Yet again I wish there was a neutral score, because while I would recommend this game to other washing game fans, that comes with HEAVY caveats.
Firstly, there are too many tools and no explanation about what most of them are. The last 2 tools are completely optional, which feels redundant. In fact, explanations in this game are minimal at best with a lot of the tools secondary functions never mentioned at all, like it would have been really nice to know that the blower also sucks for when you've gotten a single piece of rice stuck in a corner instead of having to go back and forth trying to wrangle it out. Fortunately a lot of it is fairly straightforward, but it does feel a little frustrating to spend almost the entire game thinking "I wish this game had a cleaner sense like other cleaning games do" only to hit tab by accident and find out that it does have it, they just never mention it. Just a few QOL things that would make the game a lot more enjoyable and remove some of the things I found deeply frustrating.
Secondly, the game's description says "TURN GRIME INTO SHINE - AT YOUR OWN PACE" - this is NOT true. Because of the terrible mould regrowth mechanic there is no 'own pace' in most of the levels. If you want to take it slow and have a nice relaxing time without turning on zen mode, tough luck. The mould regrowth mechanic is antithetical to an own pace experience, and even zen mode only slows this growth, it doesn't remove it entirely. I felt actually quite frantic rather than relaxed because I didn't want to spend ages cleaning something, miss a spot, and have to clean the whole thing again. Often I would think something looked perfectly clean but I was clearly missing a single pixel and would have to spend several minutes re-cleaning the entire thing or waiting for enough mould to regrow (good luck if you're missing a pixel on an item that doesn't have regrowth!) to finish it off.
I did like the regrowth mechanic in some areas, for example it was really cool that ice re-forms on frozen items if you haven't cleaned them fully. That is how ice works, and seeing that was great! It was also sort of cool when it was a liquid, because again liquids do run into newly cleaned spaces and that is indeed how cleaning liquids work. It just felt a bit overboard with the mould as well, since so many of the messes regrew and the mould grows so fast.
I do have other gripes, but I don't want this review to be entirely negative.
This is a very cute little game, the graphics are super nice and I love the pixel art style. The music was really well done, and I appreciated being able to change the tracks to suit my mood! I also enjoyed collecting and cleaning the stickers/CDs/tapes/etc and I liked that I could find these through cleaning optional things, or spraying the hell out of a manky old teabag for fun xD
Despite the minimalist approach to explaining functions I actually did really love using the different tools on different things. I do feel like there are more tools than are really necessary and it would have been better to just focus on one of each type of tool and let the player upgrade them, but having to use different tools for different tasks was a fun concept! It would be cool if after burning something up you had to then wash away the ash, but that might be complicated to implement.
I really liked that the levels were small even though the objects themselves were usually very big in comparison to the player. I'm more used to games like Powerwash Sim/Crime Scene Cleaner where the cleaning area can be vast and take forever (imagine how maddening a regrowth mechanic would be in a cavern or museum!) so these cute compact levels that were all part of a greater whole were so fun!
I would LOVE there to be more rooms to clean in the same way, it would be so fun to clean a whole house from the perspective of this lil sushi guy doing his best. Crawling under a sofa to light up dust bunnies or unsticking a years-old candy from deep inside a kids toybox would be amazing.
Despite its flaws I do think this is a really good concept and I did enjoy playing through it, just not enough to spend the next several hours combing through each level again for the missing collectibles since there's no indicator if there is a collectible in a level. I'd have appreciated something like a marker on levels with collectibles you haven't found after you've completed the main storyline, since it can be hard to follow guides to figure out what you've already found and what's missing and where.
If they release more levels I will probably buy them, but unless that happens I'm not sure I can see myself going through the hassle of completing the remaining collectibles achievements. While I try to collect all the achievements on as many of my games as I can, this just isn't quite fun enough for me.
