff. The indie game featured in this Serial Cleaners review follows a Gang of four misfits that deal with the aftermath of the city’s worst homicides. Here, cleaning up other people’s mess pays the big bucks. In the case of our protagonists, the seedy underworld of the crime-ridden East Coast represents the richest opportunities, and the untimely misfortunes of one person make for the spoils of another. Or perhaps those two analogies are more interwoven than they first seem.
It’s the antithesis of the old metaphor insinuating a limitless bounty of opportunity: the Big Apple. That was philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s indictment, anyway: the city as a depraved cesspit bled dry of any value.
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