The World Is A Mess, But This New Tiny Boat Game Lets You Clean It Up

Yahoo

26-03-2025

I probably don't need to tell you, a person reading a website on the internet in 2025, that the world is a big, horrible mess right now. It's been like this for a few years, longer if you ask some people, and it doesn't seem to be getting better anytime soon. Thankfully, Spilled is here. It's a new game about a tiny boat cleaning up a big mess that at least lets us fix a digital world.
Spilled, out today on PC, is the first indie game from developer Lente. She lives on a boat, and this is her first release on Steam. And in Lente's Spilled, you are given the role of a sleepy little boat, tasked with cleaning up a gorgeous pixel art world using an upgradeable vacuum, water cannon, and crane. Some nasty, evil boats have been putting around and leaving black goo everywhere across various biomes and its up to you to save the day by collecting all the goo and recycling it into coins—coins that can then be used to upgrade your boat.
It's a fairly simple concept, perfectly nailed in Spilled. Controlling the boat feels good and upgrading its engine to make it faster feels even better. Early on, the goo you encounter is in small patches and easy to suck up. But later on, the spills of goo you find are massive and you'll need to go back and forth through the messes to effectively clean them. And doing this is immensely satisfying, like perfectly removing the sudsy water from a car windshield using a squeegee. Clean up an area enough and sea critters, like whales and dolphins, will return and the water will turn blue again.
Spilled will take most players about an hour or so to finish. Though if you want to clean every inch of its cozy world and collect all the hidden animals, you'll likely need to spend about two hours total. It's short, but its also packed with a lot of ideas. Every 10 minutes or so, Spilled was either teaching me a new way to clean stuff up—like using a water canon to remove hard-to-reach gunk on rocks—or letting me upgrade my boat again.
I'd love to see a sequel to Spilled that adds more levels, more ways to clean stuff up, and maybe even co-op. But for now, Spilled is a solid and gentle indie game that lets me clean up the world for an hour, and that's nice. I really like that.
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