REVIEW: ASMR, pure emotions, and satisfying cleaning await in Undusted: Letters from the Past

Dredge up dirt and memories with satisfying ASMR cleaning

Ever since the surprise hit Unpacking showcased the power of simple gameplay aligned with emotional storytelling, the indie scene has tried to replicate the formula to mixed results. To achieve those heights, it requires an incredibly high level of synergy between the concepts, and there's often one half of the equation that feels lacking in many of the attempted recreations in the years since.

5minlab Corp's Undusted: Letters from the Past achieves that synergy by offering a trip down memory lane that many will relate to and an ASMR focus that tickles the brain in all the right ways. And its easy breezy two-hour runtime makes it a trip worth taking.

​Just the Facts

Developer: 5minlab Corp.

Publisher: Toge Productions

​Platform(s): PC*, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed

​Price: $9.99

Release Date: October 13, 2025 (PC), October 16, 2025 (Switch)

Review key provided by publisher.

5minlab Corp has been around for years now, working on a ton of smaller projects both on PC and in the mobile space. On one of those games, a top-down gunslinging shooter called Kill the Crows, Art Director Yoonjeong Choi found the encouragement to push forward with a game of her own vision. Choi pulled from the satisfaction of viral restoration videos where mundane objects are brought back to life through cleaning — and so was born Undusted.

In Undusted, you take your spot behind Adora's cleaning table, a young woman who is piecing together her life's history by cleaning up objects in her long-abandoned childhood home after her mother's passing. Through the process of buffing these objects back to squeaky clean perfection, Adora will learn more about her mother, her father, and the truth behind the way they were all those years ago.

It's a familiar process for anyone who's ever had to sort through a relative's belongings or even helped someone move, unearthing mysteries in a storage unit and reminiscing while shuffling through dusty boxes. It's a chance to catch previously unseen details on your mom's favorite mug, to wash off a once-lost plushie and reintroduce it to your collection, or to find an old piece of technology that still has some forgotten recording from childhood.

There's a bittersweet melancholy to the cleaning that happens in Undusted that compounds with crushing sadness as you progress through each of the game's 16 cleaning tasks. The more you learn about Adora and her relationship with her parents, the more desperate you are to unearth the meaning behind the grime of each new object. And when it all wraps up, you're left smiling with tears in your eyes over an experience that's primarily about, of all things, cleaning.

Anchored by beautiful illustrations, the interstitial dialogue and story scenes don't blow you away with poetic writing or weighty lessons, but instead with pure relatability: particularly for those who've grown up in Asian households and understand the sacrifices parents from the region often make and the weight of expectations placed on them, and us, in turn.

When it all wraps up, you're left smiling with tears in your eyes over an experience that's primarily about, of all things, cleaning.

I also appreciated the visual approach to the grime. Splashes of magical reality add some beauty to the dirt — beautiful flowers grow out of a dirty old camera and saplings sprout out of the back of a turtle tchotchke. It added an extra layer of beauty to the slow excavation of these items from Adora's past and how she saw them, even with the grime and the burdens of her past weighing on her.

Undusted's narrative works because it's so harmonious with its gameplay — serving to showcase the layered revelations Adora uncovers with the layered dirt and grime that you scrub away from start to finish.

The cleaning action found in Undusted is comparable to something like PowerWash Simulator. Rather than walking around a house or structure to spray it down, though, you're shrinking the scale down and cleaning the intricate nooks and crannies of household objects: cups, lockets, digital cameras, and old record players. Instead of a pressurized water cannon, you'll be using a sponge, toothbrush, rag, and vacuum.

As you clean, a percentage meter fills up at the bottom of your screen. When you reach a specific point, you unlock "hints" that allow you to highlight the grime that you haven't found and cleaned, easing the hunt as those last bits get smaller and harder to spot. And once you hit 90% clean, the game allows you to move on... but for those sickos, there are achievement-laden benefits to sticking around and making sure each object is 100% clean.

The smaller scale in Undusted certainly doesn't equal a lack of detail. If anything, its cleaning jobs will have you scrubbing down every single crack and crevice in a way that maintains the satisfaction of the experience from end to end. In games like PowerWash Simulator, by the end you're begging to find the last few bits of grime to be freed from the experience, exhausted by the cleaning. Undusted's more focused, detail-oriented approach keeps the joy up, despite the overall shorter runtime.

Undusted even manages to regularly introduce fun new wrinkles regularly, whether that's a new tool to use or some quirky interaction with the thing you're cleaning. Nothing made me crack a smile more than discovering a secret compartment on the object I was cleaning, where it turned out that last batch of dirt was waiting all along.

It's quicker than expected, both in overall length and in the length of individual cleaning tasks — some of the cleaning jobs I forced myself to do a little inefficiently to properly savor them. But that means it's over before you really clock how similar some of the jobs end up, leaving you with an experience that fun, and most of all, so satisfying.

The final piece of the satisfaction puzzle comes in Undusted's self-admitted focus on ASMR. Choi's inspiration from viral restoration videos becomes immediately clear in the sensory details of your cleaning jobs, and in how the audio-visual experience elevates the nuanced soundscapes of the tools and materials you're working with. The mechanical whir of the wet vacuum springing to life and the subtle pulling friction of the fabric plush it's cleaning are brought to life with just the amount of precision you'd hope for.

By keeping the game's scope so tight and focused, 5minlab is able to push as much detail into these vignettes as possible, and it shows. It's that harmony I talked about earlier: the precise pieces of a game that come together in service of a singular mission. This particular mission? Pure satisfaction.

Tack on a beautiful piano-driven soundtrack and a credits song that punctuates the tear-inducing ending, and you've got an audio mix to celebrate.

Undusted: Letters from the Past is a special little project that allows you to excavate someone else's memories through cleaning objects, and possibly dust off a few of your own throughout this tactile and patient process. Its satisfying and ASMR-inspired gameplay is addictive, and its emotional arc will speak to many. 5minlabs has a gem on its hands — one that's been patiently polished to a shine.

Video Games Are Good and Undusted: Letters from the Past is . . . GREAT. (8.5/10)

+ emotional narrative journey through a family's memories, ASMR-inspired production satisfies, as does the absorbing cleaning gameplay

- cleaning can feel a little repetitive over time, narrative can feel a little bland in places, you'll wish there was more to clean when you get to the end

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