Assassin's Creed: Vac Flag.
Cleaning up the mess in stealth games can be a real hassle. Nobody wants to waste a precious water arrow washing away blood when you could be using it to put out a torch so you can stab the next guard. Plus you gotta dump the body somewhere it won’t be found, and the bathtub already has five corpses in it. Here’s the solution: be a vacuum cleaner.
That’s the concept of Justice Sucks: Tactical Vacuum Action, an upcoming stealth game where you’re a roomba who is also an assassin. Building on a small experimental game developers Samurai Punk released as Roombo: First Blood back in 2019, it combines the sneak-murdering fun of Dishonored with the satisfaction of tidying up.
After you’ve drenched its pastel-colored world in blood, you can glide across the pools of glistening red gore to wipe them away as effectively as they do on TV. You can even mulch bodies, probably with some kind of attachment that costs an extra $9.99, though it seems to spread even more gore around when you do.
The plot of Justice Sucks is that you’re trapped in “the TV dimension”, presumably during a marathon of the kind of 1990s action movies where Bruce Willis brutalizes a whole bunch of toughs one at a time. To help you murder your way back to reality, you can summon “your fighting spirit, Sexy McClean”, who takes the form of a muscleman from an anime series about hitting people. You can also befriend animals. I’ve seen plenty of cute videos where a cat rides a roomba, and in Justice Sucks you can weaponize those cats to dismember dudes.
Justice Sucks: Tactical Vacuum Action will be coming to Steam (opens in new tab) on September 8. The mature content description says it contains “Cartoon Violence”, which seems to be another way of saying “you can reduce people to steaks, then eat them”.
Jody Macgregor
Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He’s written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was published in 2015, he edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and actually did play every Warhammer videogame.