I love it when games from the Netherlands tackle our biggest common enemy. And no, I’m not talking about cheese-hating stroopwafel-destroying warmongers. Water! Our most significant and most feared enemy in the Netherlands is water. So when a Dutch game designer/programmer develops a game about cleaning water, it’s already on my must-play list before even reading it. Let’s sail in.
I’m on a boat!
Lente, the lead behind this game, took the song by the Lonely Island very seriously and developed this game while living on an actual boat. She wrote down the process of Spilled! Let’s digest that on her (now closed) Kickstarter page before heading into the gameplay elements.
How Spilled! came to be
Lente writes that Spilled! started as a school project:
I was attempting school for game development for the second time. We had to make a small 3D game using OpenGL and I knew one thing; my game had to be about boats. I made a YouTube video on my process of starting the project without a game engine using OpenGL; that YouTube video got almost 50,000 views out of nowhere. Around this time I also decided to make a Twitter account; to be able to connect with other game developers! My first ever tweet succeeded in that; it got 1,000 likes and I met a lot of cool fellow developers!
Fast-forward to January of 2023, and the game got into its crude shape – rough since it’s about oil. I’ll go back to quoting Lente.
This is around when I got the idea of Spilled! – making an oil cleanup game. I started posting a prototype to Twitter and people really liked it. One Tweet that I made got over 6,000 likes! This is when I knew this game had real potential; and it’s a subject I’m really passionate about! Growing up very close to nature, I always noticed when things weren’t the way the were supposed to be.
In February to October of 2023, Lente found a place of steady growth!The school I was going to wasn’t a right fit for me. In hindsight, this was turned out to be a great thing for Spilled and myself by opening a new chapter. I decided to use my small savings to spend the next year working on Spilled! full time. Over the last year, there’s been numerous changes and I slowly grew more confident about the game and what I had visioned for Spilled! I continued working on the game for most of last year. It was slow at first; it was my first game of this size. Lot’s of roadblocks along the way; but I was determined to make it work. During this time I posted to Twitter very frequently. I grew to 10,000 followers there. This also made it so the game steadily grew to 3k wishlists on Steam over the year.
By the power of Twitter! She knew she had made the right call because explosive growth had occurred since October 2023.
Eventually I got the game to a point where I was excited and felt accomplished about the core game loop. This is when I decided to focus on making a polished demo for the Steam page; I was eager to share (a small part of) my game with the world! This ended up being an excellent decision. People might have liked the Twitter posts, but I wasn’t entirely sure if people would like the actually game. Well, a ton of people played the demo and I got so many positive messages! A dream come true. Good things started happening. “Wholesome Games” did a feature on Spilled! and got the game another 2,000 wishlists on Steam! Crazy numbers! I also got invited to take part of the ‘Cozy Quest’ Steam sale, even though I only had the free demo. This was huge for Spilled!, it got played by so many people, and got over 8,000 wishlists in a little under a week! (!!!) That was insane to think about.
Gameplay elements
And so the story of Spilled! came to be. Let’s focus on some gameplay elements since I had a blast playing through this. The main goal of Spilled! is to clean up eight areas, each more significant and with more waste. There is no time limit, so don’t rush through each level and take as long as you want. Spilled! is a short game that you can finish in 1 hour and I think I did it in just under an hour. But you can use the level selector to go back to any area to relax or pick up some things you might have missed on the first playthrough.
The whole idea behind Spilled! is to clean up the levels before you can advance in the game. The water gets more transparent the more you recycle, revealing an underwater life different for each location! To make cleaning a bit easier, you can upgrade your boat. I’m talking about a more significant collector (handy), a bigger tank, and more speed! As you progress through the various areas, you tackle more significant oil spills with a more prominent collector. You need to hold more oil with a bigger tank and quickly cover considerable distances with upgraded speed! As an extra challenge, Lente hid two animals per area for 16 animals to find. You can see which ones you’ve already saved in the options menu. Or if you are like me, the ones you’ve missed!
Another element that changes with each biome is challenges like pushing plastic to the recycling center, washing oil off the land, helping retrieve lost items from other boats, putting out wildfires, going magnet fishing, and more! Your journey through Spilled will take you through four different biomes, spanning eight different areas. The areas all felt very lively, especially when cleaned up. I loved that each underwater area varied and showed distinct wildlife.
Conclusion
So, to conclude, Spilled! is not something that you throw away like oil spillage. If you like cozy, relaxing games but are overwhelmed with games like Powerwash Simulator, try this for a change! It plays amazingly well, looks cute, and follows an extremely relevant topic. I can’t wait to see what Lente has in store for us after Spilled!
