26-03-2025
‘Spilled!' Review (PC): Cozy Gaming's Finest Hour
'Spilled!' is exactly what it promises to be, and exactly what everyone needs right now.
It's not often that a game takes longer to write about than it does to complete it, but few experiences are as unique and delightful as Spilled!. Releasing today (March 26), this Little Indie That Could makes you feel positively zen in under 60 minutes, delivering one of the finest hours for cozy gaming.
Few new releases have an origin story quite like it, and it's one that supercharges its charm. Spilled! is the debut for Lente, a solo developer who lives and works on her boat in the Netherlands. She quit school to make her dream game, picking up part-time work to support her savings, before successfully using the Kickstarter community to fund the rest of its development.
I outlined the game last year as part of a round-up for 2024's best-looking indie games, but as is the way with these things, Lente took an extra few months to perfect it. Patience is rewarded, because it's worth the wait, to the point it's pretty much impossible to find any complaints with it — except, of course, that you probably want it to go on for longer, and/or forever.
Spilled!'s premise is simple: you're in charge of a boat in a mountainous, lake-filled region which, if it wasn't so damn cute, would most definitely be described as the worst possible biological disaster to destroy the most beautiful place on Earth. It's like the Exxon Valdez and Great Pacific Garbage Patch were dropped from a great height on Iceland.
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Your little tugboat is small, slow, and limited, but you clean oil spills with your capture spout, shuffle plastic bottles to collection zones, put out forest fires with your little hose, and save tiny, 8-bit creatures such as a swan called Evelin and a turtle called Aaron Dunbar.
Told you.
It's an ecological game, but one that even the most rouge-faced, eternally angry anti-wokeist would struggle to hate, even by 2025's social media standards. It's just so satisfying to clean, earn dosh for doing so, then upgrade your boat's speed, tank, and collection contraption to tackle larger spills, funnel more plastic, and tackle more extensive areas of abject catastrophe.
Any gamer's instinct is to try and do things perfectly well or to at least optimize any strategies, but Spilled! uses simple blockers to make you earn your progression, and not be too successful too quickly. A large oil slick will be just too much for your current storage tank, or your bottle-collecting bracket is just a little narrow to get all the trash in one go. Still, you earn cash, upgrade your boat, and get those constant pangs of satisfaction.
Sometimes, you try your hardest to do everything perfectly. You want to collect every bottle in a small section, but one or two slip from your grasp — victims of your overambitious greed. An oil spill will go beyond your capture area, leaving minor slicks despite your otherwise careful collection. Eventually, you just accept that you can't be perfect, and that in itself is a valuable lesson in gaming.
You can't do everything at once.
At its heart, Spilled! is a completionist's dream. Each area gradually gets more beautiful and clear-watered as you fix it, revealing more happy animals swimming in its increasingly crystal-clear waters. It visually rewards you, topped off by a cheeky flash of the area to let you know you've completed it, and you can move on to an even grubbier, more significant section. There are even a few mini missions, where you reunite other boats with their missing items.
Spilled! feels much better with a controller. The only gripe is the ship's movement; based on rudders, movement is understandable while accelerating, but the same rules don't seem to apply to going backwards. I've spent way too much time trying to understand how boats work, and I'm convinced the reversing mechanism is incorrect, but in real terms, it just doesn't matter.
Lente should be immensely proud of what she's created. What's more, Spilled! has the potential to be so much more. It doesn't need new levels; it'd benefit from a randomly generated 'endless' mode, where small areas give you five minutes of solvable respite to take you away from the horrors of real life. This option, alongside the game's gorgeous art style and beautiful soundtrack, could be something everyone could get on board with.
Ultimately, Spilled! costs $6.99 and is an hour long. Lente has been clear on this since day one — the Steam listing says as much — but it's the price of a coffee and a Danish, lasts longer, and will bring you way more joy. If you can, take the opportunity to support one of the most unique indie creators of 2025 — you won't regret it.
