Carpet Diem

YOU CLEAN FAMOUS PAINTINGS FOR MONEY. Technically, they are rugs. Very expensive rugs. Very dirty, historically significant rugs. Somebody has managed to walk mud across the Mona Lisa, spill something questionable on The Great Wave, and apparently use Starry Night as a doormat. Your job is to fix that. SCRUB FIRST. ASK QUESTIONS NEVER. Drag your finger across the rug and carve clean paths through the grime. Throw down foam and the original colours start coming back. Push the mess around with a squeegee. Chase shiny Colour Essence bubbles into the drain before they disappear. Repeat until a several hundred year old masterpiece looks respectable again. There is no countdown. No lives. No energy meter. No angry red timer telling you that relaxation has expired. You clean until you decide you are done. YOUR FIRST BOSS KEEPS YOU POOR. His name is Jeff. He micromanages everyone. You realize employment was a mistake, quit immediately, and start your own carpet cleaning business. Then things escalate. Family members start bringing you work. Hotels start calling. Strangers with suspicious stains appear. Museums somehow hear about you. Eventually you are operating a carpet cleaning empire built almost entirely on poor decisions and excellent brushing. THE CLEANER IT GETS, THE WEIRDER IT GETS. At first, you are just removing dirt. Then the bubbles start making money. Then stains become collectible. Then someone offers to buy your mud. Then another person wants the stains you removed. Then you build a laboratory. Then you start researching Drain Magnets and Stain Lasers. At some point you may realize this stopped being a carpet cleaning business a long time ago. 254 REAL PAINTINGS. Every artwork in the game is based on a real public domain painting. You will clean Vermeer, Van Gogh, Hokusai, Rembrandt, Mondrian, and many others who probably did not imagine this happening to their work. If you clean well enough, bigger and stranger jobs start appearing. YOUR EQUIPMENT STARTS TERRIBLE. This is intentional. You begin with tools barely capable of disturbing the dirt. Then you upgrade. Better scrubbers. Better foam. Better squeegees. Better brushes. Eventually electric equipment. Eventually robots. Lots of robots. Robo Buddies roam the rug while you are away, cleaning, foaming and pushing valuable bubbles toward the drain. Come back later and they have been working for you. Mostly. They also seem to have developed personalities, which was not part of the business plan. OPEN SHOPS. HAND THEM OVER. DO IT AGAIN. Grow the business far enough and you can open another shop. Then another. Eventually you can hand over your current operation, collect REP and start again with permanent advantages. This unlocks the Lab, where serious carpet cleaning professionals apparently research things like Dirt Goggles, Waxed Floors, Drain Magnets, Noise Dampers and Stain Lasers. This is all completely normal. SOME JOBS ARE WORTH SHOWING OFF. Every finished rug gets a quality score. Bronze. Silver. Gold. And, if you actually cleaned the thing properly, Diamond. Your receipt shows exactly how well you did. Down to the tenth. Because 49.9 stars and 50.0 stars are spiritually different numbers. YES, THERE ARE OPTIONAL PURCHASES. There are a few permanent upgrades for people who would rather accelerate the business than grind every dollar personally. They are optional. Nothing important is trapped behind them. Every painting, rug size, upgrade path and ending can be reached without paying. There are no energy systems. No wait timers asking for money. No ads interrupting a rug halfway through cleaning. The game also works offline. THIS GAME WAS MADE TO FEEL NICE UNDER YOUR THUMB. The dirt coming off. The foam spreading. The colour returning. The squeegee pushing bubbles across a freshly cleaned lane. The sound of everything happening at once.