The PowerWash clean ‘em up genre is dead, long live the sci-fi undertaker sim

You’d think there’d be more video games that are explicitly about clearing away corpses, given how many corpses players produce. Getting rid of bodies is a routine problem for developers, with a variety of crafty or cursory solutions. Horror projects such as Resident Evil sometimes resort to accelerated decomposition, with felled zombies dissolving to maggots in seconds, but in most shooters, it’s a question of despawning the victims when you look away. Stealth sims mandate a certain level of respectfulness, albeit by accident: stray cadavers must be carefully interred in random dumpsters or closets before they trigger an alarm.

As with a lot of things in games, there are technological concerns here that form a curious warping of practicalities in the world beyond the vidbox. Dead bodies in games absorb computing resources that are needed for the next enemies along. Bodies of actual flesh and bone are a weight, if not a burden upon the dead person’s loved ones. The memory has to be freed up, so that it can be used for something else.

There’s a real art, then, to ‘videogame undertaking,’ but few games make it the focus. “There are special games like Spiritfarer that explore the emotional side of it, and games like Death Stranding, which explore the job, like the carrying of a body bag,” observes Joel Burgess, ex-Fallout 4 lead designer and co-founder of Soft Rains, a studio led by former Bethesda, Valve and Ubisoft devs. “For us, one of the real inspirations was, how do we do it in contemporary science fiction?”

Soft Rains’ first game is Ambrosia Sky, a first-person exploration puzzler in which you play Dalia, a field scientist who is also a funeral worker. You are investigating an asteroid city in the orbit of Saturn that has succumbed to an outbreak of deadly fungus, its sloping turquoise corridors decked with bulbs of orange and purple that spread in response to environmental stimuli.

Your job is both to gather samples of said fungus, studying the origins of the infestation, and compost the fallen human residents using another, specially prepared fungus, which operates like a sped-up version of today’s mushroom burial suits, with bodies softly bursting into mycelial confetti. Burgess calls this “fungal cremation.” The additional complication here is that Dalia has local connections. Her stepmother was the leader of the asteroid community, and she knows many of the people she’s interring. As you conduct last rites, you’ll learn a little about each person and join some emotional dots in the backstory.

It’s a game of repeated, “death-positive” catharsis, similar to narrative director Kait Tremblay’s previous A Mortician’s Tale, though it was hard to gauge the mood and writing during my Summer Game Fest hands-on, because somebody in the booth next door was demoing a game with lots of explosions. I had more luck understanding the game’s exploratory fungus puzzles, which, as you can probably tell at a glance, take inspiration from PowerWash Simulator, but also have a surprising amount in common with Prey 2017.

Dalia has a spraygun that fires a range of anti-fungal solutions; it can be equipped with different nozzles to alter the shape and distance of the spray. You’ll use this primarily to sluice away the growths that clog doors and terminals, care of a procedural destruction system, but you can also turn different mushroom species into new ammo types that allow you to build things with the fungus, or direct its spread.

Harvest a fungus that feeds on electricity and you can lay down conductive trails between a source of electricity and a door control. There’s also a grapple that lets you work with props as you could with Half-Life 2’s Gravity Gun, seizing flammable pods before they explode and hurling them at hills of hyphae. Other scenarios might call on the mechanisms of the base itself. Turn off a chamber’s gravity, for instance, and you don’t need to worry about its carpet of toxic flora. In the demo I played, player movement and object manipulation were “a little finicky,” as Burgess confessed, and the possible puzzle solutions felt a bit stumpy and straightforward: sponge away the wrong kind of mushroom, paint with the other. But I can imagine later stretches of Ambrosia Sky doing more elaborate things with fungus types. I can imagine this being quite special, really.

The overgrown spacebase is bewitching, even when it’s a slight chore to traverse. The architecture compares to a dungeon, with slanting corridors of lurid, comicbook metal that remind me a little of Blackreach in Skyrim. The fungus that engulfs everything recalls the mycorrhizal networks that may spread underground for miles on Earth, joining up different species of flora. Saturn’s rings carve the view from every porthole. Why this planet in particular? I asked Burgess. “There’s just a romance to Saturn,” he said. “It rains diamonds down there.”

The other beauty of the base exploration is that it’s a macrocosm for those climactic acts of corpse disposal. The asteroid city is a larger anatomy that must be prepared for interment. The idea isn’t to erase the fungus, but to reorganise and reconcile it with the “human environment” beneath, opening paths that symbolise and perform acceptance of death and decay. Again, you use a specialised kind of fungus to dispose of bodies: it’s not an enemy to defeat, but a mildly disagreeable companion organism that needs to be at once checked and cultivated.

I came away from Ambrosia Sky with the strong sense that its themes might spread, spore-like, to other games. Or perhaps, that its themes originated in those games but have only sought out daylight in this one, like puffballs pushing from bark. The clean ’em up genre at large now strikes me as preoccupied with death, either asking you to purge all trace of mortality, or to cleanse objects as though mummifying them (there are also, of course, cleaning sims that are specifically about mopping up blood and guts, like Body Of Evidence).

Nearer parallels for Ambrosia Sky include Hardspace: Shipbreaker, in which you delicately demolish spaceships that are living spaces in more sense than one – some are sown with rebellious AI “seeds.” Both require you to inhabit, navigate the entity you’re readying for the afterlife. Perhaps this is the healthier and more artful way of thinking about corpses in games: it’s not the corpses, but the space itself that needs to be laid to rest.

There’s no release date for Ambrosia Sky yet, but you can try the demo yourself on Steam.