Spilled! Review: Relax Recycle & Explore in a Satisfying Cleanup Quest

I talk frequently enough about the slow decay of the AAA games industry and the various issues that plague it.  I don’t need to nor intend to regurgitate any of those points here, except for one – which is that gamers’ perception of the importance of quality versus quantity feels… skewed.  The two are often conflated to broadly characterize a game’s value, with the metric of hours played per dollar spent being about as good a measurement of quality as BMI is a measure of overall health.  And major publishers, adept as they are at selective hearing when it comes to listening to their community, have used this as an excuse to take well-paced, focused games and stuff them full of cornmeal and sawdust until they’re 60 hours long and feel like the entertainment equivalent of watching your food be digested.

Spilled! is the antithesis of this problem.  It’s a bite-sized experience with a satisfying idea used to its maximum viable potential, and spits in the face of unnecessary padding, mechanical bloat, or complexity for its own sake.  And most importantly, it’s just really enjoyable to play.

Spilled! starts out with a snippet of story so brief that it could nearly go by unnoticed.  There’s a big boat plowing around that seems to really get its rocks off on polluting the water, and it’s your job as the cute little cleanup boat to recycle oil and plastic that litters the bay around you, and use the proceeds to upgrade yourself into a more efficient cleanup and recycling machine.

Each area will have you starting with a gross stretch of opaque brown water that looks disturbingly similar to New York City’s Hudson River, and as you clean up the oil and plastic garbage strewn about, the water will get brighter and bluer in color until it’s pristine and teeming with wildlife again.  Any oil collected will fill the canister at the back of your boat, which can hit max capacity and require you to empty it at the recycling center in order to take on more.  The length (or maybe girth?) of your collection mechanism, size of your oil canister, and speed of your motor can all be upgraded once you’ve collected enough coins from recycling to afford it.  And while these recycling mechanics are simple, they’re also surprisingly satisfying, like an incremental game mechanically harmonizing with something like PowerWash Simulator and thematically channeling a game like Terra Nil.  In fact, Spilled! and Terra Nil give off surprisingly similar energy, and if you watched my review of Terra Nil a couple of years ago, you’ll know that’s a tremendous compliment.

Spilled!’s gameplay evolves only marginally throughout its short run time, with added mechanics like washing oil off of polluted hillsides or putting out fires adding a bit of variety as the experience went on.  But the game’s core gameplay feels engaging enough to carry the game as-is.  Collecting puddles of oil and watching the water get noticeably pretty as I did felt as satisfying as it sounds, and something about the physicality of water bottles and other plastic junk needing to be positioned just right to most effectively move and dispose of them made efficiency feel addictive even when there was no reason to rush.  With that said, some of the physics around collecting this junk can feel a bit janky at times, but never so much as to meaningfully hurt the experience.

It's almost hard to explain what makes Spilled! so gratifying to play, but ultimately it just feels good to clean up the ocean and see the environment thrive in the same way Lawnmowing Simulator might make you fall madly, lustfully in love with freshly cut grass… or… something.  I don’t know, that one makes a little less sense to me but hey, to each their own.

One of my favorite parts of Spilled!, though, is easily its presentation.  The gentle, fuzzy pixel art is a good fit for the game’s gentle, fuzzy soul, with plenty of color bringing each area to life as you restore it.  I also adored the soundtrack, with some of its themes sticking in my head long after I saw the credits ultimately roll.

And that part – the time to see those credits – is what I suspect will lose some people’s interest here.  I spent my playthrough efficiently recycling and upgrading but not especially rushing either, and managed to wrap things up at the 52-minute mark.  Look – I know even after my ranting and raving about quality versus quantity that 52 minutes is a very short game.  And not being currently aware of the price Spilled! will launch at makes it difficult for me to say if you’ll feel like you got your money’s worth.  But short as it is, it’s time worth spending, and a potentially delicious palette cleanser between playthroughs of larger, more complex titles.  It’s arguably not long enough to really make a lasting impression, but it’s also not trying to be anything epic.  It’s small and cute and charming and feels great to play, and I think even if you need to wait for a sale to make it feel worth it, this is a title that most people should experience.

GREAT