This is a game that uses the tedium that we’ve seen in games like Papers, Please or Cart Life to incredible effect – after about thirty minutes, I was pissed off at the monster who decided it would be fun to blow apart everything in sight. What RuneStorm is trying to do with Viscera Cleanup Detail is remind us of the human cost of those hilarious giblets we create. But underneath that surface comedy is a pretty great perspective on the games we play. It’s all played up for comedic effect, obviously, reminiscent of things like Sunshine Cleaning, This American Life’s story on a crime-scene cleaner, or the monthly AskReddit thread. You remove yourself from any emotional attachment, and pick up everything from the Ludicrous Gibs of unarmed scientists, to shell casings and first aid kits. It’s a hilarious concept, but it’s also a brilliant satire of the conventions of first-person shooters we seem to relish. Think of it like a game built around reversing all those destructible environment tech demos developers love to show at press events. It’s an easy game to explain – you’re a janitor tasked with cleaning up scenes of horrific death of the sort first-person shooters typically have their players generate. Better still, other games have bodies simply disappear into the ether. Think of the average FPS level – you strut down some generic hallway, kill a few dozen faceless drones, splatter their blood on the walls, knock over a few barrels, grab a data log, and get out of there – who cares about the mess? Even so-called simulators like the ARMA series have you simply leave the bodies of your comrades and enemies behind.
It’s the kind of scene war films love to hide, because it’s the kind of scene that graphically illustrates how brutal war actually is. If you’ve ever spent some time watching combat footage, you’ve probably seen some pretty unpleasant scenes of soldiers having to pack up the bloodied pieces and bodies of the men they’ve just killed. We made a blog post about this, and it seemed like something worth sharing with you guys:
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