tl;dr Spilled! is the prototypical small, relaxing, cute game. You clean up ocean waste to reveal lovely pixelated landscapes and creatures below, accompanied by a wonderful soundtrack. Runs excellent on Steam Deck - well worth your $6 entry. Separately, check out the noclip_2 interview with the developer Lente on her life and journey to game dev (she developed Spilled! while living on a canal boat ⛵).

An unfortunate (and unhealthy) reality about the video games industry is that the number of games and journalists covering them have grown to be inversely related. Too many games exist to get the attention they deserve (have you ever tried sorting by new on Steam? it’s a firehose and it was like this even before AI hit the scene).

Hoping to arrest that trend, the folks at noclip recently launched a second YouTube channel noclip_2 whose purpose is to shine a light on smaller video game productions they think are cool and deserve a boost. This week they released a short interview with Lente, the maker of Spilled! who developed it while living on her own canal boat in the Netherlands. Hers is an inspirational story, and I was curious to play the game after hearing all about it. She includes a short summary on the Steam page

The primary loop in Spilled! is about navigating your boat around a local marine environment cleaning it up as you go. The gathered oil and plastics can be brought to a recycling center to exchange for rewards that can be used to purchase equipment improvements for your boat (wider vacuum boom, faster engine, larger waste oil tank). The foley and soundtrack combine to make this all a very relaxing flow-like process, and the stages can fly by as a result. You are treated to a variety of colourful biomes as the stages progress and there are 16 cute little animal friends that you can find scattered throughout.

I took three hours over three evenings to complete Spilled! with 100% of Steam Achievements, and it felt about perfect in terms of run time balancing novelty and repetition. While it falls short of the “dollar an hour” rule that many use to measure their purchases I didn’t feel short changed.

Aside from being a cute and enjoyable game, I am particularly excited by a common reaction that I’ve seen in the noclip community and beyond of people being inspired to create their own small game. Something in Spilled! is giving people tacit encouragement to try their hand at game development and I think that is a huge accomplishment in its own right on Lente’s part.