Spilled!

Imagine quitting school, buying a boat, and devoting your time to creating the video game you’ve always wanted to play. That’s exactly what Lente, which is the Dutch word for spring, did back in 2022. I discovered the demo for her game Spilled! during one of the previous editions of Steam Next Fest and was instantly smitten. One successful Kickstarter campaign and a graphics upgrade later, the game is finally ready to, erm, spill out into the world.

The basic premise of Spilled! is to clean up the oceans and to save some animals while you’re at it. You do this by steering a singular boat through different and very colourful biomes. I really feel like I need to emphasise just how beautiful these graphics are: the original demo was cute but felt a bit rough. For the full game, it seems like even the demo with the graphical upgrade got updated again to create this gorgeous and clean-looking reality that reminds me a lot of something like A Short Hike.

Gameplay starts out simple. Traversing the water, you just hoover up oil spills until your container is completely full and then deliver all of your waste to this huge refinery. In return you get coins, and let me tell you, if you’re a fan of games with great audio feedback—think of the satisfying ‘ding!’ you get when you finish cleaning a surface in PowerWash Simulator or the ‘thump’ of the stamp in TOEM—then you’ll be in for a treat here with the coins literally clattering into your boat. These coins are obviously not just there for decoration purposes; no, you can invest these to upgrade your boat! There are three upgrade options: buy a bigger suction nozzle, buy a bigger container, or buy a speed upgrade. You’ll want to invest in all three of these, as when you progress to the next biomes, you’ll be greeted by bigger oil spills and new kinds of trash showing up all over the place. Obviously, you can choose to go all-in on one of the upgrades, but from my experience, a balanced build really is the way to go.

Each new biome comes with its own challenges outside of the bigger and more waste to deal with. Early on, you will have to wash oil off the side of rock formations, but later on you’ll be tasked with putting out fires and digging out oil barrels from the bottom of the ocean. None of this ever gets overwhelming, though. Spilled! is an incredibly chill game that just wants you to have a good time. All of these mechanics are introduced gradually—as far as gradually can go in a game that’s only one hour long—and they always boil down to just another press of a button. Keeping gameplay simple doesn’t mean it’s not fulfilling, though. Getting every inch of a puddle of oil gives the same kind of satisfaction that the aforementioned PowerWash Simulator does, only on a far smaller yet somehow grander scale. I mean, seeing animal life return to the increasingly clear waters is just amazing.

If anything, this makes my biggest complaint with Spilled! that there’s not enough of it. I get the choice to go for a smaller game, and I even welcome that. By the time this review goes online, I will have turned 40, and I can attest that finding time to play games becomes harder as the years go by. So smaller experiences are increasingly welcome. But the gameplay loop on offer here just has me begging for more. And for once, my preference for author-created levels instead of procedurally generated ones works against me: with the latter, there would be infinite replayability to this game, but now you just return to the same levels you’ve played before. And while I will definitely do that, as the loop is just too much fun to miss out on, I can’t help but wish there was more ocean to clean up.

That’s testament to just how good this game is. Lente has done an exquisite job, filling this world with enough character to really draw you in, despite the game’s length. One of my favourite touches in the entire game boils down to a fetch quest. On the way into a new biome, you pass a boat, and there’s just a text bubble with an inflatable ball and a question mark above it. During my cleaning session, I came across said ball and returned it to the boat, to be greeted by some coins and a smiley face. I cannot tell you how happy that made me.

Without showing a single human in the entire game, Spilled! manages to be about humans in a way that made me both sad and hopeful. As you clean up the biomes, it quickly becomes clear that all of the waste is created by humans. So in a similar vein to Terra Nil, you are tasked with returning nature to its original state. But the game also makes clear that, while we might be the main culprits for the state of this world, we are also the ones who can clean it up. Buildings with sun panels feature everywhere, and you and your little boat play such a big role in putting things right. We can do better, and the game shows us that without ever telling us. There’s no preachiness at play here, only encouragement. A gentle nudge in the right direction.

Part of me is hoping Lente will continue to invest time into Spilled! going forward, as it’s a game I would love to see more of. But if she opts to go the Doot route of creating smaller experiences instead, that would be lovely too. There’s an emerging scene of tiny indie games that are quickly conquering my heart, using creativity and originality to show us just what indies are capable of, and I am totally here for it.