Serial Cleaners

I went into Serial Cleaners expecting a lightweight stealth novelty and came out having spent a solid eight-to-ten hours genuinely thinking through body-drag logistics. That said, the Metacritic 69 is not unfair, this is a game that carries real rough edges right alongside its real charm, and knowing both upfront will save you a refund request. The core loop is isometric stealth played in reverse: you arrive after the chaos, not before it. Every level dumps you into a gore-splattered location, a snowbound Fargo-esque field, a prison block mid-riot, a luxury boat where you are actively hallucinating, and asks you to vacuum the blood, bag or dismember the bodies, destroy the evidence, and slip out without the patrolling police noticing. The sequencing is the puzzle. Dragging a corpse creates a new blood trail; using Hal's chainsaw to break bodies into throwable limbs is faster but messier. Getting the order of operations right, watching guard rotations through the Cleaner Sense overlay, and timing your vacuum runs (the noise radius is displayed on-screen, which is genuinely helpful) produces a satisfying loop that sits closer to a spatial puzzle game than to a pure stealth action title. The four characters are the game's best design decision. Bob, the returning veteran, bags bodies to prevent blood trails, methodical, forgiving for beginners. Vip3r hacks terminals and crawls through vents, opening remote distraction chains that let you clear a room without getting close. Lati vaults obstacles, slides over gaps, and leaves graffiti tags that pull cops away from their posts, the highest-mobility option and the best one for aggressive repositioning. Hal dismembers corpses with a chainsaw, which causes any nearby officer who witnesses it to pass out, and his severed limbs can be thrown at enemies or stuffed in lockers to neutralize them for the rest of the level. Each playstyle genuinely changes how a map reads, and switching between them across the five-chapter structure keeps the pacing from collapsing into monotony. Where Serial Cleaners struggles is at the edges. The guard AI is inconsistently intelligent: cops will ignore a body you dragged six feet in plain sight until it crosses some invisible threshold, and on the PC version at launch, save-file corruption and corpses clipping through floors were reported by multiple reviewers. The level-select situation is also a downgrade from the first game, you cannot replay individual missions without restarting the entire campaign, and there are no bonus objectives or collectibles to pull you back in. The narrative wraps up on New Year's Eve 1999, told through flashbacks for each cleaner, and while the characters are genuinely interesting, the story stops well before it reaches a satisfying endpoint. It feels like a first act with credits glued to it. For players new to the series: you do not need to have played the 2017 original. Bob's backstory is surfaced accessibly, and the sequel's mechanics are different enough that prior experience is not a prerequisite. The stealth detection system, which accounts for distance, lighting, and crouch stance before confirming a spot, is forgiving enough that even newcomers to the genre will find the early missions approachable. The difficulty comes from level complexity and corpse logistics, not from hair-trigger AI. If you like puzzle-stealth hybrids and can accept a game that runs out of ideas before it runs out of levels, there is a genuinely enjoyable eight hours here. Go in with adjusted expectations and you will probably finish it.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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