There’s a trap that indie developers often fall into: the one of game length. The trap is laid by that demon which has been haunting the game’s industry for years now; the one of price. Indie games have often struggled with pricing, not wanting to charge too much lest they tempt the wrath of reviewers who decry that “It’s a great game, but wait for it on sale. It costs too much for the amount of gameplay you get”. The indie dev reaction has been, unfortunately, to pad out games with filler content or repetitive gameplay loops that overstay their welcome, leaving many good indie titles bloated messes. Spilled, thankfully, avoids this pitfall knowing that it’s core mechanic has a lifetime and instead focused on making the short time you spend with it fun, relaxing and delivering a not-so-subtle (yet not unwelcome) pro-environment message.
The premise is simple: you’re a little solar powered boat that’s tasked with cleaning up the waterways that a bunch of other, fossil fuel powered craft have trashed. They’ve left behind countless oil spills and troves of floating debris, decimating the local ecosystem. So it’s up to you, little boat, to putter your way through the river, gather it all up, and make sure it’s responsibly disposed of. For all of the gunk and junk you bring back you’ll be handsomely rewarded so you can…go and do more of it, just faster…bigger…better than ever before.
Now taking bets on how you think Spilled achieves its pixel art visuals because, let me tell you, I thought it was one thing but it’s nothing of the sort. No the dev, in their infinite wisdom, decided to code a game engine for it from the ground up and built a custom effect to translate all the 3D models into their pixel art counterparts. Most pixel art games I know of going for an effect like this usually cheat by building out a 3D models and using them to pre-render a bunch of frames at different angles/positions in order to achieve the effect. Honestly though I love her approach with this and the results speak for themselves, it looks fantastic.
The core gameplay loop is simple and to the point: suck up mess, push waste into the collection area, upgrade yourself, repeat. One thing that’s not called out is that the next area will unlock before the previous area is 100% clean, I assume in order to ensure that non-perfectionists aren’t pulling their hair out to find the 1px of dirty water that’s still hanging around somewhere. Which meant I got to area 3 before I realised that was a thing but it was easy enough to go back and clean it up. No harm, no foul.
You’ll get a handful of upgrades/different mechanics along the way (water gun to clean things you can’t reach, magnet to pick up drums) which add a bit of variety but it’s pretty much the same experience the whole way through. There’s different biomes but they don’t do anything apart from being a different visual experience which is fine though, keeps things interesting enough as you chug through the levels.
Spilled! is a lesson in indie game design: do what you do well, keep the fluff to a minimum and don’t be scared to say upfront that your game is short. The result is a focused, well executed game that doesn’t overstay its welcome. All it needs now is an Android port so I can give it to the kids to play.
Rating: 8.25/10
Spilled! is available on PC right now for $8.79. Total playtime was 1 hour with 100% of the achievements unlocked.
