The WereCleaner - A simple and cleaning game

A janitor finds himself on the night shift as a desperate CEO presses for his employees to work later into the dark for the week. This would normally just be an annoying inconvenience, but for Kyle the janitor, there are far worse implications to this situation as in the darkness of night, the humble cleaner becomes a bloodthirsty werewolf. As the head of security, Daryl, starts to become wary of the presence of the beast and becomes obsessed with bringing him down, will our precariously employed wolf be able to clean up the messes assigned to him and not create any new ones caused by satisfying his carnivorous appetite? The hunt is on.

The game’s premise is quite simple, and the game is short, which is probably why it is offered for no cost on Steam. When I streamed the game I was able to beat it in about an hour, and subsequently was able to replay the pre-designed levels for each day to lower my times and be as pacifistic as possible. It took me one additional hour to get all the visible accolades.

Polished to a shine

Unlike an actual job, though, going through this grind was quite entertaining. As you repeat playthroughs you start to get a feel on how to tackle messes more efficiently, and which route works best to ensure you can clean uninterrupted. With improvement, you start to feel like a true hermit janitor, trying to ninja your way through the cubicles without allowing the staff to notice you even exist at all. You’ll learn where the high traffic zones are and try to avoid them where you can and start to understand how the back rooms connect with important zones in the building.

Another cool thing about the game mechanics is that being spotted doesn’t stop your mission to clean the office, it just makes things harder to complete. If you go on a rampage and kill an employee, you’ll need to consume them to dispose of their body, which of course will leave yet another bloody mess you have to clean up. If someone sees you, an unconsumed body, or the uncleaned blood left behind, then they’ll run away and be marked as a witness. Of course, you can’t have any of those, and so onward the feasting and cleaning goes. Like the cleaning gameplay there are ways to optimize the disposal of unnecessary casualties, but figuring that out is its own fun.

Reading my missed achievement it looks like I missed a particular mechanic around crumpled paper entirely. So I had unintentionally done a challenge run it seems.

The game also does a good job with environmental storytelling, as the week progresses on and the deadline looms, the office gets busier, but also unrest starts to take hold. Sometimes you’ll clean up after a forklift accident, or a simple broken aquarium in the break room. However other times you’ll find that in the meeting room the frustration has boiled over, tomatoes smashing the projector screen and messages strewn on the walls in ire over the mandatory late night deadline push.

If your adult self finds that you are pressed for time because of your own selfish CEO, this game is a perfect breath of air to fully enjoy in your sparse downtime. You could say it’s… bite… size. Yeah, I’ll stop there.