What's Good About Power Wash Simulator
I don’t know about you guys, but I hate cleaning. It’s quite possibly the most boring, frustrating, time-consuming activity that one can think of. But somehow, my favourite game of the year behind Elden Ring is a game about power washing. Yeah, I am just as surprised as you guys are. But without further ado, let’s talk about power washing simulator.
Power Wash Simulator is as the title suggests, about power washing. The game is split up into a variety of modes that all provide a decent amount of content you to go through. These include the lengthy career mode, where you play as a voiceless owner of a power washing company tackling progressively bigger and bigger areas, a free mode where you can complete jobs you’ve already finished in career mode with up to five other friends, a challenge mode that’s the same as career mode, but with strict limits on water and/or time, and special jobs that take the concept of this game to its ridiculous extreme. It’s a small, but surprisingly robust selection of options to choose from.
Regardless of what you choose to do mode-wise, you will Power Wash things. Big things, little things, Mundane things, and outright ridiculous things. It’s a concept that by all means should not work but does, precisely because it implements many brilliant and interesting features that allow this to happen. There's virtually nothing in the way of a story or voice acting or even music. All of the main sounds that you hear are menu noises, water being sprayed onto things to get them super clean and the ever so distinct “DING” sound that the game makes whenever you get a piece of a surface 100% clean. It’s a very nice piece of auditory feedback that does a damn good job of highlighting how far into a job you are.
The other main reason you want to go through this, aside from the feeling of it being the Oddly Satisfying Subreddit as a video game, is because of the way you gain equipment. The more you work your way through a job, you get stars. The more stars you get, the more upgrades and money you acquire, meaning you can more efficiently powerwash the more drastic jobs out of existence. This is the way the game incentivizes you from a system standpoint to keep getting those 100% ratings. This has the added side effect of having you scour through areas with a metaphorical fine-toothed comb, chasing that one speck of dirt you need to get that hit of serotonin associated with the ding that says the area is clean, and why would the developers of this game do this to me, those absolute bastards. I say that mostly as a joke, but this game genuinely does a lot of good things for my ADHD brain, letting me hyperfocus on things in-game because when I’m talking to my friends, I like to have my hands doing something because the alternative is doom scrolling on Twitter and we can all agree that’s a thing that needs to be cut back on.
Power Wash Simulator, with its aforementioned lack of story, music, and sounds that aren’t water and dings, has become my go-to podcast/music/zone-out game whenever I need something and the idea of playing Destiny 2 solo is too taxing on my brain. When I mentioned at the start of this is my favourite game of the year not named Elden Ring, I meant it. This is the first game since that one where I’ve just been so thoroughly absorbed by a video game this year and this is honestly all I want in a game at the moment. It’s great.
All in all, I like Power Wash Simulator a lot. Between being able to jump in and out when needed and being satisfying as heck to play, it's on my game of the year list. I can think of no list weirder than mine at the moment. Go Play Power Wash Simulator.
