Viscera Cleanup Detail is a first-person science-fiction cleanup game: an anti-first-person shooter. Its premise is the aftermath of some careless, gory game. You are a janitor who is sent to tidy environments filled with blood, bodies, bullet shells, and plain old junk-food trash, with optional paperwork for extra points. Viscera Cleanup Detail is both a satire of menial labor as well as its celebration.
Viscera Cleanup Detail’s interactions with the world are limited to picking up, putting down, mopping, brushing, and using a repair gun, but its repetitive mechanics extend further than just a parody of menial labor: it elevates the dreaded task of cleaning up and transforms it into a satisfying goal, while remaining humorously self-conscious. Audio effects of sloshing buckets are exquisitely satisfying, so singleplayer is soothing despite the gore: satisfaction comes from the incremental clearing of space. The progression is clear and obvious. Players can self-pace peacefully without threats from NPC’s, and gameplay becomes soothing and rhythmic. In fact, death results in an immediate respawn with a different player model, a replacement. Yet, the world is frustrating for a janitor. Machines meant to dispense fresh buckets will randomly throw out limbs instead, creating a new bloodstain to clean. And the reward for disposing of all those bullet casings? You receive feedback from your supervisor and return to your janitorial office, a space that is cluttered with spare cleaning supplies and articles that rant about janitors’ poor performance. The game elevates chores, but never hides how frustrating they can be, and always reminds you of your role as a sanitary employee.
(artwork by hawapyon on Steam--profile linked through image)
Clear level design masks the subtle and sophisticated story underneath. Red bloodstains draw immediate attention to the task at hand, and it would be easy to push through the level without paying any attention to the letters and reports scattered across the levels. If you decide to read, a journal on reveals that scientists found three mutants discovered in blocks of ice. You find only two mutants … two mutants, and the gore all over the level. Similarly, collectible USB’s name the body next to which they are found. Other than that, the characters are difficult to identify. While some names may appear in texts scattered throughout the level, most names are only necessary to complete the optional paperwork to report the way in which they were killed. The game only recognizes their identities in the context of your janitor work. Story, too, while fascinating, is ultimately subjected to the demands of the job.
Viscera Cleanup Detail raises questions about the nature of first-person shooters. Who is cleaning the levels that our first persons so carelessly shoot up? Viscera Cleanup Detail reminds us of the human labor behind entertainment and asks us to appreciate the forces that are meant to be invisible to the ones being entertained. It asks us to consider first-person shooters outside of their genre and into a thankless, repetitive professional world whose hopelessness is only tempered by a good amount of irony. Ironically, the community’s main complaint is that the game suffers from lack of progression between levels. Even a game about thanklessness needs to feel rewarding—after all, it is still a game.
To be fair, the multiplayer has a decidedly different tone. Multiplayer’s joy comes from the chaos that erupts from conflict between serious and foolish players, chaos that the game’s physics engine and structure seem to encourage. (Hint: think flying severed heads that leave splatters on everything they hit.) Other players fill the game with the frenetic pace we tend to demand of videogames. The game’s tone begins to resemble that of Borderlands 2 or Grand Theft Auto.
Viscera Cleanup Detail is deeply confronts the first-person shooter genre not just in its premise but in the player’s basic relationship with the game world. Unlike in a shooter, you do not come from the world that the characters in the level do; you are an outsider who was brought there. You do not dominate this world; you are subject to rules to enter it. And yet, players play this game. It appeals to shooters’ playerbase. In some ways, it is a remedy to the power fantasy embodied by the protagonists of shooters. With little power comes great responsibility to your job—and somehow, that is its own reward.
(Screenshot from official VCD Steam page https://store.steampowered.com/app/246900/Viscera_Cleanup_Detail/ Be aware it is a gory horror game.)
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