Crime Scene Cleaner review – House Flipper just got grizzly

For fans of House Flipper and PowerWash Simulator, there’s a new game on the scene — but you’re going to need a strong stomach to be able to take it on. Crime Scene Cleaner has you cleaning up the grizzliest of murder scenes, which involves removing bodies, cleaning up blood splatter and taking away the evidence. Essentially, it’s your job to make it look like nothing ever happened.

You see, the work you’re doing isn’t exactly above board: you’ve gone from a lowly janitor to working clean-up for some of the biggest names in the criminal underworld. If they’ve pulled a hit or had something go awry, it’s going to be you they call to go in and clean up their mess. It’s hard to mind so much when playing Crime Scene Cleaner is so enthralling to play.

It’s not for the faint of heart: Crime Scene Cleaner doesn’t hold back when it comes to its scenes, and you’ll find swimming pools filled with blood, bodies cooked to death on sunbed machines (Final Destination eat your heart out) and people skewered to walls with crossbow bolts. Despite its utterly grim subject matter, though, it somehow manages to be rather relaxing to play. If you’re sensitive to such… viscera, you might be better sticking with PowerWash Simulator, but if you don’t mind a bit of horror or gore, you’re absolutely going to lap this up.

The gameplay loop here will be familiar to anyone who has played a game like House Flipper before. You’ll need to bag up trash, wipe down stains and put furniture back where it belongs. You have multiple tools for cleaning, each of which is more useful in a certain situation. A sponge works better on fabric, for instance, or on a surface where being careful is necessary. Your mop does better for large, hard surfaces, and your power washer can handle even larger areas. You’ll likely want to switch between all three in order to get a job done.

You’ll also have a number of other tools on hand that make your job easier. A UV light will help show up blood stains, while a standard light will help you see in darker areas. You can also unlock a step ladder that helps you to reach high-up areas, and various cleaning products can be used to give you a bit of extra elbow grease.

Crime Scene Cleaner’s locations are part of what makes this game so enticing. You’ll find yourself moving from an apartment to a relaxation spa to a pizza restaurant to a museum, and each one provides a unique and compelling backdrop for your clean-up operations. What’s particularly nice (well, ‘nice’ might not be the right word) is that each one has its own story: you’ll get an introduction to what’s happened in each location — and finding each body will give you a particularly gnarly bit of environmental storytelling. My favourite was at an empty summer camp: eight dead bodies, and each one seemingly a drug-fuelled accident.

There’s also an overarching story that helps you get closer to your protagonist, too. He didn’t envisage a life of crime, you see: he’s just sort of ended up in this line of work, desperate for money to pay for his sick daughter’s healthcare. And so, each job he completes brings him closer to having all his bills paid — but will becoming embroiled in such a dangerous underworld have repercussions? The narrative will have you wondering, that’s for sure.

What’s particularly cool about Crime Scene Cleaner, setting it apart from other games in the renovation sim genre, is that each location has secrets to discover. You might find hidden switches leading to secret rooms, or stashes of valuable objects that you can swipe to top up your funds. Hey, you’re already in deep with gangsters: what’s a bit of stealing from the dead going to hurt? After each job you complete, you’ll also get a number of upgrade points that can be spent on levelling up your mops, sponges and other tools.

Some elements of Crime Scene Cleaner feel a bit awkward, but I think it’s purposeful. You’ll need to regularly clean your mop or sponge in a bucket of water, for example, and that bucket of water needs to be frequently changed. Your power washer, too, needs to be refilled regularly. It could have gone full video game and made it so that everything is unlimited — but where’s the realism in that? True, it’s not all completely realistic: I very much doubt you can get a litre of blood out of a bedsheet with just a sponge and water (not that I’ve ever tried). But those small touches do help immerse you that bit deeper in the game’s world. Even if it is annoying when you accidentally knock over your bucket of water for the umpteenth time.

It won’t be for everyone due to its subject matter, but Crime Scene Cleaner has genuinely surprised me. It has a level of polish not usually seen in this type of game, and thanks to its extra narrative touches manages to be more compelling than ever. Cleaning up a scene is grizzly work, but it’s also seriously satisfying — and seeing your hard work pay off feels really good when it’s all done.

This Crime Scene Cleaner review has been facilitated with a code provided by the publisher. It’s available on PC.