Games about cleaning are the rage. The recent success of House Flipper, Power Wash Simulator and Unpacking demonstrates there's a mainstream-sized appetite among PC gamers for making messy places neat and tidy.
But the micro-genre goes back way further than that. The 1982 arcade game Bubbles was about using a bubble to clean a filthy sink. Cosy foundational text Harvest Moon—like its descendant Stardew Valley—has you gradually transforming a forgotten ruin into a quaint and personalised space. Then there's stuff like Chibi-Robo and Katamari Damacy.
Not all cleaning games are cosy or sim-oriented. Viscera Cleanup Detail is about cleaning blood 'n' guts and The Gunk is a 3D platformer about eliminating space gunk in order to, I'm not sure, probably save the world. And the recent wave of retail simulators have lots of cleaning and sorting.
But the cleaning or tidying game has evolved once again. Its newest manifestation may clock as either a living nightmare o...
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