Serial Cleaners

Serial Cleaners' main problem is that it's kind of a wasted opportunity. There's room for a game like this on the market, and it's stylishly presented enough that it could easily garner an audience of obsessive stealth-loving cleaners. It just doesn't achieve the necessary tension to make it a compelling stealth game and its mechanics are too open to abuse to reward careful play and smart decisions. As a result, the potential thrill that it could have been is lost.

A stealth-action 'em up that makes murder-cleaning a fun task that rewards patience or chaos.

Serial Cleaners features quirky characters you’ll simply fall in love with. The game is fresh and entertaining. Even as the difficulty ramps up, you’ll still enjoy sneaking past guards, destroying evidence, and—most of all—vacuuming up blood (it just has a certain charm, even in the snow). Plus, the constant strategizing will keep your brain engaged. Add to that some laid-back jazz-inspired music and a mafia boss, and you’re in for a treat. So grab your vacuum and head out to clean up the streets of New York.

In this unusual take to stealth action, the players will have to clean up crime scenes after the gruesome actions occur but before the law can catch them. With its marvelous art style and sountrack, and an accessible and fun experience, Serial Cleaners' biggest flaws are its rather easy difficulty for experienced players and repetitiveness that settles in after a couple of hours, but which can be averted by playing in short sessions.

Serial Cleaners tries to take a leap forward from its predecessor, but manages to barely make a dent: while the graphics and narrative are indeed improved, giving us a colourful and enjoyable 90s-tinged work, the gameplay still has shortcomings.

The varied set pieces really capture the grimy, gritty nature of the crime that permeated film and TV during the late 90s with a surprising level of detail.

While Serial Cleaners isn’t without its issues, this macabre mop-’em-up has its moments, but only the most patient custodians of carnage will likely want to see it through to the end. The writing is fantastic and the characters all bring something new and exciting to the table with their various talents. If you enjoyed the original game and can look beyond the grime and viscera that occasionally gunk up the experience, you might just find Serial Cleaners to be a dirty job worth undertaking. It’s not much, but it’s honest work.

I loved my time with Serial Cleaners, which clocked in at around 10 hours. It was everything you could expect from a sequel of a game that showed some real promise. The greater lean on narrative and the gritty aesthetic carried the game much further than the original Serial Cleaner, but sadly the core gameplay loop remains mostly unchanged. This is fine initially but wears thin toward the end.  If you're a fan of Stealth games and movies such as Pulp Fiction, you'll lap up everything Serial Cleaners has to offer. While it outstayed its welcome, I'd have no qualms about hiring this motley crew for another clean-up.

Serial Cleaners improves a lot of components from the original, especially when it pivots towards a more story-driven interface. The voice acting and the overall creative choices make it an indie game worth trying out for the story and also for its unique way of telling a crime story from a different perspective. The best part of the game is interacting with the unique cleaners that give Serial Cleaners so much character by utilizing creative ways to tell the story through different eyes. Above all, there’s the enjoyable stealth action that takes you from start to finish, allowing you to tackle each level at your own pace.

Serial Cleaners is a unique game, one that asks you to clean up the kinds of messes you'd usually leave behind in some other violent game. It pushes forth a stylish story with compelling characters, wrapped up in a package that some may be understandably disappointed by and others might be surprised (and relaxed) by. With its easy-to-dupe AI, the need to be perfect in your work fades away, and instead a calming, weird sense of comfort lures you in. And in this world, sometimes "weirdly comforting" is all you can ask for in your pastimes.