Nobodies: Murder Cleaner

I have a soft spot for games that ask a single, genuinely strange question and then commit to it for their entire runtime. Nobodies: Murder Cleaner asks: what happens after the hitman leaves? The answer, it turns out, is a surprisingly tense first-person point-and-click across thirteen hand-drawn crime scenes, each one a self-contained puzzle that starts with a body on the floor and ends, ideally, with an immaculate room and no witnesses. The core loop is inventory-driven in the classic adventure-game tradition: you pick up objects, combine them in ways that only make sense once the penny drops, and then return every borrowed tool to its exact original position. That last part is the real twist. Most puzzle games reward the taking; this one rewards the putting back. Leaving a wrench on the wrong shelf or forgetting a bloody sheet in a laundry chute counts as evidence, and the game will fail you for it with quiet, merciless efficiency. Each of the thirteen operations has one clean solution and several plausible-but-wrong paths that end in capture. Community players praise exactly this quality: the puzzles make logical sense while still managing to surprise, and the wrong routes are genuinely fun to stumble down before reloading. The variety across locations is impressive for a small studio, taking you from a construction site where mixing your own concrete has a grim obvious purpose, to a hotel room demanding careful camera management, to a church crypt that wrings a surprising amount of atmosphere from its stone corridors. The writing is a quiet standout. Your handler communicates through a pager, keeping the tone clipped and bureaucratic, which suits the dark comedy underneath everything. The premise, government-sanctioned counter-terrorism assassinations framed through cold procedural language, sits in a morally ambiguous space the game never over-explains. Missions are connected to a real-world-inspired bioweapons backstory involving a terrorist cell called Q-100, but the narrative weight is light. This is a puzzle game first. The story is seasoning. The hand-drawn art across nearly one hundred distinct scenes carries a consistent aesthetic: muted, slightly grimy, never trying to be cute about what you are doing. The atmosphere lands somewhere between spy thriller and dark farce, and that balance holds. Weaknesses are worth naming. The difficulty curve can spike without warning. Some solutions require a logic leap that borders on pixel-hunt territory, and players who dislike stalling mid-mission will find the absence of strong in-game guidance frustrating. The hint system exists but it is deliberately sparse. A handful of players across platforms have also flagged occasional bugs tied to specific operations. None of it is game-breaking, but if you go in expecting smooth sailing you will hit a wall eventually. Budget for a walkthrough tab on your second monitor and accept it as part of the experience. For point-and-click fans, especially those who feel the genre has become too hand-holdy, this is a reminder of what it feels like when a puzzle genuinely stumps you. Runtime sits around five to ten hours depending on how often you fail, which is a fair length for the price tier. There is a sequel, Nobodies: After Death, if the ending leaves you wanting more of the same energy. Blyts built something with a real identity here, the kind of small game that knows exactly what it is and executes it without fuss.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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