I can’t believe I mean this: right now a game called Crime Scene Cleaner is somehow one of my favorite games of 2025. That sentence is true. I have spent twelve hours or so mopping up blood, moving bodies, and picking up broken glass in a video game, and it may be the most chill and genuinely relaxing game I’ve ever played.
The premise is real, real simple: you’re a janitor who gets hired by a mob boss to clean up after his people. You take the job because you need money to pay for your daughter’s hospital bills, which makes this the most American game of 2025. You accept jobs through your computer and the occasional phone call from “Big Jim,” the guy who signs your checks. You have a dog. There’s an achievement for petting the dog 15 times. The crime scenes range from a small apartment to an entire museum to a giant warehouse. At the end of each job you get paid based on how thorough a job you did; money can be used, not to pay for your daughter as you might think, but to upgrade your cleaning tools, accomplished through a skill tree, so you honest-to-God might pay for an upgrade to how much blood your mop can clean up before you have to wring it out in a bucket, and you can also upgrade how many detergents you can add to the bucket at once. By the end of the game you’re able to dual-wield sponges, which is not a phrase anyone had ever said or thought of before this game came out.
There is something primordially satisfying about walking into this:
and walking out an hour later with the floor and walls spotless, the broken tables whisked away, the bodies safely stored in your truck, and everything that wasn’t broken put back exactly where it belonged. There are some collectibles– every level has a few cassette tapes hidden away, and there are secret areas all over the place that you can uncover, and exploration is a lot of fun, especially once you unlock the– again, I’m not kidding– upgrade that lets you walk across blood without leaving footprints all over the goddamned place afterwards. You’ll need to find keys and the occasional key card, and oh, you’ll also rob everyone blind while you’re cleaning. The great thing about working for the mob is the people they send you after tend to have piles of cash and jewelry and stuff just sitting around! They’re all dead, they don’t need it any longer.
There’s no real point in talking about graphics or sound; they’re good enough and no better. The rag doll physics can occasionally be kinda ridiculous. You can jump or fall from any height and be fine; it’s impossible to die, so there were definitely times where I was moving a body and just chucked it off a balcony and then jumped after it rather than carrying it down the stairs. My only real gripe is that if you’re a completist, like me, and you want to 100% everything, every so often there’s a single bullet that you accidentally knocked somewhere with your mop that takes an hour to find, or a single spot of blood that you just missed that is too small for your UV lamps or your “Cleaner Vision” (no, seriously) to spot easily. Having to end a level at 99% blood cleanup because you just could not find that last spot is kinda annoying, especially when the game really does need about an hour to an hour and a half per level.
But yeah. This was a blast. Twelve hours or so was enough to 100% every level and get all but five of the achievements; I’m gonna jump back into finish those off just because I’m that guy. It’s on Game Pass right now, so if you have that, you don’t have to pay for it, but it’s worth the $20 or so you’d pay if you actually buy it.
Oh, and I vacuumed the whole house today, because I’d been cleaning in a video game for several days and felt kind of guilty about the condition of my actual house, which is a real place with cats in it that needs vacuuming way more often than I actually do it.
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