'Rumu' Is a Creepy Game About a Love-Powered Roomba

Rumu loves to clean. Rumu loves subservience. Rumu loves the idea of subservience. He’s a smart vacuum full of love and curiosity. Rumu’s ready to cleanup all the messes his absentee human owners, who happen to be the vacuum’s creators, leave behind in their smart home. Sabrina, the home’s AI backend, sets him to his task. But she’s hiding something.

That’s the basic setup for the new video game Rumu, a simple and beautiful puzzler from developer Robot House. It’s part Portal 2, part Roman Polanski thriller, and part Gone Home, with an emphasis on story and atmosphere. Players take control of a vacuum who enjoys cleaning and tooling around the house of his humans, trying to pick up the pieces of their broken lives. Sometimes literally.

I began my vacuum journey by cleaning up a series of 99 spills in virtual reality diagnostic mode while chatting with Sabrina.

It was a boring, repetitive task, something odd to open a video game with, but there was an open door to the side, just asking me to rebel. So, after four out of 99 spills cleaned, I did. Rumu’s—and the player’s—first conscious act is to rebel against Sabrina, the smart home that runs the house’s various appliances. It’s an important moment that seems innocuous at the time, though it sets the tone for everything to come.

Things begin normally as Rumu cleans some spilled tea and hoovers up bugs in the home’s kitchen, before the game takes an abrupt turn toward the dark and strange. Sabrina, it turns out, is upset the house cat, Ada Lovelace, is constantly causing messes, and the AI suggests filling the air vents with poison gas to take care of the problem once and for all. She’s not joking and it’s an early sign things aren’t what they seem and that Sabrina isn’t quite right.

Also, the humans never seem to be around; Sabrina always makes excuses for them that don’t make sense. The AI tells you they’ve gone out mountain biking on a day when it’s clearly storming, for example. The messes aren’t consistent with normal human lives either, and the only organic lives are the cat, the plants, and the bugs.

The messes Sabrina asks Rumu to clean get stranger and, as more rooms open to Rumu, I rooted through the drawers and journals of the seemingly missing family. It’s a sad and well-written story I won’t spoil. Sabrina and Rumu are more than just appliances and Rumu is more than just a vacuum cleaner. His journey is a path to sentience and understanding that mirrored my journey as I unraveled Sabrina’s mysterious motivations and an absent family.

The game is short, sweet, and to the point, never overstaying its welcome. The puzzles are simple but fun and the sound design is excellent. Sabrina is a little like GLaDOS from Portal 2 and Rumu is a little like Wall-E. It’s a strange mix of bright colors, big ideas, and creeping horror.

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