Considering some of my favourite games include Hitman and Hide the Corpse, you could say that I was probably the target audience for this game. That’s why when the developer requested for us to cover the game, I could hardly say no. It sounded like a fun premise, even there was some stiff competition from other ‘clean-up’ games.

As always with early access releases, it’s worth keeping in mind that the game is in an unfinished state. With plenty of more updates no doubt arriving in the coming months, this review will likely end up being out of date by the time the full version drops and the thoughts here may end up being slightly inaccurate or even irrelevant.

Many thanks to the developer for the review code.

THE CLEANER
Even though the basic premise seems more than a tad grizzly, don’t worry too much: you’re not playing some heartless monster. Instead you take on the role of an undercover cop trying to get closer to a deadly hitman. There’s a lot of risk involved, as being caught will not end well, but hopefully you can piece together as much as you can from the victims in order to put a stop to his murderous spree.

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For the most part though, you’ll be cleaning up crime scenes. Starting at your safe house, you’ll need to wait to hear from both your handler at the police force, and the anonymous caller that fills you in on your next job. These all play out in a similar way: locate and dump the body (or bodies) in your truck, hose down the blood with your power-washer, remove all the garbage that indicate signs of struggle, and try to find any evidence that might get you one step closer towards those responsible.

The cleanup itself works reasonably well, even if it does lack more than a little polish. In particular, anything that involves picking stuff up can be somewhat of a hassle, and bodies lack any kind of weight or realistic physics. When coming from the excellent Hide the Corpse, moving the victims around feels very cheap and unsatisfying. Garbage is also very fiddly to pick up, but thankfully that can at least be made easier by purchasing a portable Roomba to do the work for you. I also failed to find any real usage for the UV light that gets introduced to you early on, which may have had some intended purpose that didn’t end up being implemented properly.

At least these become somewhat negligible once you start buying upgrades to help you out. Whether it’s a stronger power-washer, a roomba, or even a dog to help sniff out evidence, they’re great ways at reducing un-necessary hassle. It’s a shame that there’s not much time to test out your gizmos given that there are only really four clean-ups to do, but I imagine more levels will be added soon enough.

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Wiped Clean has a pretty entertaining premise, and you can see that this could be a great little title with future additions and tweaks. I’d love to see a lot more levels, of course, but it would also be nice to see some variety too. The current locations have a lot of potential for alternative disposal techniques or additional objectives that don’t boil down to simply finding a four digit code written down somewhere to open a lock, so I hope the developer expands the concept a little further in future updates. It would also be nice to have additional modes to help with replayability, so perhaps having randomised crime scenes or a mode where you need to judge for yourself as to whether everything is clean (with a chance for failure) could work well. Regardless, I look forward to seeing what the future holds for Wiped Clean.

VERDICT
Wiped Clean is an entertaining game all about cleaning up various murderous bloodbaths. It may be a little rough around the edges and could do with a little extra content, but this game will definitely be worth keeping an eye on through early access as it could end up being quite the gem.