Fresh Start is a game about cleaning things, a strange little subgenre which I find myself continually drawn to. What sets Fresh Start apart from some other games like PowerWash Simulator is that instead of cleaning buildings or cars you’re cleaning up nature.
Each level takes you to a location around the world to clean up piles of trash, nurture the plants back to life, and restore the area to its former glory. It’s a fun twist on the usual format and the art is simple and pleasant. There's a dedicated “pet animals” button so that's the kind of tone you can expect.
Unfortunately the game is very indie in the bad ways, it’s quite rough around the edges where you can never be sure if something is supposed to be this way, or it’s just broken. For example if you’re going for the 100% achievement then you’ll likely find yourself wandering around the area over and over again looking for what you missed and not seeing anything. Even with the scanner you can buy it’s possible that the plant is glitched behind a building or it just vanished, it gets frustrating.
The controls on the upgrade menu are also broken with going left taking you up to the top and all over the place, it’s like a little maze that you have to figure out how to navigate. The Upgrades themselves are also priced in a somewhat random way. Your deployable drones are very hit or miss in what they’ll actually target, often watering the ground in front of plants instead of the actual plants. And in an extremely tedious choice you have to constantly refill your water tank every few minutes, a process which is never fun.
The game also appears to be very badly optimised. Playing on an Xbox Series S the game chugged harder than any other game I’ve played, dropping to 12 frames constantly. Restarting the game only fixed it for a few minutes so eventually I just learned to deal with it.
None of this was enough for me to give up on the game, I played it with some YouTube on in the background and it was a pleasant enough time. Fresh Start is a decent entry to the Cleaning subgenre in theory, but it’s going to need a lot of patches before it can actually stand with the champions.
3.0