Cleansuit
What immediately caught my attention about Cleansuit was its graphics, ironic given that it is in essence a text adventure game. I guess technically it’d be a different genre than that given that it has visuals, I was never the best at keeping all the various subgenres straight.
At the start of the game you are resting in your easy chair when you are interrupted by a pounding on your front door. Naturally it is a killer in a cleansuit here to murder the heck out of you. Your goal is obviously to avoid having that happen. There is a certain amount of time before said killer makes his way into the house (I believe it is determined by the number of actions you take as opposed to a real time countdown) which you can use to prepare yourself for his arrival. That or you can just answer the door, spoiler that ends poorly.
The upper 60% of the screen is a static visual of the room or what you are currently looking at with some text beneath it offering further details. You type text commands below this in order to move around and interact with things, fortunately there is only a handful of usable verbs you have to keep straight (move, look, use, get) so one rarely has to worry about making sure to pick the right term. Each time you look at something in the room or a given item you are given a new image on the top of the screen, while nothing ever animates this does a good job of making it feel like you are moving about and active.
The house itself is fairly small, I mean it’d be a decent sized actual house but by video game standards it is fairly constrained. You have a map of the house drawn in crayons that lets you know the rough layout and where each of the half-dozen or so rooms are, but beyond that you are basically left to your own devices to try and figure out what to use in order to survive. There is a fairly high likelihood that the killer will get you at least the first few times but each run lasts less than ten minutes.
Beyond that there is more than one way to win, based on the ending screen there are at least five different good endings (some with a variant) on top of I’d wager a good dozen or so different “you died” scenarios. Getting a good end comes down to basically finding a good set of objects around the house, figuring out how they’d work together in a rather adventure game sorta way (well more sensibly so than in many of those games) and hoping that you didn’t end up forgetting something that turns out to be the difference between life and death. I didn’t find every good end but it was definitely worth playing through a decent number of times to mess around with everything and see the various paths one could take.
I mentioned the graphics before, they are all static, fairly basic settings but there is a distortion effect put atop all of it that I found to be fairly striking. I’m sure its been done before and probably better (this is clearly a low budget game) but I found that it fit the setting rather well and helped with the mood. There is also a nice brief tutorial that shows you the basics in a few minutes that actually take place the few minutes before the game proper starts (basically has you get to the living room from the next room over and ends with you sitting in the easy chair) which is handled very well.
I’m not sure even if one went searching for every single ending it’d be possible to put more than an hour or so into Cleansuit, it is a very compact experience. I think that is to its strength though as this is a nice twist on the “killer trying to break into the house to kill you” motif that benefits from being text based as it pushes it more into the realm of figuring out what in the heck to do rather than have to worry much about actually executing it. It is short enough that failure isn’t much of a punishment and often teaches you something about how this overall puzzle fits together, and I found piecing it all together to be rather rewarding.
So as a heads up this is the last game I’m gonna write-up for this topic. For me it was an idea I had for a few years that I wanted to at least give a year to see how it’d play out and… well failure would be too harsh but it definitely was better in theory than in practice. I wanted to have at least one day set aside a week to play some small/random indie games and this did a good job of keeping me honest in that regard, although in retrospect I think taking some time off from those while really into an Elden Ring-sized experience would have been okay.
Still there was a pair of issues that was beyond my ability to fix. One is that by going truly random I often ended up with games that there either wasn’t much to really write about or worse, were rather poor. I played another game this week that shall remain nameless that even by the standards of “name your own price” itch games was poor. Awful movement glitches that got you stuck in place in a timing heavy “move at the right time to avoid projectiles” game, heck in a game with only fifteen stages it couldn’t even send me to the next stage upon completion correctly about four or so times. If I didn’t have time to get to Cleansuit I’d have to very politely trash that and… the odds of anyone here ever stumbling upon it is minimal so IMO it’d just be pointlessly mean.
The other issue I can’t get past is that I’m just not a good enough writer or “game thinker” to be able to write about a different game a week every week. I felt like I ran low on material many months back and would often look at a game and go “I have no idea what to say about you that isn’t just ‘this is fine’”. The thing is, a game shouldn’t have to worry about that, hell I shouldn’t have to worry about that. If I’m in a braindead mood and play a braindead game that’s okay and the fact that it doesn’t fit into the scope of some outside notion is the notion’s fault. Much respect to those who have to write for a living, shit’s tricky.
So yeah, I’ll still play games like this on my own time and if any of them make me feel like I want to write something about them (Infini seems likely to do so) we got that giant “game you played today topic” for it. If any of you dug this sorry it’s done, and let me finish by saying that even though I don’t think this ultimately worked I’m still glad I tried it and I did play some very neat games (ex. Pig eat Ball, Salad Fields, DEIDIA) during the course of it.