Trace: Crime Scene Cleaner

A client texts you an address and a deadline, and never says what happened. This is a crime scene cleaner game about one room a night. You have until six in the morning to make the room boring.

The text arrives, the room comes up all at once, and you go through it. Six to twelve traces are in there at three tiers of visibility: a stain, a scuff, a smear, a burn, a shard, a footprint, a sticky patch, a mark on a wall. The obvious ones are free. The rest are under, behind and inside things, so drag anything that will move and open anything with a door or a lid. Two or three minutes, door to door.

• A room scores on boring, not clean. Nobody should look twice at it
• Leaving early with everything found pays more than running the clock down
• Nothing pushes you out and nothing tells you that you are finished
• Eight kinds of place: basement, conference hall, gym, museum, party room, reading room, studio floor, tea room
• Kit to buy, from a bigger van to solvent, a work lamp and a second pair of hands
• Rooms and traces laid out fresh every night
• Twenty goals, six of them secrets that stay off the list until they happen
• Nothing is shown. No wound, no weapon, nothing that was once a person

The client sends one line when you leave, impeccably polite, still not naming the thing. "They said it is somewhere below the stairs, apparently."

English and Korean. Plays offline, no account, no energy bar.

Controls (PC)

• Mouse: click a mark and keep clicking to scrub it; drag furniture to look under it; click doors and lids to open them.
• Esc: back

The itch.io version

• No ads. No in-app purchases. The full game, once.
• "Take an advance on the next job" is a free button here. It only shows up when nothing on the board is affordable.
• The mobile version's other video offers (thirty more seconds, better light, selling one thing, a word with the client to clear a strike) are not in this version: free every night they would take the pressure off.
• A tall window (540x960) that fits a 1080p screen and can be resized.

Credits

Art: Modern Interiors by LimeZu (limezu.itch.io); Ninja Adventure by Pixel-boy (CC0). Fonts: Sniglet, Nunito, Pretendard (SIL OFL). Made with Godot.

Privacy policy: https://crystllabs.com/privacy.html