This Minesweeper roguelike is a chaotic corporate nightmare, and I love it
The original Minesweeper is a simple and precise puzzle. It’s a game of deduction—eliminating possibilities one by one, using cold, hard numbers, until you have found the truth.
BroomSweeper dares to ask: what if sometimes the numbers were just lying to you?
Set in a surreal corporate dystopia, the game transplants Minesweeper into a roguelike structure, casting you as a cleaner tidying up successive floors of an office building. The tiles are bags of trash and the mines are rabbits (dust bunnies, I guess?). While mistakenly clicking one doesn’t spell game over right away, it chips away at your “Hiring Potential” (HP). Run out before you’ve completed three floors’ worth of offices, and you’re fired.
At first, the game pretty much feels like normal Minesweeper, outside of its off-kilter atmosphere. But the further you progress, the stranger things get. More and more bunnies are added with each successive board, and soon bizarre modifiers are applied.
From each number having a chance of simply being wrong, to tiles potentially containing multiple bunnies, to tiles potentially containing infinite bunnies, to tentacles growing across the board and blocking your view, it all gets very weird, very fast.
At first it feels completely unfair. How are you supposed to solve a Minesweeper screen with incomplete or actively deceptive information? But the more you persist, the more you realise it is still possible—you just have to tie your brain in fun new knots. Traditional strategies fall apart, but new ones start to develop, as you find yourself hunting for inconsistencies and likelihoods as much as truths.
And, of course, the game lets you level the playing field a bit too. Each office cleaned earns you some cash, which you can spend at vending machines to acquire useful items, from a cheque that lets you bribe bunnies into leaving to an upgraded broom that makes your first click also reveal all four corners of the grid.
Beat a boss (one on each floor, and yes literally one of the bosses at the company), and you get an even more powerful item, such as a mop that can clear a whole row twice per screen, or the ability to pour cement over parts of the grid you don’t like.
It starts to feel like you and the game are fighting over every grid, both undermining the actual puzzle with every dirty trick you can.
The result, predictably, is chaos, especially as there doesn’t seem to be a limit on how many items you can stack as long as you have the cash for them (they’ll literally spill out of the inventory window and off-screen if you get too many, but still grant their effects). But it’s a wonderfully focused kind of chaos, anchored by the dry predictability of Minesweeper at its core.
It starts to feel like you and the game are fighting over every grid, both undermining the actual puzzle with every dirty trick you can until the moments where you’re forced to actually try and find some sense in it all.
“Oh,” Broomsweeper seems to say, “you’ve cleared half the grid just with your opening click, have you? Well what if an alien slug started corrupting tiles one by one until nothing makes any sense? Hold on, what do you mean you’ve befriended a bunny using a dust carrot and cleared a row with a trombone?! Okay, okay—but you’ve at least got to try and figure out this bullshit blob of tiles over here…”
Unlockable characters boast their own unique strengths and weaknesses, which only make things spiral into anarchy faster. I’m particularly fond of the elderly Mae Tenance, whose personnel file reads “Old, slow moving target, everyone will suspect natural causes”.
She always knows how many bunnies are in each row total, which basically turns the game into Minesweeper Sudoku. But that comes with the horrendous downside that the amount of bunnies she has to deal with escalates wildly compared to other characters—if you can’t find a way to mitigate it, you’re soon faced with grids that feel like they’ve got more bunnies than safe tiles.
It becomes a race to find the right items to keep up—often leading me to the unintuitive but surprisingly effective strategy of stacking ones that make the grids larger and larger, diluting the bunnies as fast as they multiply. There you go, there’s a sentence that’s never been written in the English language before.
If BroomSweeper sounds like your sort of thing, I can’t recommend enough playing the free demo available now on Steam. If it sounds completely infuriating, you should actually still play it, because increasingly I think that’s part of the point. Either way, make sure to check it out before the end of Steam NextFest—the demo will likely disappear when it ends on June 16.
