Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior – Steam Backlog Bonanza [Blaugust 10]

10 August, 2019

Back in 2013 I bought Shadow Warrior for $10, and it came with a free “mini-game” called Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior. That’s what came up on the schedule for yesterday’s stream, so I finally tried it out.

I had heard about Viscera Cleanup Detail before but I don’t own it. It’s a physics game where you take on the role of a janitor who “cleans up” after the heroic gamer has gone through and slaughtered all the bad guys, exploding them into gibs or whatever.

The “Shadow Warrior” version puts you in the same levels where you (ie. Lo Wang) chopped up the bad guys with your (his) samurai sword in Shadow Warrior, a game that I’ve played before but only briefly.

Viscera Cleanup Detail is a funny concept, but is there a game here? The answer is a resounding nope. I got bored in exactly five minutes.

You use a mop to clean up blood puddles. You use your hands to pick up body parts and toss them into a bin. I think there’s more but that’s the gist of it. There’s some kind of handheld meter but I couldn’t figure out what it was for. There’s a lot of running back and forth. All the while there is some barely amusing commentary from the janitor. “Well this guy sure lost his head,” as you pick up somebody’s head. Things like that. There was no timer as far as I could tell. You just go until you get bored, then you “clock out” and your boss tells you how well you did.

I gave up pretty early and I got fired. :)

I’m very glad it was free.

On the plus side, they did a good job of recreating the pagoda from Shadow Warrior. It was like I had stepped right out of Shadow Warrior into Viscera Cleanup Detail.

And while I’m here I’ll mention that the source game, Shadow Warrior, is a mildly amusing game which I think I finally played last year or so, but I got bored with it too. It’s a bit like a mashup of Duke Nukem and Big Trouble In Little China. Lots of dumb one-liners and cutting people to pieces with a samurai sword. I haven’t yet got my $10 worth out of it.

Live Stream - Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior

Stream Production Notes: This was my shortest stream yet. I started out playing Shadow Warrior for about 10 minutes just to show what it looked like for comparison. Then I went into Viscera Cleanup Detail and … there’s just not much there. I stalled as long as I could but I just couldn’t take it anymore after about 15 minutes. I remember wondering when I put it into the schedule if it would be long enough to support a video, and I was right to worry about it. I started to play more Shadow Warrior but I forgot to save my game and I didn’t really want to play the first chapter again, so I ended the stream after 30 minutes. All in all, it was kind of a bust of a backlog day.

Previously on the Steam Backlog Bonanza: Kholat. (Incidentally I have actually played more Kholat since the stream, the very first game in the backlog to receive additional play time.)

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