Slow Damage: Clean Dishes, also called "Saradame/皿ダメ", is a mobile browser game which takes place in the same world as Nitro+Chiral's newest title, Slow Damage. It is considered a spin-off game.
Shinkoumi is a city of rampant crime, fueled by the country’s crippling recession. Fights, violence and other criminal activities are a daily occurrence. In this city, a certain presence is of high importance. ''Clean dishes'', commonly known as "Sara-ya," is a cleaning service which tidies up rooms in which people have passed away. The story focuses on protagonist Baku, a worker at “Clean dishes,” and his lover Shiro, who seems to have a strong desire to end his life.
One day Baku suspects Shiro might be involved with the mysterious organization "Hare's nest", a group that glorifies death.
The game is available for free and can be played in the browser of your smartphone or tablet. It's also fully voiced and can be played on Animate Games, Fanza Games and DLsite. I personally played the DLsite version. At the moment the game is only available in Japanese, and it is unknown whether or not it will get an English translation in the future.
Although the game is free, it does have in-game purchases like any other mobile game. To progress in the game, you need to use stamina to play through the chapters. Your stamina refills every 2 hours.
Main characters
Items
To complete the contact and cleaning sections of the game, you’re going to need various items which you can either get by logging in every day or by purchasing them in the shop. Note that the game can be fully completed without paying, therefore it is recommended to claim the login bonuses every day. The items you need for each chapter increases as you progress. For example, to finish contact scenes in the first chapter you only need 1 lemon candy, but in the later chapters you need 2, 5 and eventually 10. The cleaning sections are similar and require 1 cloth at first, but you’ll eventually need 10 of them. Once again, these can be obtained by claiming the daily login bonuses. Every day you’ll be able to claim 2 lemon candies and 1 cloth.
It is not a super long game, but if you want to play it for free it might take a while to complete. It took me exactly 2 months to fully complete it and I did get impatient and bought a few coins.
Chapters
The game consists of 8 story chapters:
1. Tutorial
2. Prologue
3. SideA (the route which will give you the good endings)
4. SideB (two bad endings)
5. SideC (one bad ending)
6. SideA Ending 1
7. SideA Ending 2
8. Extra optional epilogues (extra content, which is the only paid content of the game)
Note that the game makes you play the endings in a certain order after the tutorial and prologue, which is as follows:
SideC bad end> SideB bad end 1 > SideB bad end 2 > SideA good end1 > SideA good end 2.
It is also important to keep Shiro happy by collecting as many hearts as possible, which you obtain in the contact scenes by picking certain choices. They are displayed on the top right of the screen, next to the Shiro icon. You can replay the contact scenes as many times as you’d like, when the heart counter doesn’t increase after a new contact scene, it is easy to replay and select the other choice. These hearts are important to get the good endings.
My own impressions
As a big fan of Slow Damage, I was excited to play a mobile game which takes place in the same universe. Nitro+Chiral has created mobile games in the past: False Alkanet and World’s end Nightmare, which were both released in 2010. Both of these games could be accessed by opening the CHiRAL MOBILE app, which ended its services in 2012. The app was only available for Japanese phones, which is another reason why I never had the chance to play any of them.
The story of Clean Dishes mostly focuses on Shiro and Baku, who are both very interesting characters. I also really liked the new side characters, Kimika and Ru. I loved reading their interactions with each other. By the way, the only romance in this game is between Baku and Shiro. When the game was announced there were some speculations that Kimika and Ru might have their own routes as well, but Shiro is Baku’s only love interest.
I could sometimes predict the story, but I was still always curious what was going to happen next. I even bought coins a few times because I just couldn’t wait another day to finish some of the endings. Especially the bad endings were really dark and interesting, as expected from Nitro+Chiral! I do wish the game was a little bit longer, because they could have added some backstory and details about each character. But of course this is a mobile game, so I don’t expect the same kind of quality as Nitro+Chiral’s main games. Also be aware that you can only play this game in your phone’s browser. It doesn’t have an app and you also can’t play it on your computer (unless you use an emulator) which can sometimes be a little bit inconvenient.
I suspect some of the content I want to see is shown in the epilogues, which are the only chapters you can’t buy with free items. Overall it was a fun experience to play and I can recommend it! Just be prepared that it might take a few months to finish it. I recommend not spending too much extra money because you can just claim your login bonuses every day. I have not played the epilogues yet, but I might consider it sometime.
According to Nitro+Chiral's official Twitter account, these are the descriptions of each epilogue.
Epilogue 1: A story of how Shiro and Baku met each other. (Summary)
Epilogue 2: Kimika and Ru’s past.
Epilogue 3: Shiro’s backstory and why he wanted to die. (Summary)
Epilogue 4: Shiro struggling how to celebrate Baku’s birthday.
Epilogue 5: Band activities that started with 4 people.
Epilogue 6: 4 people enjoying their vacation.
Each epilogue costs 300 coins, which can be purchased for 330 yen (roughly 3 USD).
Slow Damage: Clean Dishes also recently got its own manga called Clean Dishes -leveret-, illustrated by mangaka Hiromasa Okujima. I’m very curious what kind of new content they’re planning to release in the future.
Update: Summary of the plot + endings can be found here! Becareful because there will be spoilers.
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