Hoarder Turns a Simple Cleaning Sim into a Cosmic Horror Descent

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At first glance, Hoarder doesn’t look like the kind of game that would stick with you. And that’s probably the point. You start off doing something almost mundane – cleaning. The setup is simple: you arrive at a cluttered home owned by a couple of extreme hoarders, and your job is to sort through the mess, organize what you can, and slowly bring some order back into the chaos.

But the more I look at it, the more it feels like that normality is just a setup. Because at some point, Hoarder stops being what it first presents itself as. You reach the basement, find a staircase, and instead of leading to another part of the house, it drops you into something completely different. Suddenly, you’re not cleaning anymore. You’re descending into an abyss. And not just metaphorically.

The game shifts into this surreal, almost suffocating underwater setting where you’re piloting a submarine through pitch-black depths. It’s a stark contrast to the grounded opening hours, and that’s where the real hook lies. You’re now recovering strange, almost forbidden objects, navigating an environment that feels hostile and unknowable, while slowly piecing together what any of this has to do with the house you started in.

What I find interesting is that Hoarder doesn’t seem to rely on cheap jump scares to get its point across. Instead, it leans into atmosphere. That slow, creeping dread that builds as things stop making sense. The fact that it’s coming from a team that includes a co-creator of Darkwood also explains a lot. If you’ve played Darkwood, you already know the kind of tension and unease they’re capable of creating without holding your hand.

It’s already available to wishlist on Steam and it’s been confirmed for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S as well. No release date yet, but this feels like the kind of game worth keeping an eye on.