Splatoon 3 and Serial Cleaners – Zero Punctuation

Let’s focus on the single player, where the obligation to give us something new actually lay. And urinate colourfully on my shutter shades if they didn’t kinda do that. At first it pulls a sneaky one by letting us think we’re doing more of the same shit from the Splatoon 2 campaign. No one thought to put a bike lock on the giant electric eel that powers the city so someone’s nicked it again and again the evil octopus gang seem to be behind it, we go through a few little enclosed levels to complete shooting challenges and traversal puzzles and rescue a little blob friend from a milking machine probably best not dwelled upon. But a few levels and one familiar boss fight in, the game goes “Ha ha! You think we’re just going through the motions, don’t you? Well you know what else is a motion? Downwards!” And then the fucking floor collapses and we fall into a secret oceanic hubworld where we must explore a series of islands to get to the bottom of a sinister plan to take the world back from the cephalopods and return it to the mammals, asserting the superiority of furriness and lactation. Is this all getting alarmingly nipple-focussed or am I projecting again?

You remember that Bowser’s Fury open world thing Nintendo packed in when they rereleased Mario 3D World for the Switch, I remember thinking it had the stink of proof of concept about it. I assumed they were toying with making a full on open world Mario, it being the only logical way to top Mario Odyssey short of giving him tits, but I guess it could have been leading to this, too. At least I assumed that at first until I actually started exploring and the first thing I had to do was go through a portal into a little enclosed level to complete shooting challenges and traversal puzzles. So it’s not really an open world campaign at all, it’s just another elaborate level hub. You do the levels to acquire eggs so that you can infuse your little friend with energy and thrust him at masses of wobbling pink fur-covered matter, and now I definitely am projecting something. But by doing this the furry pink stuff disappears, opening up more of the world and more levels to attempt. Thing is, though, there’s no clear benefit to doing anything other than going straight to the next story objective, uprooting only what hairy blancmanges lie directly in your path.

And if you do that, you’ll find there’s a not inconsiderable percentage of the map you didn’t have to bother with at all. “Well, we don’t technically have to bother with any of it, Yahtz, it’s a video game. Anything you do is inherently for its own sake and not because Nintendo are going to report you to the completion police.” Good point, reasonable horse. Suffice to say then that the random levels and their numerous samey rearrangements of the elements “spray ink on thing” and “swim in the ink” like an unsociable chimp finding uses for his own shit just aren’t as interesting as the critical path’s boss fights and ending sequence, so why waste your time. The plot has an appealingly surreal tone to it. I note that it’s now canon that the Splatooniverse – oh christ I think my throat attempted to physically reject my vocal chords as I was saying that – takes place in a post-apocalypse after the humans died out and the ocean life took over, which I remember positing as a joke, once, so I appreciated that. Splatoon’s definitely positioned itself on Nintendo’s anarchic side, hanging out at Wario Ware’s table flinging bread rolls at Princess Zelda.

But I still wouldn’t call it much more than Splatoon 2 again with a few knobs tweaked and a new T-shirt, and that’s the final word, which is a shame, because we’ve still got one third of video left. Well, I also played the indie game Serial Cleaners last week, which theoretically provides a nice counterpoint to Splatoon in that it’s about making things presentable again in the aftermath of the splattery violent fun. Serial Cleaners is a top down stealth cleaning game, not to be confused with Serial Cleaner, top down stealth cleaning game with same developer and mostly same title, understandably confused though you might be, but hey, we let the Alien movies get away with it, because Serial Cleaners is a less arcadey, more plot-focused affair about four underworld crime scene cleaners reminiscing about their careers and exchanging tips on their preferred Mr. Sheen varieties. Now, cleaning simulators are a proven concept with Powerwash Simulator and Viscera Beandip Derail, and an action-y version where you have to clean up a murder scene within a time limit before the cops show up is a fairly obvious idea to go to after that. I know, because I fucking well made it myself for my Dev Diary series.

But that’s not what this is. In Serial Cleaners, the cops are already there, you have to stealth around and distract them while you hoover up the blood and hump the bodies – no, hump in the sense of laboriously carry, pull your trousers up. And for me the whole premise kinda falls apart with the more contemplative, story-focused take. I mean, what’s the point in cleaning up a murder scene AFTER the cops have seen it? In a stealth game I wanna feel crafty, you know, like I’m one step ahead of PC Plod, but when I’m hurriedly running out from a cupboard to mop up a bloodstain while the patrolling officer is distracted by a moth, and over the course of the mission get spotted nine times and chased around a coffee table by four dudes but get away because I went into a lift or turned a corner and my pursuers decided to check back in on the moth situation, I don’t feel like I’m succeeding through skill, I feel like I’m succeeding thanks to the police recruitment drive at the local dementia hospital. So there you go, that’s my mini review I felt like I needed to bring across. It’s good to not be frustratingly hard, but also not good to make me feel like I’m doing the dishes at the moron restaurant. And that’s the final word, which is a shame, because we’ve still got two words of video left. Er. Knob chops.