Trace: Crime Scene Cleaner

A client texts you an address and a deadline. They never say what happened, and you never ask.

Trace is a crime scene cleaner game about one room a night. The text arrives, the room comes up all at once, and you have until six in the morning to make it boring. Two or three minutes, door to door.

FIND WHAT IS THERE

Six to twelve traces in a room, at three tiers of visibility. A stain, a scuff, a smear, a burn, a shard, a footprint, a sticky patch, a mark on a wall. The obvious ones are free. The rest are under, behind and inside things.

POKE AT EVERYTHING

Drag anything that will move. Things hide under things. Shift what you are not supposed to shift and you will not get it straight again, which is its own kind of problem.

YOU DECIDE WHEN TO LEAVE

Six in the morning is a ceiling, not a target. Leaving early with everything found pays more than running the clock down. Nothing pushes you out and nothing tells you that you are finished.

THE ROOM SCORES ON BORING, NOT CLEAN

A room nobody would look twice at is a room done right. The light turns over as you work: cold and blue when you walk in, warm by the walkthrough pan at the end, same room, no comment made about it.

THE CLIENT NEVER SAYS

"They said it is somewhere below the stairs, apparently."

One line at the end, impeccably polite, still not naming the thing.

NOTHING IS SHOWN

No blood, no wound, no weapon, nothing that was once a person. This is a cleaning game with the lights low. If you want the other kind, this is not it.

WHAT IS IN IT

- Eight kinds of place: basement, conference hall, gym, museum, party room, reading room, studio floor, tea room

- Seven pieces of kit: a bigger van, a second pair of hands, a survey, a kneeling pad, solvent, steel toecaps, a work lamp

- Rooms and traces laid out fresh every night

- Twenty-three goals

- Nine hidden things, more than any other game we have made, because poking at everything is the point

NO NONSENSE

No energy bar. No timers between jobs. No waiting to play. Take a job, do it, stop. It saves where you left off.

English only for now.

Contains ads. No in-app purchases.

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