Serial Cleaners

When I reviewed Serial Cleaner back in 2016, I raved about its unique premise and morbid sense of humor. While it was far from the deepest stealth game on the block, the concept of cleaning up an active crime scene while the cops investigate was original enough to keep me engaged. And with its gritty 1970s style and a bunch of bonus stages based on famous movies, I spent most of that year telling people to buy it. In fact, I liked it so much that whenever somebody who ask me what recent game needs a sequel, Serial Cleaner was usually the first name I thought of. Now, six years later, and the crime scene fixers are back in the appropriately named Serial Cleaners. With a whole new look, new characters and a new decade to clean up, this ambitious sequel should be everything I’ve been waiting for and more, and yet I find myself feeling a little disappointed. We’re going to explore why that is in this review of Serial Cleaners.

As the 20th century comes to a close, an aging crime scene fixer is facing a real problem – he doesn’t know who to trust. He’s assembled a well-balanced team of shady characters who are all talented at cleaning up whatever the violent underworld can throw at them. In a perfect world, this highly-skilled crew would be able to work together to make all of their dreams come true. But the world, much like the next murder scene we’re asked to clean up, is messy, and things get complicated as the past comes back to haunt these professional fixers.

When it comes to cleaning up a crime scene, things haven’t changed that much in the last six years. The jobs can usually be boiled down to three simple tasks – clean up the blood, dispose of the bodies and retrieve all of the evidence. This is made that much harder by the presence of the police and a hot-shot father/son investigation duo who are mulling around the crime scene looking for clues. It’s your job to sneak around the stage grabbing the evidence and picking up bodies, all without being caught by the fuzz.

The big thing that sets Serial Cleaners apart from the original is the cast, which includes a group of low-lifes who have their own individual skills. For example, Latisha can vacuum up the blood like anybody else, but she’s also able to climb up fences and vault over short obstacles, as well as push boxes and other objects away. Vip3r is a Korean hacker who uses her skills with the computer to toy with the police officers. She’ll hack into the network to create noisy diversions and turn off the always-imposing surveillance cameras.

And then there’s Hal, who is basically the tall, quiet wife-napper from Fargo. No, seriously, he’s literally introduced at a crime scene where he’s tossing people into a woodchipper. He has the ability to chainsaw the bodies into tiny pieces and use the limbs to knock out the police. He will also be able to cut through parts of the levels, creating shortcuts and hiding places that nobody else can get to.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

What’s fun about the storytelling is how it’s told completely out of order. We’ll jump around the 1990s (and even go back in the 1980s) in an effort to better understand who these characters are and what brought them to that fateful New Year’s Eve celebration. Each level will be geared around a different character, so you should expect a lot of computers to hack when playing Vip3r and tables to slide over when it’s a Latisha stage. The game is split up into five increasingly tense acts, with all four characters getting a level in each act.

This non-linear approach allows for a lot of unpredictable stages, and this game makes the most out of it. This is the kind of game where you’ll go from cleaning up a bloody crime scene at the Quick Stop from Clerks to disposing of a bunch of bodies at the local rock club to throwing evidence overboard while working on a cruise ship. You never know where you’re going to go next, but one thing is for sure, the level is probably going to reference some sort of 1990s crime film. I’ve already mentioned the obvious nods to Fargo, but expect to see moments from Seven, Reservoir Dogs and countless other films from that era.

Fans of the original Serial Cleaner may remember that there were separate, bonus stages where you cleaned up scenes from famous movies, including Alien, Star Wars, Rocky Horror Picture Show and more. Instead of giving us bonus stages based on movies, the references are baked into the actual campaign missions. I’m not going to lie, I don’t like this as much. Don’t get me wrong, I chuckled when I saw that I was cleaning up the Quick Stop, but I much preferred the way they kept the two parts of the game separate in the original. It’s also disappointing that we didn’t get a new batch of stages directly lifted from 1990s movies. The developers decided to split the difference, but not in the direction I would have wanted.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

Beyond adding a few new characters and axing one of my favorite modes, the most obvious change to Serial Cleaners comes in the form of a facelift. This is a much different looking game, which is both a good and bad thing. On one hand, the new isometric camera angle allows them to create far bigger and more elaborate stages than anything we saw in the first game. No matter what character you’re controlling, there’s a lot to interact with and plenty of ways to navigate around the larger stages.

On the other hand, the new camera angle and art style robs the game of some of its personality. Due in large part to the levels we’re cleaning up and the movies it’s mimicking, this is a much darker game than the original, which I found a little off-putting. The original was bright, colorful and cartoony. I loved how the minimalist look masked a much darker and scarier game underneath. That’s not masked this time around. The new style is menacing right from the start, making it look almost identical to the gritty crime movies it’s referencing. From a technical perspective, these levels are certainly more detailed, but I prefer the look of the first game.

Unfortunately, that also goes for the writing. I get the feeling that a lot of the writing is intended to be a take-off of 1990s cliches with a heavy dose of pop culture references. A little of that goes a long way, and this game is a big fan of trapping you in lengthy conversations that probably sounded better on paper. Part of the problem is that I didn’t care much for the central plot, which is a bit jumbled and convoluted, thanks to the way we choose levels and skip around time. I will admit that it all comes together in a compelling way, but I wanted to turn the game off every time the slang-obsessed Vip3r or slow-talking Hal opened their mouths.

It also feels like the developers don’t do enough with the four-person team. They set it up as if you would be swapping between characters in every level, with each cleaner bringing something different to the table. There really isn’t a whole lot of that in Serial Cleaners. There are a handful of stages where you’ll be able to swap between two characters, which at least is a step in the right direction. But since every character is capable and you can solve the stages a number of different ways, there’s really not much of a point in bringing in your tag-team partner. This feels like one of those gameplay ideas that sounded good early on, but the developer couldn’t figure out how to make it work in practice. Seeing how annoying it can be with two people, maybe we dodged a bullet by not having levels built around swapping between all four characters.

Click For the Full Picture Archive

When I reviewed the original Serial Cleaner, my main complaint was the repetitive missions. I was hoping that they would mix things up beyond the three basic goals we saw in every stage. This sequel makes an effort of adding more variety, but it’s still incredibly repetitive. No matter what, we’re doing pretty much the same thing in every stage, just like the first. Some of the late-game levels break the most, but that’s at the very end, when it’s too late. I wish they would have sprinkled some of that late-game originality in throughout the rest of the game.

I also wish the computer-controlled police officers were a little more intelligent. This is, by far, the dumbest artificial intelligence I’ve seen in a stealth game. When a cop sees you, don’t worry, just move behind a car or a sculpture and they’ll completely forget about you. They’ll also forget about you when you run away from them. They have the memory of that guy in Memento. And that assumes they even react your presence. There were a few times when I would stand right in front of an investigator and they wouldn’t see me. Like I said, the A.I. is the worst.

Despite not quite living up to the original, there’s no doubt that cleaning up active crime scenes is still a lot of fun. I like that the level designs are more elaborate and the four-person crew does add some much-needed variety. This game also has a fantastic soundtrack that helps to give each of these characters a different vibe. There’s a lot to like and a lot to be disappointed about, which is precisely why Serial Cleaners is a solid stealth game, but a bad sequel.