Serial Cleaners will continue sneakily cleaning for the mob next year

Quietly grab your mop bucket, select your least squeaky soap, and bring a whole load of bin bags, for soon we'll again be called on by the mob to clean up crime scenes before cops get the evidence. Serial Cleaners, announced today and coming next year, is a follow-up to 2017's Serial Cleaner. I still like the sound of the concept. I hope that its realisation is less frustrating this time.

A big blast of style right there.

Serial Cleaners will put us in the quiet shoes of crime scene cleaners, folks like The Wolf in Pulp Fiction. But we're called in once the cops are already on the scene, so making it a bit easier to mop up blood, haul away bodies, and so on. This time, it's set across the 90s and will have four different characters to pick from on each mission, each with their own technique. Draw Distance, the devs formerly know as iFun4all, say "Street smarts, brute force, cutting-edge tech skills or good old fashioned tricks of the trade: each will allow you to tackle a similar obstacle much differently." It sounds good in theory. But so did the first game, and in reality was quite frustrating.

"Maybe some smart ideas just can't survive translation into a full game, or maybe a smart idea cannot survive without equally smart design," our former Alec (RPS in peace) said in his Serial Cleaner review. "I think in this case it's that Serial Cleaner's levels need a stronger, more thought-out puzzle element rather than relying on this oxymoronic combination of randomness and repetition."

Serial Cleaners is coming to Steam in 2021. Fingers crossed.

Whatever you call it, hit our E3 2020 tag for more from this summer's blast of gaming announcements, trailers, and miscellaneous marketing. Check out the PC games at the PlayStation 5 show, everything at the PC Gaming Show, and all the trailers from the Xbox showcase, for starters.