The first time I booted up The WereCleaner, I expected to have a little fun puttering around and tidying up an office.

I didn’t expect an uncontrollable, blood-spattered moral dilemma.

I went into The WereCleaner—which was created by a team of students from the University of Southern California’s Games Program—without much information. This is by design. I don’t read the full dust-jacket summaries of novels for the same reason: I like being surprised. I want to experience the twists and turns of a narrative in the way that their creators intend them to unfold. Knowing what’ll happen on page 216 of 533 spoils some of the fun. Here is a brief spoiler, though: The WereCleaner is now available for free on Epic Games Store, both PC and mobile. 

I arrived in the offices of The WereCleaner as a cash-strapped, mild-mannered janitor named Kyle. It seemed a little odd that I had a hose strapped to my back, but I was ready to embrace the soak-everything Super Mario Sunshine vibe. On my way into the office, I stopped to talk to my buddy, a security guard named Daryl. I then headed through the security checkpoint, ambled through the office and past a bunch of employees who paid me no attention, sprayed and twirled to drown a couple of nasty messes, and headed out at the end of my shift. All in all, a good day’s work in a playful, cartoony, and colorful world.

The next day, things got weird.

It started with an email informing all employees, including me, that we were required to work a mandatory week of unpaid overtime—at night.

Also, it turns out that I’m a werewolf. A big, hairy, impossible-to-mistake werewolf.

Okay, I figured—maybe I can handle that. I’ll just stay out of sight and treat the next night as a stealth mission. That’s more difficult, for sure, but probably not insurmountable.

Here’s the thing about being a werewolf: You just can’t help it. I found that out about a minute into the second night when Ena, a painter who’d had a mental breakdown, sprayed her office floor and walls with fluorescent paints of purple, pink, and green. She saw me and shrieked. I saw her and jumped.

Every bit of lupine instinct took over, and I covered the 10 feet between us in a flash. She was dead before I knew what was happening. The only sensible thing to do was eat her and clean up the blood and viscera alongside the paint.

This is the twisted beauty of The WereCleaner. Night after night, Kyle does his best to do his job with as little murder as possible. It rarely works out bloodlessly, but it’s always hilarious and nerve-wracking. The ideal janitor cleans messes. Kyle just can’t help but create them, too.

The idea for a werewolf janitor came to Howlin' Hugs Creative Director Mason Sabharwal years ago. And although The WereCleaner is the successful game that came out of it—it’s surpassed more than a million downloads across platforms, according to Marketing Lead and Mobile Engineer Abby Farhat—it bears little resemblance to where it began.

“I was thinking grayscale,” said Sabharwal, “with just blood being red. It was along the lines of horror. It was a little bit more horror than it was funny-playful.”

Not long before development began, Sabharwal pitched the idea for The WereCleaner to the faculty at USC's Games Program as a capstone project to work on in his senior year. This is how it works. You learn the art and craft of making games and managing the process, helping other students make their games, and you can pitch your idea for making something of your own.

“You come up with a game idea,” he said. “There are multiple gates of ‘Okay, send a one-pager telling us about your idea. If we like your idea, you'll get into the second gate.’ The second gate, it's properly pitching the idea to faculty in a 5-to-10-minute rigmarole. And from there, the faculty ends up voting on the games, and whichever ones get the highest scores, those people end up becoming creative directors for next year's year-long capstone project.”

Development began on his first-person 3D horror game in the summer before Sabharwal’s senior year. He recruited a team of fellow students to create it, fitting their work in between their academic studies and schedules. As creative director, it was Sabharwal’s job to make sure things got done and progress was being made. Every week, on Tuesday, they’d submit a build to the faculty for feedback.

Looking back, Sabharwal is happy that he and the team were able to keep a good perspective. But the point of the review was to get knowledgeable outside perspective, and that feedback fundamentally changed The WereCleaner.

“We ended up getting some negative responses from lots of faculty members about how we were initially handling our narrative where we were doing a visual novel structure of communicating story before levels,” Sabharwal said. “And it was a weird disconnect between the 3D and this 2D environment which you only see before levels. And the flow of that into a level, as well as out of it, it ended up not really feeling great. They were basically like, ‘This isn't working. You should do something else—like anything else—please. And yeah, that was really helpful.”

Sabharwal saw the wisdom in that feedback, coupled with a simple, repeated question: “Why isn’t this a 2D game?” The team changed The WereCleaner from a first-person to an isometric perspective, and that in turn influenced everything from the narrative to the inclusion of the game’s final boss fight, a cat-and-mouse game that wouldn’t have been possible from the game’s original perspective.

The concept evolved, the team grew, a mobile port was added, and The WereCleaner was finished and shipped in less than a year.

The result is a short, constantly evolving, always challenging, and yet lighthearted romp through a nightmare office job. It remains, as Sabharwal puts it, “a wacky concept of a horrible janitor.”

Developing a video game can be surprising, especially if it’s your first time—but then again, so can suddenly turning into a werewolf and devouring your coworkers on sight. But unless you're Ena, it all works out in the end.

“Am I happy with where it is now?” Sabharwal asked. “Oh, hell yes. It ended up so much better than it would have been if I'd tried to make it on my own, if I didn't end up getting the team that I did—because everyone on our team ended up contributing in such a large way, both creatively as well as just in a community-building sense. I'm proud of the thing that we made, and I hope that everyone else is proud of what we made, too. And I think they are, so that to me is a win as a creative director.”

The WereCleaner is available now on the Epic Games Store for PC and mobile.