| Quick Verdict: Undusted: Letters from the Past is great at its core as a cleaning game. However, the narrative shows a grief-stricken parent turning to themes of distance and verbal abuse in the form of “tough love,” leading to a situation where trauma is unresolved. The ending does very little to show a path of healing. |
| Game: | Undusted: Letters from the Past |
| Developer(s): | 5minlab Corp. |
| Publisher: | Toge Productions |
| Review Score: | 8 |
| Cozy Score: | 5 (due to the narrative) |
| Price: | $9.99 |
| Pros: | Cleaning the items is a genuinely fun time and the art style is lovely. |
| Cons: | This is an incredibly triggering game if you’ve dealt with distant, abusive, and uninterested parents. The “happy ending” is disproportionate to the hurt expressed and leaves you feeling unresolved rather than relaxed. |
| Platforms: | Steam |
| Genres: | Sim |
Undusted: Letters from the Past is a small game that follows Adora as she returns to her childhood home to, literally and emotionally, clean the dust from her past. You’ll help her reclaim objects from the ravages of time and unearth memories both heartwarming and painful.
Through a series of 16 levels, you’ll be able to clean objects with a sponge, brush, cloth, and sometimes a vacuum detailer. Interspersed are snippets of memory that tell us the story of who Adora is and how she got where she is.
That’s the entire game and you’ll have it done in two hours. My only suggestion is to change the keybindings. The way things are set up, you have to hold down the mouse button to clean things and since you’re cleaning for a minute or two, your hand will get fatigued quickly. I suggest changing the bindings so that it’s the space bar that cleans.
That ended up saving my hand in the long run.
In terms of gameplay, there’s nothing else. You can fiddle with things a little more to open up extra achievements, but it’s cleaning objects and reading about the memories attached to them.
Here’s where I may have an unpopular opinion on Undusted: Letters from the Past, spoiler warning
I’ll be really honest here, Undusted is a little triggering because it deals with unresolved trauma featuring a parent who is no longer around to reconcile with. It features an emotionally distant mother who never shares her viewpoint with Adora, leading her to do abusive things due to her own trauma and a jaded idea of “tough love”.
In the end, we’re given some semblance of resolution, but it’s bittersweet in the form of a letter. I’m not normally one to spoil things, but this game left me feeling uneasy and not really relaxed, so I feel it’s important to mention that this game kind of does the bare minimum in offering an ending. It’s almost abrupt. There’s one still image after the credits roll that’s meant to signify a level of peace being reached, but I don’t feel like it was enough.
Maybe I’m sensitive to such themes, but with a game that touts ASMR qualities and relaxation, I wasn’t expecting to be gut-punched by the memories of Adora’s mother ignoring her and throwing away things that were meaningful to her.
To be fair, it does mention that the relationship falls apart and asks us as the player if Adora can understand her mother after passing, but the reality of seeing those memories… no, the mother deeply needed therapy. I can understand the motive that hurt people hurt people, but responsibility was never taken in life to make reparations.
Equally, Adora needed therapy. Her going no contact with her mother wasn’t an active choice, but rather a goalpost of reaching out when she felt successful. It was, frankly, frustrating.
I wasn’t expecting to walk away from this game feeling like the world is an unjust place. To be fair, Undusted held up a mirror to reality, but if you’re looking for an escape from the harsh light of the world, you’re not going to find it here.
If you don’t have unresolved trauma with a parental figure, you may be able to jump into Undusted and leave without a scrape. Unfortunately, I do have experience with a parent who is verbally abusive and dismissive.
This game is not for those who have lived this experience…
Thankfully, it wasn’t my bio parents, but I think that’s what makes me so deeply uncomfortable and makes me feel like I need to correct the injustice. I have a fierce need to stand in the way of that abuse and to see it resolved because I’ve seen what happens to an adult who grows up in this environment.
Sadly, I didn’t find anything healing in this narrative, and that’s likely my own need for therapy making me unwilling to accept that a simple letter has healed all things.
Obviously, I’m too close to the subject matter. The game is fun for the cleaning aspect and if you don’t have this level of dysfunction in your life, you’ll leave the game unscathed and maybe even relaxed. My issues with the narrative have not deeply impacted the score because I realize a lot of this is my own experience bleeding through.
If you’d like to play Undusted: Letters from the Past, you can get it for $9.99. I can’t promise you’ll have the cozy experience it sells, so if you’re sensitive to such themes, you can check out some of the other reviews here. I recommend some of my old favorites that leave me feeling happy and relaxed: Smush Come Home and Botany Manor.
