International super spies sure make a lot of mess when they’re saving the world, and in Viscera Cleanup Detail’s new DLC, The Vulcan Affair, it’s up to you and your trusty mop to tidy everything up after them. Specifically, you’ll be cleaning up the aftermath of Fox Huntington’s attack on Dr. Hades’ secret lair. Dr. Hades (presumably deceased) plotted against the world from inside a volcano, so at least you get to visit exotic places.  

Like all good Bond villains, Dr. Hades had a fetish for lasers and sharks, and judging by the trailer, they’ll simultaneously make your life easier and more difficult. Want to get rid of some body parts you’ve found scattered around? Feed the sharks. Just try not to go for a swim while you’re doing it. 

The secret lair looks like a big place and cleaning it will undoubtedly be a lot of work, so it sounds like an excellent excuse to force a friend into helping you with your chores. As Pip notes, Viscera Cleanup Detail is great for bonding. 

Viscera Cleanup Detail left Early Access over three years ago, but since the world is still a very messy place, there’s plenty of potential for more DLC. I just knocked over a glass of apple juice—it never ends! And if you’re in the mood for something more festive, there’s already some Santa DLC. It’s… grim. 

The Vulcan Affair is out now on Steam.

Often I think of Viscera Cleanup Detail as less of a game and more of a personality test. The debacle revolves around you and a group of friends acting as FPS janitors, cleaning up after the monster-shooting is over. There are bullet casings to collect, thoraxes to incinerate and USB sticks to gather from fallen allies. 

It’s a cleaning sim. It has the appeal of bringing order to a disordered world through the act of mopping. I sometimes wonder whether the developer, RuneStorm, would ever make the accompanying FPS so that players could generate unique hellscapes and then the cleanup detail could tidy those. 

But that’s beside the point. The point right now is that, in playing scenarios with friends, you learn a lot about those friends. 

I am one of nature’s tidiers. I didn’t used to be but suddenly a switch flipped and I can now happily spend an hour folding laundry into cuboids. In Viscera, I am the boring one. While everyone else is larking about, playing games of catch with an errant mandible, I will be scrubbing bloodstains from walls. I listen to the banter but don’t chip in for fear of reminding people I’m not skiving off.  

My friend Dan can be similarly tidy. When left to ourselves we obsess over tiny blips on the mess detection device, wrangling the whole area into terrifying spotlessness. He’s more prone to joining in the fun, though. He’ll abandon his grim bucket of slop and take a break for the right japes.

Clean team

My partner is a stop further along the scale. He’ll get around to tidying eventually, but will also gleefully break the only lift on the level and chuck barrels beyond the scenario’s boundary just to see what happens. When he turns up, Dan will abandon me in a fit of giggles. Then something will explode and there will be a guilty silence from the pair of them. 

Alice marries inexplicable efficiency with the ability to seem like she’s just titting about. Her banter game never drops below a ten so I assume her area is a tip, then I’ll turn up and wherever she’s been will be immaculate. I feel like Viscera might be her natural esport.

Then there’s Nat. Nat will always find the laser welder. The laser welder is supposed to be for removing bullet holes from walls and fixing lightning scars. It can also overheat and start shooting fireballs into the level, burning everything and leaving a sooty mess. When Nat has been quiet for more than a minute that’s usually a sign that the level is on fire. 

The thing here is that I don’t like playing Viscera alone. I need my friends to flesh out the experience. Nat means I have soot to clean up. Dan is a vital ally when I say, “We should get on with this...”, and Alice and my partner add a clownish radio drama (“Oops, was that your body bag?”) and concerning vagueness (“Oh that’s what that does!”). Together we are a glorious, inefficient cleaning machine.

Viscera Cleanup Detail recently received a long-awaited update (v1.092) which adds a new level and new stuff to clean up. The update released earlier this week on December 17—exactly one year after the game's previous update, developer RuneStorm says. 

The new level, 'uprinsing,' continues the game's punny traditions while making one big, filthy addition: graffiti. In addition to blood and viscera, players can now scrub some good old-fashioned vandalism. The update also makes significant changes to several speedrun times, which are detailed in the full patch notes. 

New ways to dirty your mop are a pretty big deal for a game that's basically competitive tidying up, but RuneStorm says there's more in the pipes, both for Viscera Cleanup Detail and unannounced projects.  

"Indeed, that's a small update for a year's worth of work. This is because we're mostly working on other projects," the studio says on Steam, hinting that Viscera Cleanup Detail's next update (v1.1) will bring far more "stuff." Can't have too much stuff. 

"One major project we hoped to reveal, as it's seen a lot of attention, won't be happening just yet. This is because we've been pursuing multiple things, and at this point, we've got a number of interesting projects being explored, so we cannot say which will be chosen in the end. This is good though, because it'll allow us to settle on something we feel is both really interesting and can also be done right." 

In the meantime, you've got guts to clean up.

I don't like mess, in real life and in games, so I've always found the premise of Viscera Cleanup Detail interesting. It's a game about the aftermath of that particularly bloody shooter campaign—you know, the one with the absurdly detailed dismemberment system. It's a game where you go in and clean up the mess left behind, by mopping, squirting, scraping and de-littering until everything's lovely and neat again.

After entering Early Access last year, RuneStorm's innovative game of first-person tidying is finally out for real. Look, here it is on Steam, with a 33% launch discount and everything.

The game seems to have expanded a fair bit since we last covered it—it now boasts online multiplayer and split-screen co-op, some increasingly rare words to see these days. Buying Viscera Cleanup Detail will also bag you the game's two spin-offs—Santa's Rampage, and the Shadow Warrior tie-in—and RuneStorm hopes to implement both into the main game sometime in November.

You know what I really love about violence? Dealing with the consequences! That s why I m so excited to see that Viscera Cleanup Detail, the space station janitor simulation, is now available on Steam Early Access. The first-person mopper also has a new trailer, which celebrates some of the slapstick comedy inherent in such a horrible job.



The new launch trailer shows off the sad-if-you-think-too-hard-about-it world where you get to clean up after the gun-toting hero. For what was once given away as a free alpha, the team at Runestorm has added a bunch of features, including a multiplayer mode. Runestorm is also promising mod support, so we can expect to clean up recreations of our favorite battlefields after the community gets their rubber-gloved hands on it.

I just watched that trailer again, and boy, I would not make it as a space station janitor. I can barely clean my kitchen without threatening to burn it all down and move to a different city. My advice to these hardworking people is to cut their losses and drop this space station into the sun.

You can get in on the freshly mopped ground floor of Viscera Cleanup Detail by heading over to its Steam page. Buying in will also get you the Shadow Warrior and Santa s Rampage spin-offs.