Janitor Bleeds Preview: Dead Dirty

What do you think this is – a hotel? Someone has to clean up your mess, and that’s down to the janitor, not your folks. How the janitor bleeds… An entry-level introduction to some words on the demo, available now on Steam.

So Janitor Bleeds, from Korpus and Bonus Stage Publishing (Sunblaze), is a cleaning game? I don’t know, is it? In the demo, it transpires someone is missing, and there’s a bit of a pattern with this sort of thing. You’re the idiot that goes to find them. ‘Idiot’ as there’s bound to be some unnecessary drama if just one person is doing all the grafting.

In a scene that replicates the end of the world, we’re greeted by some conveniently placed cars that force us to follow a pre-determined path. Where does that path lead us to? An abandoned arcade: the best place to search for a missing person. In fairness, most mature gamers would happily retreat to the days of old and hide behind Operation Wolf during closing time.

Once you’re in, you know that the arcade represented in Janitor Bleeds is a bad omen. You’ll run around the cabinets looking for clues or to check what games they have. Do they have Operation Wolf? Out-Run? How about Rampage? None of the above. But they do have Janitor, and if you follow the trail to the toilets, you can relive your youth. Playing games, not hanging in toilets. Unless you did.

Ah, but I’m being facetious. Janitor is a made-up game, and it’s the equivalent of a video nasty as the moment you start playing, all sorts of creepy shit goes down. From passing shadows in the dark to ominous noises outside, it gets a little bit freaky for us gamers made of jelly/jello. 

Presentation-wise, Janitor Bleeds is very low-key, VHS-like and has plenty of noise effects. You aren’t running around with a camcorder, but the aesthetic comes across that way, and it’s good. There’s a bit of tension as once you’ve played your first game of Janitor (which I hasten to add is a fun arcade game for all its simplicity), you’ll start seeing warnings painted in blood, presumably, not to play the game. Too late.

From a first-person perspective, you’ll move around this reasonably sized establishment as you would any other title, only you can’t jump. Of course, you can’t. You can crawl, and if the full game is anything like the demo, it’s an action worth doing to hide under the tables or crawl into the ventilation system to escape that… thing.

Janitor Bleeds is a short experience – it’s a demo – but it’s a fun one to try out to get a feel of what’s to come, or at the least, stomp around a vacant arcade without being moved on. Is it any good? Yep. The demo is available now on Steam, and if you don’t like it, you haven’t shelled out any quarters and can instead chuck them into Tron. That is all.