In this game, no one can hear you clean.
With all the media nowadays, both social and otherwise, it can be really hard for a company to grab potential customers’ attention in meaningful ways. They could all learn a lesson from Japanese chemical company Kao, whose Magiclean brand of household cleaners now have my undivided attention by releasing its own survival horror game.
▼ That is one frighteningly dirty kitchenette.
It makes a strange kind of sense too. The first Resident Evil came out in 1996, and those who grew up along with the series now face different kinds of horrors in the form of student loan debt, colonoscopies, and stubborn mildew stains.
This game, however, gives a nod to another classic franchise with its title Silent Cleaning and is available for free on Steam. They even allow streamers to use the game with monetization on platforms like YouTube or Twitch, which is understandable since it is basically a commercial for Magiclean products.
▼ Magiclean Extra Strength for Kitchens is one of the many weapons at your disposal.
In the game, you have inherited a remote vacation home that’s been abandoned for years. You decide to sell it off but first have to clean every inch of it before the real estate agent comes over for an appraisal. Of course, this being the horror genre, you chose to do all this alone and in the middle of the night.
The house has a complex layout also has all the familiar features of a home in the Japanese countryside. While inside, you must seek out a range of real-life Kao cleaning supplies to eliminate all the stains before it’s too late, while also solving puzzles to access different areas of the house.
This probably doesn’t sound all that scary, but the catch is that you’re not alone in the house. There is also a being that is completely blind but has extra-sensitive hearing and is constantly listening for the sounds of prey. Scrub too loudly and it’s curtains for you in an instant.
The game constantly tests player’s compulsion to clean by making them have to choose between leaving some cleanser only half-rinsed or dying a horrible death. Our writer Saya Togashi tried the game and found that choice more difficult than you might expect, while dying about 50 times in the process.
▼ She instinctively tried to “shoot” the monster with Magiclean, but it was no use.
According to Steam, it takes about an hour to 90 minutes to complete the game, but Saya spent over three hours, partly due to constant death and partly due to a bug in the game.
Like in many survival horror games, at the end you’re given a god-tier weapon. For Silent Cleaning, this weapon is the Magiclean EXPOWER Limescale Spray and Saya was so impressed with how it worked in the game that she bought the real thing for 965 yen (US$6.50).
She decided to try it out on some stubborn scales on her bath tub.
According to the instructions, you need to spray the area to be cleaned, let it sit for five minutes, and then wipe it up.
Amazingly, just like in the game, her faucets were sparkling as if brand new! By the way, even though you have to use the cleaners as instructed in the game, you don’t have to sit around waiting five whole minutes because in game time one minute passes in just one real-world second.
Unfortunately, this game is only available in Japanese, but in Saya’s experience, the plot didn’t really matter all that much. The goal is to escape the house, and the front door you walked in through is always there. There’s also your inexplicable desire to get the house all nice and tidy to sell despite the fact that it has a deadly monster roaming around it.
Still, horror fans would probably see these irrationalities as endearing positives rather than negatives. That, combined with the fact that Silent Cleaning is a full-fledged game rather than just a half-baked novelty promotional tool, makes it well worth a download.
Source: Steam/Silent Cleaning
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[ Read in Japanese ]
