Anomalous Cleaning Detail

Edit: It was pointed out to me that the spider appears in the steam store page video on the motel level. That's on me, I didn't watch the video. Still, I played 5 hours and only saw that single bit of horror theming on one level. I am so beyond disappointed with this title. I played the demo ages ago and was super excited for this to come out. The concept is awesome and the demo had promise. The full game though, it steps on every rake in the yard then circles back for more. I played 5 hours, I wanted to finish it regardless of how angry I was but the bugs finally won. The bugs are 50% of the problem but I want to start with the most disappointing aspect. This game's demo showed off a charmingly creepy cleaning game. It combined the idea of looking for anomalies to help you figure out what type of ghost you're dealing with all while you clean up the site like a janitorial ghostbuster. The full game followed up the demo's motel and laundromat locations with a truck stop that had a wonderfully creepy spider in a randomly chosen spot on each replay. I'm spoiling that because it never shows up again. Unless I was terribly unlucky with RNG, which based on my time with the game I can pretty confidently say I wasn't. Not only does the spider never show up again but it is the single interesting bit of horror theming in the entire game. I kid you not, this ghost game has one creepy aspect to ONE level. That's it. The rest of the game fumbles the horror vibe so badly that I desperately want to know what happened during development. After the aforementioned levels there's a motel pool level that takes place in broad daylight. I promise you that I am not making that up, there's a picture for it on the steam page. It's a garden variety "clean up the pool area" stage with the ghost hunting mechanics thrown in so awkwardly that I'd call it an asset flip if it weren't for the opening few interesting levels. Even worse! It's not the only level to do that. You'll get to hunt ghosts in the daylight at a completely normal looking kids playground as well. I need to be clear here, most of these levels save the church, the gas station and maybe the subway are not even horror themed. I can't call them assets because I don't know that for sure but the dev did not add a single piece of horror theming to 90% of the levels in this game. Much less did they strive to make these levels make sense with their ghost hunting mechanics. Heck, the game barely works as a cleaning game because of the bugs. Speaking of which... Every post saying the game is buggy beyond belief is right. Objects get stuck in the terrain, you get stuck in the terrain, you'll routinely fail levels because objects have left the map and headed to Narnia, lighting issues, input registration issues. I got hit with a 2 for 1 special on bugs when I threw a plank at a trash can. The can not only failed to register the hit but the plank then got stuck in the ground and became inaccessible. Greeeeat... The game has a scanner feature ala' Power Wash Sim that will highlight things you've missed but needless to say it doesn't work on out of bounds items nor does it work in finding that one spot that you've cleaned up graphically but not quite enough for the game to register it as clean. Que where I quit. This game has been in the works for ages, I think I played the demo almost a year ago. The maps are simple and this level of jank is inexcusable. Did the dev run out of time, money or interest?

Right...where to start. If you want to play a cleaning game with some unnerving elements of "something bad went on here" ...play viscera cleanup detail instead. There are a ton of bugs, some even bringing on fatal errors which immediately sends you back to desktop. Some bugs make the map go from incredibly difficult to impossible to 100% due to poor clipping or to "oh you need to trash this spider web that doesn't show up in the cleaner sense ability". This game, while incredibly ambitious, should have spent a bit more time in play testing before releasing. There is good here; the atmosphere of "something is not right here" is good, there's no jump scares which is good (unless you count giant spiders just being there on the roof...but there's an option to disable this) and it does make you use your brain to find evidence of what's haunting the location; however, all of the good is hard to see it under the mess. Things that should be changed to make it better: Bug fixes bug fixes bug fixes, oh my goodness does this need it. Play testing would have sent red flags immediately to the devs from just normal gameplay. The sense skill needs to work correctly. Maybe have a small compass in the checklist that points in the direction of what's missing when you're near done. (I had a dust pile that was just under the carpet in the mission which you could not see for the life of you unless you spent an half hour just vacuuming the floor like I did.) While I would say more maps would be something the game needs as there's like...10?...maybe for the future provided the game survives that long.