Like many people in my country, I’m concerned about the environment. Here in the UK, climate anxiety is at an all-time high, probably because we’ve got water companies polluting all our waterways, fracking in the North Sea, and a bunch of iconic natural landmarks being destroyed by criminal hooligans. In many ways, that makes Spilled! a very therapeutic experience. It’s about someone living on a boat (or a living boat, I can’t tell) who has to go around cleaning up dirty waters to help the natural world that relies on them to thrive, and that’s literally all that it’s about.
What Is Spilled!?
Spilled! is a casual puzzle game (I think) about cruising around in your solar-powered boat, cleaning up oil slicks and plastic bottles to help clear the natural environment. As you go along, you come across distressed and dirty animals, oil patches and fires on land, and a bunch of disgusting oil-powered boats that keep messing up the areas in the first place. Beyond that, there’s not much in the way of a story. You just clean up the area well enough to unlock the next one, then you move on to that area.
It’s worth noting that this game is incredibly short. In total, even playing through it twice took about an hour and a half to two hours, so a single playthrough is likely to come through as less than an hour at most, and on at least one of those playthroughs, I was trying to 100% everything (with limited success.) So, the question becomes: With a game so short, is there enough going on to keep the game interesting?
Must Be Something Inside
The main crux of the gameplay in Spilled! sees you boating around, scooping up oil with a special device on the front of your boat. This scoop will automatically suck up any oil you find and dump it into your tank. Once you’ve got a full tank, you can unload it on the recycling boat to be receive cash, then you can spend the cash to upgrade your boat speed, the size of your scoop, and the size of the oil tanker on the back of the boat. You also have a water cannon for spraying oil off of the shoreline, as well as for putting out fires or creating snowballs (please don’t ask because I don’t know either), all of which also net you cash.
That description pretty much fills out everything you’ll be doing in the game, outside of a side mission of collecting various dirty animals. You clean the area, buy your upgrades, and then move on to the next. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. There’s nothing to really harry you in your journey, no wrong moves to take or failure states to worry about. In short, it’s 100% vibing as you help to clear up the world, and at an hour long, it doesn’t really feel like it outstays its welcome too much.
…and Breathe
Spilled! is certainly a relaxing experience, and that’s clearly by design. The visuals, the music, it’s all coming at you from a place of serenity and calm that aids the feeling of accomplishing something without much of a failure state. It works well with a game that’s primarily about cleaning stuff up. If you’ve ever played PowerWash Simulator or Viscera Cleanup Detail, then you know how satisfying taking something from filthy to pristine can feel. This feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction is pretty strong throughout Spilled! and is most of the reason that I kept playing.
However, there are a few pieces of design that feel like they’re struggling a little bit against satisfaction. For example, as you cruise around in your boat, you come across these bottles just sort of floating in the water that you need to scoop up and dump in the recycling boat, but they don’t go into a tanker or container on the boat. Bottles are completely at the mercy of physics, and often, you’ll find that you end up trailing a line of bottles behind you that you’ll need to go back for if you want a perfect score. That isn’t too much of an issue inherently, but a fair few times I had bottles get stuck on walls, and it meant that I couldn’t 100% some areas. There was also a weird bug in the last area where some of the oil ended up inside a rock, meaning I couldn’t clear that up either.
Visually Vital and Audibly Awesome
The visuals in Spilled! are pretty good, with a lot of bright and natural colours in the areas that you’ve started to clean up starting out a little more muted and grey when you first hit a new ‘polluted’ area. As far as serving the message of cleaning up the environment, the isometric pixel art does a fantastic job, and the entire game is pretty good-looking.
Musically, things are even better. To aid the relaxing vibes, the soundtrack is made up of meandering synth riffs with some more analogue-sounding piano chords backing things up. It keeps a certain amount of energy in the game, but it also still lets you go at your own pace to a certain degree. While the game is too short to really get into the music too deeply, there is certainly a fair bit of music here that will fit comfortably on my ‘games’ playlist in the future (if I can find it online anywhere, at least.)
The Verdict
Spilled! is a bit-sized adventure about keeping our all-important waterways clean. While it only takes an hour to finish, the relaxing vibes, cool music, and decent visuals are more than enough to keep you playing. Sure, there are a few minor annoyances with the floating bottles, and the gameplay doesn’t evolve too much beyond where you start, but these are minor considerations for something that feels like a very tight and managed experience. In short, Spilled! is everything it’s trying to be: a fun, bright, small experience that will hopefully motivate even more people to care about the bodies of water that we live around.
Developer: Lente
Publisher: Lente
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC
Release Date: 26th March 2025
