SPILLED

Hubert Spala
6 days ago
3 min read

Do you want to save the environment while navigating a cute little ship and relaxing for one hour?

SPILLED is a fairly straightforward game. Swoop up the oil slick from the river or solve little side tasks and recycle that into currency with which you can upgrade your ship.

Your choices of upgrades are a bigger tank, more speed, or a bigger swooping area. There isn't much in the area of replayability for SPILLED, but you could experiment with the different upgrades since it's impossible to maximise all upgrades in one run. Or just play the entire game without adding any of them. The downside is that it takes longer, and there is more back and forth to the selling station. But if you want that, you have the freedom to do so.

SPILLED presents a vibrant, colourful low-poly art style reminiscent of one of my longtime favourites, ROLLERCOASTER TYCOON 2. I love how the landscapes change into different little aquatic biomes that you uncover while cleaning them up. Another positive was the themed menu UI with animated ships and the minimalist UX in the main game screen. The soundtrack, reminding me low-key of the Anno games, was pleasantly trickling along in the background, accompanied by atmospheric nature sounds that changed throughout the game.

The vibrant landscapes looks even better once the cleanup is all done.

To my surprise, I enjoyed the gameplay loop a lot. Usually, I am not much of a cozy gamer, but SPILLED hit the spot for me. The controls with a gamepad are precise and smooth, and steering the ship is a joy. Only collecting the barrels submerged in the water needed a little more precise input. What I liked especially is that the game leaves you some room for choices. The next area opens after a certain percentage of the landscape is cleaned, but you are free to clean the rest up. Which you probably will do, since you are under no time pressure and it's satisfying to do so until the entire area is pristine.

The only two downsides I can say about the game are: That I want a lot more of it. Right now, the game ends pretty abruptly, when I was in a nice flow. But I also laud that the dev created a good scope for their first game and polished all elements to a very solid degree. Many games fail because of a bloated scope, bad execution, and/or a lack of vision. At worst, they are just not fun to play. From which SPILLED makes none of these mistakes.

I hope that SPILLED has enough success to adapt the core gameplay loop into a sort of "endless mode". I would burn many more hours into the gameplay, for sure. Secondly, without spoiling the final part of the game, I have to say that I found the finale to be a little bit of a tonal whiplash from the rest of the game's presentation. Which left me confused to a degree, if I had missed anything in the story. I know that the dev probably needed this from a gameplay perspective, but I believe the game's resolution could have worked better with a different narrative.

All in all, I am happy to see that SPILLED has sailed off to be a very impressive first professional game. I wish Lente a lot of success and hope to hear more about her future projects and her cute little houseboat.

Written by Börbo.