Hoarder is what happens when a Darkwood co-creator makes a cleaning simulator: Your job is to clean the abyss and 'no one is coming to save you'

The 2017 survival horror game Darkwood is really good and creepy as hell, an accomplishment that’s doubly impressive because it’s played from a fairly distant top-down perspective: There’s no up-close gore or monsters jump-scaring into your face, but hoobie-doobie is it intense. A sequel is in development, but it’s not being made by original developer Acid Wizard Studio, which went on hiatus in 2023; instead, it’s being developed by Pathologic squad Ice-Pick Lodge, which is honestly great—it’s a perfect matchup.But one of the co-creators of Darkwood is up to something new, which also looks like it might be great: Brought to my attention by RPS, it’s called Hoarder, and it’s a cleaning sim, a bit like the Powerwash Simulator games.Well, maybe not entirely. As you can see from the trailer, it’s a dark, grim cleaning sim in which you’re not so much cleaning as excavating an old, ramshackle house packed to the ceiling with junk. It looks bad in there, although maybe not quite so awful when the sun comes up and you can properly get to work digging, scrubbing, hauling, dumping, listening to weird recordings, opening doors you maybe shouldn’t, discovering something in the basement, and, well, you know. Stuff like that.From the Steam page: The goal is simple: declutter a house abandoned by a hoarder. Start with the comfortable hand-holding of a job simulator: checklists, quest markers and clear goals. But beneath the trash lies a basement that defies geometry. As you descend, the game strips away this…

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