If you love cozy games and cleaning up messes with a touch of nature, your ship — or rather, your tugboat — has come in. Spilled!, launching today on PC (Steam), is an environmentally conscious game about sucking the oil and trash out of rivers to leave pristine nature behind, with a vibrant pixelated art style and relaxing music to soothe while you scrub.
Spilled! is the first game from Lente Cuenen, a game developer from The Netherlands who programmed it from her home — a boat on the country’s waterways that she outfitted with solar panels and an electric motor, as well as Starlink internet to work and play games online. She named it Zusje V, or “Sister Five” in Dutch, after the other four sister-boats her family had growing up.
“When I was a kid, there would be a lot of trash in the water,” Cuenen said. It makes sense that her love of nature and boats would make it into her game.
Like “reverse city-builder” Terra Nil before it, it’s easy to see the environmental underpinnings of the mechanics of Spilled!: drive your boat through polluted canals and use your scoop, hook and various tools to return it to its natural state. The waters clear, showing rich vegetation and fish below; clean enough and larger fauna like dolphins will swim alongside your vessel.
Cuenen included eco-themes from the game’s inception and hoped it would have an inspiring message, but she first and foremost focused on making it a fun game to play. “I think it’s more beneficial to have a fun game that’s played by a lot of people that has a more subtle message than one with a big message that’s in your face and puts people off,” she said.
Spilled! at Day of the Devs games showcase during the Game Developers Conference in March 2025.
The gameplay of Spilled! is a relaxing loop of filling your boat with trash and oil then turning it in to floating collection barges, which grant you further tools to explore other areas that need cleaning.Collect, upgrade, progress, repeat. All told, it’s not a long game — you can finish it in an hour — but like many cozy games, repeatedly indulging in the vibes is the point, not completion.
“There’s this one guy [in the Spilled! Discord] that occasionally hops in and shows his play time on Spilled! and he’s now at 80 hours. I don’t know how he does it,” Cuenen said.
Spilled! runs through different biomes with new tools to clean up pollution. While the oil barrels and plastic bottles mucking up the waterways feel dismally familiar, players may notice plenty of wind turbines and solar panels lining the hills and houses on the riverbanks. That’s evidence of the “solarpunk” setting that Cuenen subtly built into the game. The minimalist story reveals that the game’s world wasn’t always so green after an era of oil and factories, so it’s up to the player to revive the waters — a power fantasy for the planet.
“It is kind of like a futuristic world where we do still embrace technology, but for a better cause and more green,” Cuenen said.
Spilled! is available for PC (Steam) starting March 26, 2025.
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