YMMV / Viscera Cleanup Detail

• Breather Level:
  • Athena's Wrath has a simple layout and good lighting, with the only real annoyance being the number of alcoves requiring the J-HARM to access. It is one of the go-to maps for players wanting the Ubermensch achievement for completing a speedrun in less than 75% of par time.
  • Frostbite is more homage than challenge. All but one of the bodies are easily reached and they aren't excessively messy. More notably, the level has no bullet holes, no casings, and shockingly little litter.
• Catharsis Factor: When you arrive in a level, it can be shocking to see how messy it all is, from the sheer gorn to the litter and crates and barrels scattered haphazardly everywhere. But as you clean the place up, ridding it of the bloodstains and trash, fixing the bullet holes and stacking the crates and barrels in their rightful places, seeing the level start coming together can be very satisfying. And when you finish entirely and take a walk through the now-neat and tidy map, the sense of accomplishment in knowing that you helped transform the place like that can be very cleansing indeed.
• Demonic Spiders: Well, inasmuch as this game has "enemies", but one of the more annoying messes to deal with are the small, slender giblets that somewhat resemble intestines. They show up whenever there are gibbed humans in a level, and being small and dark-coloured, they blend into the scenery a lot of the time. Made worse by them being able to fit into the tiniest of nooks and crannies, leading to many a moment where players can be running around like headless chickens with the sniffer out looking for biological waste, only for the intestines to be tucked away in the dark and out of sight.
• Fridge Logic: Just how are the bucket and bins dispensers spewing out giblets more than they can fit in anyway? The dispensers can easily create bucket or bins retrospectively, but how can it even create giblets too?
  • Fridge Horror: Mentioned below under Paranoia Fuel, one of the death threats is sabotaging the vending machines so they suck you in. Those body parts? They're pieces of janitors and other staff who due to some malfunction or sabotage got pulled into the machinery. This does only work if the vending machines are teleporting the items rather than manufacturing them on-site, though.
• Good Bad Bugs: You can lift up another player by picking up an object they're standing on. They can do the same with you. Simultaneously.
• Jerkass Woobie: Santa in Santa's Rampage. He may have gone absolutely berserk and horrifically murdered countless elves and reindeer in all manner of depraved ways. But the notes dotted around his office and above it detail demands from horrendously-bratty children, an impending lawsuit from an Amoral Attorney for the heinous crime of Santa doing his job, family/work troubles and jaw-droppingly huge invoices from requisitioning increasingly expensive toys and gadgets. After looking at all of that, can you really blame him for snapping the way he did?
• Nightmare Fuel: The whole game is about being in the aftermath of a sci-fi horror scene; you explore large, dark, empty areas alone while surrounded by bloody human and alien corpses. It's definitely disturbing to say the least.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The various hate mail and death threats you can receive in your office if you do well enough. You just don't know when they will strike. One of them even states that the person writing the death threat will threaten to kill you in one of several ways; such as pushing you into an incinerator, or having the Slosh-o-matic machine suck you in, and that the person is patient enough to wait for the perfect opportunity to do so. Try remembering that the next time you play the game online with your friend...
  • Many of the mission briefings, both for the initial janitor and any replacements, imply there's still a good chance that whatever killed everyone in the level could show up again. The administration also makes it clear in a few that an unsatisfactory or slow job will result in the janitor being left to find out if that's the case. Some levels also include creepy noises in the vents.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The bucket and bin machines randomly jamming and dispensing giblets instead of giving you what you want, as well as the J-HARM jamming and malfunctioning. It does nothing but add Fake Longevity, and to make it worse, they can jam multiple times in a row, which causes even greater frustration. Part of the v1.13 update limited jamming to five times in a row, though the developers noted that in most cases players would be unlikely to notice the difference.
  • Santa's Rampage makes it worse. The good news: Sometimes the jamming doesn't produce giblets which you have to clean up. The bad news: The giblets will be replaced with TNT. Which always lights itself. Even if you don't get blown to hell trying to get rid of it, the explosion will still make a huge mess, screwing up the work you've done up to that point. Fortunately, the TNT can be safely neutralized by dunking it in a water bucket, provided you can move fast enough. This necessitates having a bucket to hand that the TNT can be quickly put into after it is just as quickly rotated fuse-down.
• That One Achievement:
  • Santa's Rampage:
    • The "Tower of Babel" achievement, where you must stack 10 stools on top of each other. Object physics get wonky as more items are in contact with each other, and once you get to eight or nine stools it's a disaster waiting to happen.
    • "Christmas Crisis Corrected" requires you to clean the entire map perfectly without destroying any of the Christmas items. This is relatively easy except for one problem: The ornaments. Hung on the wall, ceiling, and tree are glass ornaments that if disturbed will fall to floor and shatter. It takes a lot of care to avoid damaging any bulbs and worse yet there's no indication you failed the achieve if one bulb breaks and you don't notice. (According to Word of God on the game's Steam forums, up to three Christmas items can be broken and destroyed without losing the achievement.)
  • "Need a Hand" requires getting a large number of bloody arms from the bucket machine. Given that the malfunctions are relatively rare and the arm is just one of several different giblets that can spawn, it becomes a big RNG waste of time. This was recognized by the developers, and part of the v1.13 update reduced the number required from 100 to 35.
• That One Level: "Zero-G Therapy" and "Gravity Drive" are two of the more difficult levels due to the anti-gravity effect alone, which makes controls difficult, giblets hard to catch, blood suspend in mid-air, and using buckets and disposal bins significantly more frustrating. Thankfully, the anti-gravity can be turned off if you know where to look, but in both of these levels, anti-gravity is necessary to actually dispose of anything, leading to a lot of extra mess and hassle from spilled buckets/bins.

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