I absolutely adore PowerWash Simulator. I’ve adored it for three years now. It’s the console game I keep coming back to; curling up on the couch, putting on a podcast, and cleaning the muck off an ice rink or UFO. It got me through a horrible bout of covid, it offers me comfort when I’m feeling down, and it keeps adding increasingly peculiar and excellent DLC. Please, you have to know, I love this game. So now, here’s everything wrong with it that I desperately hope to see fixed in the forthcoming sequel.
For those who might not yet have experienced the sheer bliss and therapeutic healing offered by PowerWash Simulator, the name pretty much explains everything. You have a power washer, and you clean the dirt off an ever-more elaborate series of settings. Things begin with relatively simple targets, like a motorbike or a bus, but later you’ll be tackling vast, three-storey treehouse networks, or the outside of Lara Croft’s mansion. Each level’s features are invisibly divided into hundreds of distinct sections, such as a fence panel or a novelty plastic penguin, and each gives a (mostly) satisfying “Ding!” when it’s clean. With various nozzles and soaps, you methodically spray away the dirt, and that’s it. And it’s enough. (There’s also the most wonderfully batshit crazy storyline going on, which is far too easy to miss.)
For as long as I’ve been playing PowerWash Simulator, there have been two aspects that have enormously nagged at me, and I believe represent two serious problems with the game. The first occurs when you’re left searching an entire adventure playground for a single pixel of dirt on a microscopic section of a fence before you can finish the level. The second is the exact opposite, when you’re merrily cleaning a large section of dirty wall or floor and it all suddenly pings clean on its own. Each is infuriating, and they’re the main things I’m desperately hoping a sequel will address. However, they’re just top of a list of requests I have for a superior game. And yet, when I watch the trailer for PowerWash Simulator 2, I’m deeply worried none of them will be met.
The main reason is because…well, it looks like the first game. The washer gun is a different shape to any of the many variants currently available, but after that? It might be a graphical upgrade, but the first game already looks great, and it’s not exactly the sort of thing where shadow fidelity plays an important role. When I watch that trailer and it finally moves past being about garden gnomes (which while present in the first game, really weren’t a key thing in it, and seem the oddest, most generic thing to bank on as a gimmick here), it looks like it could be for yet another DLC pack for PWS1. And, while I would be very happy to live in the universe where that’s what keeps happening, it isn’t the significant shift I’m really hoping for. That I’m still hoping for.
I reckon my two main complaints might have the same cause. I suspect (and I’m guessing) that it’s a percentage game. When you’ve cleaned up, say, 99.5 percent of a section’s dirt, the game considers it done enough to ding. And on the majority of features, that works fine. But when something is especially tiny, or especially large, that remaining 0.5 percent can be either an incredibly tiny, or an incredibly large, amount of remaining dirt. Hence it being impossibly fussy, requiring you to hunt tirelessly to find it, or the inverse, so deeply unsatisfying as to be magically cleaned before you were done. That certainly makes sense as a time-saving development device, but I’m desperately hoping a better solution is found for PWS2. Anyone who’s played the game will recognize these issues—it would be so, so disappointing to see this repeated.
But there are other things I’m always finding myself pondering as I play, and they primarily focus on the reality of power-washing. Now, I’ve no shame left to preserve, so I’m just going to tell you one of my current YouTube obsessions. In between watching Some More News and Big Joel, I love to watch real-life people doing real-life pressure washing.
I guess you’ll get it or you won’t, but there’s something so incredibly rewarding about watching a dirty thing get clean, about seeing years of grime and moss getting blasted away so rapidly, and the results being so dramatic. But the more of this I see, the more convinced I am that PowerWash Simulator 2 needs water physics.
I want drips. I want channels of water to cut into the dirt as it falls down the side of objects. I want spraying the ground to spray up dirt onto the sides of nearby furniture. I want to be able to see a river of water running away from my target and into a nearby drain. Because, honestly (and again, re-read that first paragraph if you think I’m slipping into being a hater), PowerWash Simulator is not a power-washing simulator, but a lawnmower sim.
You cut perfect strips into the dirt like a mower cutting a path in the grass. As you sweep the green nozzle, rotated vertically, left and right, you’re mowing stripes into a lawn. And watching that trailer, that raccoon’s face that gets blasted clean is being yet another front yard.
Sure, I know the counter-argument. The whole point of PWS is to be a relaxing, therapeutic play. It’s about that methodical process, and a part of that is the simplicity of cutting through the dirt. But here’s my counter-counter argument: that game exists! It’s been out for nearly three years. You can (and should) go play it right now. And if you finished it, seriously, go back to it. Not only are there now cheap DLC packs adding huge new levels based on the unlikeliest of licenses (Final Fantasy VII, Shrek, Back to the Future, Warhammer 40,000…), but also piles of new, free levels in the “seasonal updates.” There’s a Halloween-themed witch’s place, and an elaborate ice rink with polar bear and penguin decor (and yes, the story does address this faux pas), and much more, and it’s all as good as or better than the main game.
Given this, and given the possibility of continually adding new levels and content to the first game, doesn’t that make room for the sequel to be more experimental? Because otherwise, other than promising a “home base” and some slightly soapier soap, what is it going to add?
I wanna blast some moss! I want to use gravity when washing; give me the realistic advantages that come with cleaning top to bottom. I want to see the dirt get wet and run, not just get wiped away like in an infomercial. Heck, I’d love a little business mode, a more fleshed out version of getting hired for jobs, where I’m able to gradually improve my equipment in a much more subtle way than the current game’s systems, which essentially equate to levelling up, allow for.
Obviously I’ll get what I’m given. And if it ends up being more of the same but soapier, I’ll be right there for it. Honestly, the only thing that’d actually piss me off is if I’m still searching for that one percent of a roof bracket that I’ve missed on a twenty-bedroom manor house, or watching all the dirt I was looking forward to cleaning pinging itself away. That sucks, that needs fixing. The rest is cherries. Gloopy, dripping, gravity-dragged cherry juice, waiting for someone to clean it up.
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