Video Game / Viscera Cleanup Detail

"Oh, it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it!"

Have you ever played through a First-Person Shooter or watched an action-packed sci-fi movie with Gorn, seen somebody be reduced to Ludicrous Gibs and thought "Boy, do I feel sorry for the poor schmuck who's gotta clean that up"?

In Viscera Cleanup Detail, that "poor schmuck" is you.

Viscera Cleanup Detail is an indie first-person simulator game, developed by Runestorm. It entered Steam Early Access in April 2014 and was fully released in October 2015.

The year is 2183 and you are a janitor working for Aerospace Sanitation Inc. The Company takes contract work from other space-faring corporations and as a result, you are sent to clean up various space stations, colonies, and ships. No problem, you say? Not when these locations have been the sites of major catastrophes, leaving them one giant mess of body parts, gore, blood, shell casings, bullet holes, and rubbish. Your job is to take out the trash and leave the place sparkling.

Trust us, it's much more fun than it sounds.

You enter each level with four tools: A mop for cleaning up blood, soot, and other fluids; a "sniffer" that can detect nearby messes; a PDA for taking notes; and your hands for picking up trash. Additional tools such as brooms, shovels, and welding lasers can be found within the level. Vending machines produce buckets for cleaning mops, bins for collecting trash, and other useful items while incinerators dispose of any trash. At the end of your shift, the Company will evaluate your performance based on how thoroughly the site was cleaned. Bonus points can be earned by stowing cargo properly, filling out paperwork, and performing other menial tasks.

There are four side games:

• Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa's Rampage has you tasked with cleaning up the bloody aftermath of Santa's homicidal rampage at his North Pole workshop.
• Viscera Cleanup Detail: House of Horror is a Halloween-theme level taking place in a haunted suburban house and its surroundings.
• Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior has you cleaning up the temple from said game's first level following Lo Wang's katana-wielding rampage through it.
• Viscera Cleanup Detail: The Vulcan Affair follows up on a confrontation between a super spy and a supervillain.

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Viscera Cleanup Detail provides examples of:

• Accentuate the Negative: Leave a single piece of rubbish, bullet hole, or drop of blood uncleaned, and your co-workers will give you feedback that makes you look like the worst employee in the world.
• Achievement Mockery: An achievement is awarded for getting fired, which requires you to leave the area you were supposed to clean up with an even worse mess.
• Adminisphere:
  • While nothing you can do will result in a Game Over, doing a poor job will result in memos detailing your demotion, pay cuts, reduced office size, and a lost spot on the requisition waitlist. The worst that can happen is being fired, which destroys any items collected in your Office. Contrarily, doing a good job will result in a notification of these things getting improved and an "Employee of the Month" picture to hang on their wall. Notably despite all the memos about gaining or losing privileges, nothing actually changes about your office.
  • Many mission briefings show signs of the disconnect between the administration and janitors. This ranges from casually dismissing potential safety hazards and hostile aliens to casually dismissing the death of the previous janitor assigned to the job.
  • This is taken to the extreme in the "Uprinsing" level, which takes place in the aftermath of a janitor protest after robots have swept through and killed everyone, implied to have been sent by upper management to deal with the problem rather than listen to their demands. Management sending another janitor to clean up their former colleagues' remains is just the cherry on top.
  • Reports include a field for complaints to your Union about the Company. The Union won't do anything about your complaints while the Company will penalize your score for writing anything in the field.
• Alien Blood: The giblets of alien creatures splatter green or yellow blood.
• All There in the Manual: There is no hint in-game as to how to complete the Bob storyline. The player must collect all of Bob's notes from other levels, then place them on the altar in "Unearthly Excavation". Complicating this is that if the player simply follows the levels as they appear in order in the game, at least one Bob note appears after Unearthly Excavation, meaning that if you complete all the levels in order, to find Bob you then have to go back and do Unearthly Excavation again.
• Amputation Stops Spread: Some of the crystallized corpses in "Core Sample" have bonesaws lying next to them, implying that this was attempted. One particular corpse is missing its legs, which can be found crystallized not far away, so it looks like it did actually work, even though the scientist then bled to death anyway.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • You can bring up the console and use cheat codes if you think you are missing something but can't find it. Also useful for getting at gibs that you can't reach.
    • The console also allows you to cycle through different rendering modes. The wireframe mode makes it easier to spot items outside of the level geometry while the world normal mode makes objects and stains stand out clearly.
  • Some things may prove difficult to handle (like large bodies or body parts). You can use the Welder gun to cut it down to more manageable chunks, but you have to be careful not to go too crazy or you'll leave burn marks all over the place (which you'll need to clean up).
  • The Sniffer tool can detect both organic and non-organic trash that you may have missed. It also detects scorch marks, blood, ichor, and bullet holes.
  • The Incinerator won't get any blood on it if you drop a body part or spill a dirty bucket inside.
  • While carrying items clicking the fire button will turn them right-side up but holding the button will allow you to rotate the item to whatever angle you desire. This makes stacking items and storing trophies neatly much easier. Additionally, while most objects "snap" to upright when you click, a bucket full of liquid will rotate slowly so it doesn't trigger a spill.
  • It is possible to walk at a slower speed than normal. The advantage of this comes when carrying bins filled with a lot of items. Walking reduces how much the bin gets jostled by your walking which in turn reduces the chance of item collision causing trash to fall or clip out of the bin.
  • Spilled buckets don't make stains in zero gravity.
  • All code-locked doors will flicker when the correct digit in the correct place is pressed, in the event that the clue for the code is cleaned up before the door is unlocked.
• Arch-Enemy: Secret Agent Sub-Zero Seven to Dr. Hades in The Vulcan Affair, to the point where Dr. Hades' moneylenders are starting to be concerned with his single-target fixation being placed before actually being a supervillain.
• Artifact of Doom: The artifact in Unearthly Excavation drove the miners and archaeologists insane. Those who didn't feed themselves to the sand worms killed one another.
• Artificial Meat: One story on the News Ticker machine notes that "pasture produced meat products" haven't been used in more than a century.
• Bad Santa: The version of Santa in Santa's Rampage, who snaps and kills all his elves. Even beforehand, it is stated that he puts his elves through bad working conditions, and the amount of whiskey and eggnog bottles in his office also implies other problems.
• Blood Is Squicker in Water: Soaking up too much blood with the mop without cleaning it will cause the mop to become red and dripping with blood, and leave behind bloody, wet smears. That being said, cleaning a bloody mop in a water bucket enough times will cause the water in the bucket to become red with blood. You can also drop a giblet into a full water bucket and it will immediately turn the water red and make it unusable.
• Bloody Handprint: Seen occasionally.
• Body Horror: A lot of the corpses you find have been mutilated in horrific ways.
• Bookcase Passage: There's one behind Dr. Hades' desk in The Vulcan Affair that serves as an escape route.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Your duties don't have to be in any particular order, so if you want, you can pick up normal litter before picking up the body parts and cleaning the blood.
• Brick Joke: A rather morbid one. In the options, the tooltip for the View Bob-Setting mentions that if you see Bob, you should report it to security immediately. If you explore your office's locked rooms you find his "collection" of various body parts and a coworker he killed. He's currently on the run from the company.
• Butt-Monkey: Bizarrely, the Big Banger stereo. There are several achievements for destroying it in various ways.
• Celebrity Endorsement: Some of the News Ticker stories are blatant endorsements by said heroes.
• Christmas Episode: Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa's Rampage is this.
• Cleanup Crew: The heroes of this game.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: Messages written in human blood are common, left by either the victims or killers depending on the situation. They get cleaned up like the rest of the blood.
• Crapsack World: Let's not beat around the bush, life in this universe sucks. Even ignoring the monsters and Gorn-inducing catastrophes, this is a universe packed full of corrupt mega corporations who are unapologetic about putting their workers in harm's way and squeezing every last cent out of normal people. And Aerospace Sanitation is no better, being a company that treats its workers like crap, views them all as expendable, and doesn't take kindly to any kind of insubordination or protest, as the Uprinsing level demonstrates. Worse is that it's packed full of spiteful jerkasses at best and entitled, Ax-Crazy psychos at worst. Do well? They send you jealous death threats. Do badly? They Kick the Dog by sending you letters cheering your firing. Even worse is that according to Bob's notes, the company itself has ties to several illegal operations throughout the galaxy. Honestly, it's enough to make you want to try to get the company shut down with a horrible performance sometimes.
• Crate Expectations: Crates and barrels of varying designs are scattered around every level. Stowing them in marked cargo areas rewards bonus points, which require careful stacking due to limited space.
• Crawl: The News Ticker machine appears on some maps and streams a number of stories. The stories largely focus on the "heroes" who created the messes you're cleaning up and the various antics of their new celebrity status.
• Creepy Souvenir: As you can steal any item that fits in your trunk, it's entirely possible to make off with body parts or even entire corpses and store them in your office. Bob had a collection of viscera hidden in the sewer room, the discovery of which prompted him to commit murder and go on the run. There are achievements for collecting heads in the main game and Santa's Rampage.
• Cub Cues Protective Parent: The scientists in Paintenance Tunnels were experimenting on the local underwater fauna. They realized too late that they were the offspring of an absolutely enormous creature.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If you manage to die, you'll respawn with none of your cleaning undone, unless your cause of death was being blown up, in which case, you'll then have to throw your own giblets into the incinerator. Justified as the "respawn" is a different employee sent in to cover for the deceased one.
• Death Trap: The board office in The Vulcan Affair is set up with these, so that with a push of a button the supervillain can drop any of the dozen chairs around the table through a trapdoor and straight into the Shark Pool below.
• Desecrating the Dead:
  • You can do this to corpses, playing with the parts, dismembering them further, arranging them, or whatever takes your fancy. If reporting on how the corpse was handled there are fields for "Malicious", "Obscene", and "I Like Corpses".
  • Some aliens do this to their human victims as well. In Hydroponic Hell some of the mutants completely dismantled several corpses and arranged them in a ritual pattern.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The business end of the Sniffer tool.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The Legacy Levels were the first levels available for cleaning and tend to be simpler as a result with only Splatter Station having bullet holes to repair. Each level's story was also much simpler and limited to the intro text, generally referring to generic alien invasions as opposed to the parodies that became more common later.
• Epic Fail: If you somehow manage to leave a level with an even worse mess than when you arrived, your failure will be so bad that the entire company will get liquidated, with everyone (including you) getting retrenched. You more or less have to be trying to get this outcome.
• Evil, Inc.: None of the companies in this game are particularly nice to work for, especially not Aerospace Sanitation, but according to Bob's notes, the company has ties with illegal operations up and down the galaxy, making them officially one of these.
• Exploding Barrels: Barrels marked with flammable warning signs explode if placed in the incinerator or shot with the welder, spreading extra soot.
• Expy: Fox Huntington, or Sub-Zero Seven, of James Bond.
• Fake Difficulty:
  • Some maps have giblets and blood splatters placed out of the player's reach. The problem? Until the v0.38 update introduced the J-HARM, a portable elevator platform, Viscera Cleanup Detail had no implemented ladders or similar tools. Reaching them required finicky crate stacking or cheat codes.
    • The map Athena's Wrath took this up to eleven; there are several very high windows holding rubbish, blood splatters, giblets, and a Plasma Welder. The map would have been a Breather Level had the player had the proper tool to easily reach the window ledges; missing them causes you to miss out on a massive amount of cleaning and fixable bullet holes.
  • Some maps have bullet holes camouflaged against certain wall textures a little too well; the rock walls in Unearthly Excavation and Unrefinery are examples of this.
  • The collision engine can introduce elements of this when filling bins or stacking objects in the bonus areas. A bin filled with small objects can shift its contents around and even push items out while not moving. Sometimes this can cause items to partially or completely clip through the bin, which in the case of gibs results in accidental splatters. The same can happen if barrels or crates are stacked too close together, as they can cause the entire pile to shift and collapse. This is especially bad in Unrefinery where the zones require four or five layers to stack all items.
    • Additionally, saving and reloading the game can do strange things to stacked items and filled bins. On reloading items in contact with each other will shift and settle into new positions, which can have messy results.
  • Alien blood is a rather dull color which can make it difficult to spot on metal and rock surfaces, which are exceedingly common. This means it's entirely possible to do a thorough mopping of an area without noticing large splatters of alien blood.
• Fake Longevity: On larger maps vending machines and incinerators located in out-of-the-way spots significantly increase the game length solely due to increasing the amount of time you spend walking back and forth. Even worse are maps where the machines are not grouped together but scattered around.
• Fantastical Social Services: The player takes the role of a janitor for Aerospace Sanitation Inc, because every time there's a massacre caused by alien monsters, escaped experiments, and artifacts of doom, someone has to clean it up and the heroes who made the mess are busy.
• Finagle's Law: If you neglect to leave your workspace totally spotless, a news article will appear detailing how it caused something to go improbably wrong. Left a bucket sitting around? Someone trips over it and breaks their neck. Missed a bullet hole? Some poor sap's going to have a PTSD flashback and go on a rampage. Leave the incinerator door open? Somebody will fall into it. Nice job breaking it, janitor.
• Footprints of Muck: Walking through slime, dirty water, or blood will coat your boots in it, making you leave behind dirty footprints for a short while. Some maps also include bloody alien footprints which can sometimes go onto the walls.
• Gale-Force Sound: "The Bigbanger Supernova Edition" in-game radio. While the regular Bigbangs won a contest by having "Earth-shattering" loudness, they only produce enough sound to be heard throughout the level and bounce around a bit. The "Supernova" edition on the other hand will automatically default to its loudest setting, which is louder than any other effect in the game. At the same time, it will shake nearby objects, send smaller objects flying, and even shake the bucket machines and bin machines in to producing buckets and bins. Oh, and it also ignites any nearby flares or explosives. The radio is only encountered in the Unearthly Excavation level which coincidentally has a large amount of explosives.
• Gameplay Grading: After completing a level an inspector will evaluate your performance and give you a percentage score based on main and secondary objectives. If your score is too low, you'll be fired and not receive an achievement for completing the level.
  • Primary objectives typically consist of eliminating trash items, splatter, and bullet holes. Some maps include additional objectives such as storing certain objects in a designated zone. The score starts at 0% when you zone in and can go up to 100% for completing all objectives or go negative if more of a mess is made.
  • Stealing or destroying certain objects will penalize the score as will filing a complaint against the Company.
  • Side objectives add extra points to your rating, allowing completion above 100%.
    • Levels typically have a designated area for crates and barrels; points are rewarded based on the number within the area.
    • Collecting P.I.D.s from the dead humans and depositing them in the clock machine.
    • The optional end-mission reports offer points on several categories. These include accurately identifying the nature of the incident, accuracy on details of the clean-up such as number of bullet casings, and accuracy on the details of each victim's death.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The game isn't completely clear on many parts of its grading scale, perhaps intentionally as part of its Adminisphere humor. It's particularly bad in two respects:
    • Map-specific objectives are rarely mentioned outright. For instance, in Cryogenesis, all the cryo-sample containers must be stacked in the right areas to get 100%. Most of the time, stacking containers is optional, so even the signs saying this is expected of employees might be glossed over.
    • The cause of death on personnel fatality paperwork is very specific. Once you figure out what each checkbox correlates to it can be guessed fairly accurately, but several keywords are very similar, may or may not be mutually exclusive, and sometimes it's hard to tell which PID belonged to which body in a pile.
  • Finding Bob requires an unusual approach. The player must collect all of his notes from across several levels and placed them on the altar in Unearthly Expedition. Only a few notes give hints about the related locations and many of the notes are relatively well-hidden.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Some bodies are cut in half at the waist. If filling out a report on the body's disposal the correct category for its condition is "Halved", in addition to any other mutilations.
• Hazardous Water: Some maps contain dirty water which will instantly soak mops with grime and will cause the player to leave behind dirty footprints.
• Hope Spot: Intact bodies are easy to dispose of but are relatively rare. This makes the presence of seemingly intact bodies which fall apart into a dozen pieces when touched a minor example of this.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: The crew of the ship in Gravity Engine were apparently driven insane after using the experimental engine and seeing things outside the windows. Whether there was anything out there or it was just in their minds is not entirely clear.
• Incompetence, Inc.:
  • The player works for a company contracted to maintain various space stations and colonies. Memos the player can read in their office imply that janitors are expected to do poor jobs. The union covers for janitors who do incomplete jobs, though it's not competent enough to ensure properly functioning equipment or job safety. Your office is located on a space station that is home to many of the other maps, all of which have suffered some catastrophe unrelated to one another within the same year.
  • Even outside of your station, ships and colonies regularly suffer from alien invasion, escaped mutant experiments, and any other set of messy blunders one can think of.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: An entire game about working as a janitor. Downplayed though, the twist in that you have to clean up from alien attacks in a sci-fi setting makes it more adventurous than lame.
• Kid Hero: The age of your character can be as young as 16. It doesn't matter how grisly or dangerous the job is.
• Kill It with Fire: The main way of getting rid of giblets, shell casings, and rubbish; you can either throw them into an incinerator or, on certain maps, burn them away with the Plasma Welder.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: There is a blue trunk (which is yours) and you can keep anything that you can stuff into that trunk. There is an achievement that entails taking the heads of all 5 species (including humans) into your office using the trunk, and the Shadow Warrior and Santa's Rampage games also have achievements that involve using the trunk.
• Late to the Tragedy: Everyone's already dead and the monsters are gone. All that's left is corpses and bits of story from which you can piece together how they ended up that way.
• Level Editor: The main game comes with one. Additionally, the v0.39 update introduced Steam Workshop compatibility.
• Locked Door:
  • On some levels there are locked doors that only open when you enter a code on the keypad. Thankfully a datapad or note somewhere in the level usually has the number needed.
  • In the Office there are three locked doors hiding Bob's "collection", Bob's special collection, and Dave's corpse. They have security codes that can be determined based on the panel flickering when a correct number is entered. (In fact, all keypad codes behave this way, making it possible to brute force the combinations in the event the code clue is cleaned up before the door is unlocked.) A fourth door requires a keycard.
• Luck-Based Mission: The bucket and basket machines may randomly drop body parts that will dirty up the machine. The basket machine can get really nasty with the body parts as it can drop up to six body parts at a time, and it can drop multiple times in a row (though only up to five times as of v1.13). In addition, the J-HARM lift can jam or launch its cargo into the air, and the vending machine can choose to spit out advertisements for various equipment items rather than what you ordered.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Basically, the enemy in this game. Intact bodies are actually extremely rare and in early maps aren't present at all.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Sure, you're still cleaning up messes as a janitor, but said messes included disemboweled corpses, chunks of dead aliens, shell casings, and blood smears.
• Mutagenic Goo: Caduceus contains several vials of glowing green goo, namely samples of an alien virus. It infects and transforms anything that comes into contact with it.
• My God, What Have I Done?: For all of Bob's further descent into madness over the course of the story, he does display genuine remorse for killing Dave. In his final note, he pleads for forgiveness and asks whoever reads the note that if he doesn't make it out of the excavation site alive to give Dave a proper burial, revealing where his body is. Of course you've already discovered Dave by this point and, tragically, likely disposed of his remains.
• Never My Fault: An article about accidentally leaving litter, such as a bag of chips, at a workplace recounts how a cyborg allegedly suffered a critical programming malfunction on seeing the litter and went rogue before exploding. Aside from the possibility the scientists were just covering up their own incompetence by blaming it on the litter, the fact that the programming can't handle litter is not a good sign.
• No Antagonist: The aliens are long gone (and likely fresh meat) by the time you reach the scene.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Did a perfect job? Your coworkers will hate you and send you death threats for taking their promotion.
• Non-Action Snarker: The janitor of the Shadow Warrior-themed stand-alone level is far more talkative than the others, making small body-part-related quips to himself and making frustrations with things falling over known.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Briefings usually warn that the location is most likely safe but there are no guarantees. The J-HARM malfunctions frequently - either jamming while staff are still on it or rocketing them into the ceiling - as do the vending machines which occasionally dispense the gibs of the last shmucks to restock them, the furnace apparently emits toxic gases, and any on-site deaths merely result in another employee being sent in with no delay.
  • Gravity Drive has two open shafts with no guardrails which lead to thirty-foot plunges, one of them directly onto the titular spiky, rotating engine.
  • One level explicitly states that there are still large quantities of toxic gasses but that upper management decided the janitors wouldn't get any protective gear because the gear is worth more to the company than the janitors are.
  • The Vulcan Affair has a memo to the supervillain from the contractors specifically calling out its lack of safety procedures, ending with a refusal to do any work for them until the problems are fixed.
• Not Enough to Bury: Aside from bodies reduced to chunks of meat, some are outright disintegrated or liquefied.
• Nothing Is Scarier: While the nature of the game means that the only usual threat to the player is either themselves or other players, the atmosphere in some levels might invite normal horror game players to expect something to jump out around every corner. In particular, "Penumbra" is set in an abandoned storage facility with lots of twists and turns, something can be heard groaning or moaning in the distance... oh yes, and there's almost no power, meaning that much of the level is near pitch-black.
• Octopoid Aliens: Paintenance Tunnels has dismembered tentacles scattered throughout the level, inferring that the aliens attacking were octopus-like.
• Our Slogan Is Terrible At the end of an advertisement for the J-HARM lift, the sentence "You can't afford to be safe anymore!"
• Palette Swap: Three of the alien species are identical aside from difference in coloration and skin texture.
• Paparazzi: Several News Ticker stories are largely gossip about the heroes and their activities, up to and including their lunch. The news service providing said stories is "Papanazzi".
• Plant Aliens:
  • Athena's Wrath was home to research on sentient alien plant life, specifically breeding to create variants capable of guard duty. Things went predictably sour.
  • Hydroponic Hell had Plant Mutants, created due to splicing plant and animal genes in an attempt to create new products.
• Punny Name: While most name tags are randomly generated, some are pre-determined and obvious puns. For example, in the underwater Paintenance Tunnel level, there are names such as Dr. Pescador^*fisherman, George Seaman, and Keel Ovaar.
• Right-Hand Cat: Mr. Hugglesworth to Dr. Hades in The Vulcan Affair, to the point where the supervillain Hades regularly spends millions of dollars on him.
• Rustproof Blood: Blood is always red and wet while cleaning, apparently never drying or changing color. Additionally water used to clean mops turn red rather than a realistic yellow.
• The Scapegoat: The janitorial staff will always be the main focus of blame if something goes wrong due to leaving behind a stain or piece of garbage. The mistakes of other people involved are usually overlooked. One of the more blatant examples is if all planters in Hydroponic Hell are not filled. Despite it not being part of a janitor's job, the people actually responsible for the task complain about it and Administration plays along because they hate the janitors.
• Santa's Sweatshop: One level takes place in the aftermath of Santa having gone postal and slaughtering all the elves.
• Scenery Gorn: The levels when you enter them are absolute messes of dead bodies, Ludicrous Gibs, bullet holes, scorch marks, overturned furnishings, and blood splatters, showing something absolutely horrific happened here. Your job is to turn that all around and leave it spotless.
• Scenery Porn: Some of the levels are surprisingly breathtaking once cleaned and the stackables are moved to their zones.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Do not put a lantern into a bucket of water.
  • Choosing to file a complaint against the company with the Punchomatic won't improve your work conditions, it will just get your score penalized by the company.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Spill one too many dirty buckets? Too much gore? Sick of the job? You can clock out whenever you want, even before you clean a single thing.
• Shark Pool: The supervillain's lair in The Vulcan Affair features one of these, and yes, they have lasers on their heads. It's the level's equivalent of the incinerator.
• Spoiled Brat: In ''Santa's Rampage" you can find letters from children demanding a ridiculous amount of presents.
• Strawman News Media: The News Ticker and various articles in your office are written by an obviously biased staff. The News Ticker is blatantly in love with heroes, depicting them as unable to do wrong, while the articles heap constant abuse on the janitorial staff. They are almost solely fluff with only a few articles of actual journalistic merit, and then only due to a massive disaster.
• Stuff Blowing Up: Unearthly Excavation has several piles of TNT that appropriately explode when thrown into the incinerator or fried with the Plasma Welder. Blowing up another player in multiplayer gives you an achievement. The Santa's Rampage side game also features TNT that work in the same way.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option:
  • Several achievements in the main game ask you to do stuff that you wouldn't think of intentionally doing. One achievement asks you to spill 100 dirty buckets, while another tasks you to track over 20,000 footprints, and another even wants you to punch out with a mess so bad that you get fired. The most ridiculous one by far asks you to get eaten by one of the pit creatures in Unearthly Excavation. The Santa's Rampage side game also gives you an achievement for blowing yourself up with TNT, as well as punching out with a worse mess. Similarly, The Vulcan Affair dishes out an achievement for jumping into the Shark Pool.
  • Turning on the Death Ray in The Vulcan Affair is required for a few achievements. Naturally, getting yourself killed by it is one of them.
  • If you manage to get a perfect score on the level, your character ends up being invited to a ceremony meant to congratulate them for their excellent work effort. However, during this ceremony, your character grabs the Idiot Ball and shakes hands with the station mayor without taking off his blood-soaked gloves, which results in the mayor getting a nasty infection. Because of this, the award he was going to receive is forfeit and he "only" gets an "Employee of the Month" award instead. There is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent this from happening. And this happens every time you get a perfect score.
• Taken for Granite: Most of the scientists in Core Sample have either partially or completely turned into crystals.
• Testosterone Poisoning: The game pokes fun at the over-the-top violence of video game protagonists with their mission orders and various news stories. The orders include secondary objectives such as "Kick alien ass!" while news stories involve them being hyper-violent and one giving a near-incomprehensible speech at an academy which boiled down to "Those bastards gotta pay! THEY GOTTA PAY!!"
• Thrown Out the Airlock:
  • While the player is safe, in Zero-G Therapy you can throw trash out an airlock. Seeing as the incinerator is located on the roof, it's much easier to use the airlock.
  • Gravity Drive has a two-door airlock system that will kill any janitor inside if depressurized. It's also the only way to get rid of trash for the level.
• Too Dumb to Live: The person who, without fail, will fall into the incinerator should you leave the door open when you finish the job.
• 20 Minutes into the Past: While most of the game is set in the 2180s, The Vulcan Affair is set in 1975, still using the same cloned janitors and bucket/bin-producing appliances.
• Underwater Base: The location of Paintenance Tunnels is an underwater base on an alien planet.
• Ungrateful Bastard: If the place isn't cleaned up in at least 95%, the inspector will react as if you didn't do any cleaning at all.
  • Possibly justified if real life is anything to go by, since you are dealing with blood, dead bodies, and other biohazards in this game. In schools and workplaces, even a simple nosebleed is a huge biological hazard and must be treated with concern due to the possibility of transmitting bloodborne illnesses, so it's understandable that leaving behind a few blood smears would provoke such a response.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: There's nothing stopping smaller items (gibs, etc.) from wedging themselves outside of the map geometry. You get in trouble for it making a mess on the other side too.
• Vengeful Vending Machine: The bucket and bin machines periodically malfunction, instead producing additional gore and blood stains to clean up.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • The Personal ID tags found next to each body are intended to serve as a record of death should the player choose to fill out additional paperwork. However, the potential is there (and indeed there's even an achievement for it) to simply steal the IDs back to your office in your trunk, essentially rendering every deceased person missing in action as far as evidence is concerned.
  • In Unearthly Excavation, there is a creature that looks like the Sarlacc Pit from Star Wars. You can feed it practically anything and it'll eat it. It will also eat you if you decide to jump in (in which your clone will take over the job afterwards).
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: However, if the above creature eats too much, it may vomit the items back out, possibly creating a big mess.
  • This is the only way to obtain one of the Shout-Out items.
• Violation of Common Sense: Some levels contain guns, virulent pathogen samples, and priceless alien artifacts. How do you safely handle these things? By throwing them in the incinerator, of course.
• Would Hurt a Child: Since among the randomized ages your character is assigned can be as young as 16-17, Aerospace Sanitation could fall into this trope, as it shows that they're not above sending out teenagers to handle dead bodies and other biological hazards, not to mention the fact that it's possible to be killed in certain maps. There's also the other employees that send you death threats if you do a good enough job.

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