A game that makes you feel like you’re doing chores for the criminals of the world.
If PowerWash Simulator and a career criminal had a video game baby, the result might be The Evidence Cleaner, by TitanzGames.
In this cleaning simulation game, you take on the role of a protagonist, whose wife has died. While the police have ruled it a suicide, you believe otherwise.
This sets you on your quest into the seedy underworld to find out whodunnit.
“The core inspiration was blending the highly satisfying loop of immersive job simulators with the intrigue of a gritty crime thriller. I wanted to take a methodical, tactile task and give it real narrative weight. It’s about the contrast between the oddly relaxing act of cleaning a chaotic scene and the suspense of slowly piecing together the secrets of what actually happened there,” said Noman Nazir, developer on The Evidence Cleaner.
As you work your way up the chain of the cities criminal underworld, you’ll clean up the evidence of their crimes. This includes mopping up blood, cleaning up broken glass, and dissolving the bodies of the victims left behind.
All while doing this, you seem to be collecting evidence.
The game sees you start off in your work hub. Here you can select the mission and upgrade or purchase new gear.
Each mission comes with a ticking clock – though it’s not always apparent that the clock is counting down. You’re given a checklist of things to clean, usually detailing the blood and other things that need to be removed.
Once each mission is completed and evidence collected, you’ll return back to the home hub where you’ll see your rank and money available to continue progressing forward.
It its core, the game is very simple, Nazir notes that the game was meant to contrast the simplicity of cleaning with the chaos of crime.
“I wanted to take a methodical, tactile task and give it real narrative weight. It’s about the contrast between the oddly relaxing act of cleaning a chaotic scene and the suspense of slowly piecing together the secrets of what actually happened there.”
To aid in your cleaning, you have a very unique set of tools; and it all starts with a mop.
Your cleaning cart is your best friend through each mission, acting in a way you would expect in real life. It holds your mop, sponge, evidence baggies and the rest of your gear as you work to clean up the mess left by the criminals.
As noted earlier, you can upgrade your gear to make it more useful.
Things like the unlockable vacuum and power washer will require quite a hefty amount of money to fully upgrade them, you’ll find that switching between different items can be a more useful system early on.
For instance, the power washer on level one will run out of water very fast. You’ll have to wait a significant duration before it’s ready to be used again.
Keeping the cart close so you can get rid of the big stains, before switching over to the mop, is the best course of action if you want to clean up the scene before the cops get there.
Mechanically the controls work out to be as simple as you’d need.
You’ll pull up the to-do clipboard with ‘Y,’ crouch with “X,’ and you can use your “hunter skill” to find leftover evidence by using ‘B.’
Triggers will activate certain tools, such as the power washer, vacuum, and the tape roll used for wrapping corpses to dissolve.
You can also distance grab by using the grip buttons and aiming to see a blue line before using the trigger.
Oh, and you can perform a physical clapping action to get your cleaning cart to come to you when needed.
Graphically the game is alright.
Things are clear and there’s no blurriness or issues with the framerate to note. However, the world isn’t super high quality.
You certainly won’t be experiencing the same level of quality you might get if you were playing Ghost Town, and there doesn’t really seem to be any texture to the world. But you’re cleaning up crimes and this actually adds to the flatness your soul might feel if it were your actual job.
Overall, The Evidence Cleaner is a unique title for the virtual reality (VR) space that makes you feel like you’re actually cleaning.
Not kidding here, you will definitely break a sweat if you’re mopping with a vigour to beat the timer.
Like PowerWash Simulator this game is very niche and won’t be for everyone.
While you will be attempting to clean up the mess left by the seedy underworld, the simplicity of the tasks you’ll undertake can be very calming.
Yes it sounds like these things would be diametrically opposed. But there’s a zen like calm that washes over, when you’ve managed to immerse yourself in the game world and are using the mop with all the real-world physics TitanzGame could create, to work towards figuring out the mystery.
The Evidence Cleaner, was reviewed on the Quest 3 after receiving a key from the devlopers.
