Odly satisfying and fun.

Viscera Cleanup Detail is all about cleaning stuff. Nothing more. You take your little mop and broom and get to work. You do this for over twenty levels and expect to be bored out of your mind but surprisingly this is not the case. Surprisingly, it has a fairly good story you can follow in which you chase after the rogue janitor Bob and find his rotten corpse at the end. This alone gives you purpose to play this game, not turning it into a chore (pun intended).

Every level in Viscera Cleanup Detail is different and has a different theme, some special cleaning requirements and sometimes a different way of disposing of the waste collected in the level. The variation is high and although your objective stays the same throughout the whole game, it feels like you play a different game each level.

The graphics in this game are fair, they are bright and colorful. The music from the boombox is good and works nice on the background while you are working your ass off. Except for the “Polka” soundtrack, that one is god awfully horrible.
The controls and physics in this game work quite well. Sometimes the game glitches like crazy because of two objects interfering to much but overall, it feels responsive and does what you want.

The game is intended to make you angry and make your life miserable with the chances of getting limbs and more gore instead of a bucket of water or a disposal bin, the chance of creating fires on the wall while welding bullet holes and of course, knocking over your blood-soaked bucket at the slightest touch. This is part of its charm. I am sure this game has a secret algorithm build into it that whenever you kick over a bucket, something nasty is coming out of one of the dispensers afterwards, just to remind you: “You screwed up and here is your punishment”.

The game has some issues like crashing, resetting your office at random and some game breaking bugs in which you detect trash or blood, but nothing is there, but overall, it is manageable and nothing to complain about. The fact that you realize that you are a janitor and you just f*king clean for twenty levels reminds you of this.

There are several DLC maps you can play in Viscera Cleanup Detail. You got the House of Horror which is a mix of all your favorite horror stories for you to clean up like the Evil Dead, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street. This one was my favorite. You got the Vulcan Affair, which is a huge, huge map with several special agent and spy references like Austin Powers and James Bond in which you can throw your trash in a pool full of sharks! You got Santa’s Rampage in which you have to clean the mess of Santa having a breakdown and murdering the sh!t out of his personnel and you got the Shadow Warrior Temple. This one I found least enjoyable because of the short duration and the fact that all the bins are in place and there are two incinerators, making it ridiculously easy.

The game is easily played solo but is, like many other games a lot more fun when playing together. Especially because you can see the other players wobbling back and forth. The walk cycle of the janitor character models is hilarious.

Like many other games, the biggest joy, and the reason I almost clocked eighty hours into this game, is collecting all the achievements. Because of this I now saw every square inch of the game, collected all the unique and fun items for my office and have the feeling that my janitor duty is finally complete, and I can get a life again.

Definitely recommend this game!