Merry Christmas everybody, and Happy Holidays if you don’t celebrate. A whole lot of people took off work today to celebrate with their family and friends, which made me think of all the work that’d be waiting for them when they returned to their jobs. We are, unfortunately, living in a society that determines our worth by how hard we work and how much money we make.
There are a lot of thankless jobs out there, like janitorial work. Even in the world of science fiction, janitors are swept under the rug (no pun intended). They never really get the appreciation they deserve.
Have you ever played a game where you were the janitor? For some reason, the menial work becomes cathartic when it’s digital. I’d like to focus on Viscera Cleanup Detail today, because it’s a game about people who should really receive more recognition for what they have to put up with.
Viscera Cleanup Detail (which I’m going to abbreviate as VCD from now on) is an exercise in menial labor. You are a space janitor, tasked with cleaning up the aftermath of a terrible space disaster. Science experiment gone wrong? On it. Robot uprising? On it. Mining operation dug up something messy? On it. You go wherever the company sends you, and you’re pretty expendable.
You’re given a handy mop, a sensor device to help you find all the hidden shell casings and fleshy bits, and two dispensers, one for buckets of water to clean your mop, the other for large bio waste bins to contain the body parts you need to clean up. When your bucket is too dirty, or you have a full bin, you place them in the incinerator to get rid of it - after all, any trace of the incident left, and it could cost you your job.
As for mechanics, I’m very impressed with what’s been done with VCD. All objects that can be picked up have physics, including the bio waste bins and the water buckets. The body parts and shell casings, basically anything that can be placed in the bins, also have physics. The fact that you can put physics objects inside other physics objects is impressive to me, even if there are occasional bugs - one time, I placed a severed arm inside a bio waste bin, and it flipped three feet into the air, landed with a wobble and spun in continuous circles until I touched it again.
I’d recommend playing this game when you need to wind down, perhaps one afternoon after a hard day at work doing non-janitor things. The way the mop splashes and the bloodstains disappear is cathartic and makes for a satisfying motion. All in all, VCD is fun, even if the real-life equivalent would be tiresome.