It’s happened to all of us. Your digestive system disagrees with something you ate for lunch while you are out and against your better judgment you seek relief in a public restroom. Hoping for the best, you walk into a filthy room that looks and smells more like a dungeon than a men’s room and you can’t help but think „Who’s job is it to clean this place?“ Well, now the answer is you. Assuming, that is, if you choose to play Men’s Room Mayhem, a new downloadable game available on the PlayStation Vita that tasks you with maintaining the cleanest facilities possible. Videogames have allowed me to be everything from a raceing driver to a bloodthirsty mercenary so its about time one has let me be a janitor.
The gameplay mechanics are simple and quite frankly ingenious. You have a top down view of a men’s room and patrons will steadily stream in hoping to relieve a stream of their own. An icon above their head specifies whether they need to go for a number 1 or number 2. A patron that needs to urinate can use either a urinal or a stall. A patron that needs to move his bowels can only use a stall – though we’ve all been in bathrooms that contained evidence that not all people think this way in the real world. You guide them to the appropriate destination by drawing a line from their current position using the touchscreen.
Many more in depth elements build upon this gameplay foundation making Men’s Room Mayhem more interesting and challenging. Your primary goal is to keep the space clean. If things get dirty it causes „mayhem“. Mayhem comes in three forms: a puddle of urine left behind by a patron that didn’t make it to a urinal in time, a brown puddle left by patrons unable to reach a stall in time, and a puddle of blood resulting from a fight that happens whenever two patrons come into contact with each other. It sounds crude and filthy, but somehow the game makes it work. Trust me, I was sort of freaked out when I read „Blood“ in the game’s ESRB classification because blood and waste are a truly horrifying combination, but thankfully it’s not as bad as I initially suspected.
Gameplay takes place in waves ranging upwards from a minute. In between each wave you are given a window of a few seconds to clean the restroom using your finger to rub down the urinals, stalls, and faucets, after wiping any puddles of filth that may have appeared during the previous wave. If you are able to get rid of your mess in time you get to start the next wave with a clean slate. The mayhem gets too intense when more than five puddles accrue in a single wave and will result in your being fired from your job and a game over.
Men’s Room Mayhem keeps tally of your score as you progress through successive waves. You get bonus points for guiding your patrons through certain behaviors. You get an etiquette bonus if you keep at least one open space between men using a urinal. You also get a bonus if they wash their hands before leaving the rest room. Other bonuses include one for near misses, which happens when patrons get dangerously close to one another without actually touching, and close call bonuses for those who make it to the urinal just before it’s too late. Of course you can compare your score with player’s across the globe through online leaderboards.
