Clean Start is an upcoming house-tidying simulation game that follows Lena, an immigrant domestic cleaner supporting her family from an unspecified western country. Polish developer Serious Sim uses the familiar cosy-cleaning genre to explore migration, language barriers and the personal lives hidden within clients’ homes, aiming to encourage greater compassion towards people working abroad.

Players clean and rearrange homes while learning unfamiliar words through conversations and environmental interactions, and by locating objects with sentimental or dramatic significance. Artist and designer Katarzyna Haptaś drew on relatives’ experiences of working overseas in the 1990s, her grandmother’s migration to America, and research into immigrants seeking work in Poland, including people displaced from Ukraine.