Watcha Playin’? Serial Cleaner

Serial Cleaner is a stealth game by iFun4All. You play as a man who specializes in cleaning up crime scenes for murderers during the 1970’s. Overall, it’s entertaining, and looks great aesthetically.

While I’ve been having fun with it on my Switch, Serial Cleaner has begun to get more and more frustrating the longer I play. Each sequence pits you against cops who are investigating. They have cone-shaped fields of vision that turn red if you get caught in them. The only way to avoid being arrested and having to restart the level is to hide in one of the hidey holes around the map. To progress through the level, you have to collect any evidence and bodies at the scene, as well as literally vacuuming up a certain percentage of blood.

Like I said, if you get caught in their vision and can’t hide, you have to restart the whole level over, which reeeeallly sucks, especially if you’ve already gotten all the bodies, or cleaned up enough blood. The other thing that makes it rough is that every time you fail, the level resets so you can’t even memorize where the bodies/evidence are. I get that they probably did this to keep things interesting, but it really serves to fuck you over on the harder levels. There have been moments where I’ve almost been convinced that there’s no way to finish a level, only to persevere right at the edge of throwing my Switch across the room.

Despite all this, I want to keep going because there seems to be an interesting story brewing underneath the difficult gameplay. I want to see if it actually delivers on what its plot seems to be promising, so I’ll probably struggle through it in my free time. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it through to the end.