Big Boat Is Out To Get You! My Thoughts On Spilled!

Sink them to the bottom of the lake! Oh.. Wait...

Spilled!

Developer/publisher: Lente

Socials: Twitter | Discord

Price: $5.99

To play a game like Spilled! You need to have a certain mentality. The music is soothing, the environment is passive, there’s no action, and no timers. As a person that is all about the shoots and bangs, the clings and clangs, or the run and dashing, I had to switch it up a bit.

For a little bit of context, I played League of Legends for ten years (I peaked Plat…), I loved GW1 and WoW PvP, played tons of Halo and CoD, and honestly, anything I can beat people in was hype. I only recently stopped going into PvP games and decided to actually play games instead of breaking my joy-cons, table, and sanity.

Spilled! is a casual game developed by Lente, the dev living on a boat, and it’s a soothing and cozy game that has you cleaning lakes from a variety of biomes, as it was polluted by a dastardly corporation. During your cleaning, you are recycling the oil floating on the lakes, the oil drum that sunk to the bottom, and the bottles floating up top to upgrade your cute little boat.

To be sincere, I’m not the biggest cozy fan, but I do have a past that has been getting fleshed out thanks to my wife. I used to enjoy my time with Harvest Moon, and because of my wife, I sunk a couple of hours into Coral Island, then raged quit after all my plants died from the first season change. It was such a blast until I saw hours of work just die in front of me. They really should’ve made it painfully obvious that seasonal changes ruin your crops.

But knowing that this game was supposed to take around an hour to beat, I approached it differently.

You know when your team throws the game in League of Legends and blames you, or you team throws the game in Marvel Rival and blames you, or you know how in any competitive team game the team just blames you, and you keep playing, titled out of your mind? Which then spins you into a tilting spree of continued suffering, sinking you further into Elo hell? Making it harder to win because you get angrier, and angrier, lash out to your teammates, sometimes your friends, which creates conflict and an awkward environment afterwards, and the only possible way out of this dark hole is by getting banned, but after the ban is lifted you don’t change anything and repeat it all over again?

Well, this is a game you’d play to avoid a tilting spree.

The cozy genre is a genre I’m still fairly new to but have developed an interest in thanks to my wife, and the vibes it forces down the player’s throat. While I’ve noticed that some cozy games can feel intense in their own ways, maybe with seasonal changes, other cozy games just give you a space to relax, such as Spilled!

It’s not intense at all, although that ending did surprise me, and I realize that you do pollute the lake. The loop is simple, you pretty up the place without thinking of resources or anything like that, cash in what you recycle, upgrade your capacity, length of your graboid (That pusher thing), or your speed, and repeat until you hit the end. You also get to save animals who are suffering because of the pollution, and if you look them up online, you’ll learn some dreadful things.

The sounds and music really help, especially with how pretty the game looks. I loved how the rain falls, and the music when it picks up.

But again, because it’s so short, it made me wish it had more. Maybe each area had a worker you could recruit to help you clean the lakes, each with a snippet of why they believe in your cause. Because it feels like you are the boat that cleans around and people reward you for doing so. I get the purpose and the message of the game, I just would’ve appreciated some context inside the game.

But a neat little game to tune down the rage after a game, and cheap, too.

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Have you played the game? What do you think of it?