Power Wash Simulator continues to blow my mind. On paper, it is an achingly boring idea as you’re dumped into back gardens and public parks to clean away disgusting layers of grime. But through a charming personality and approachable mechanics, developer FuturLab has managed to mimic the mediated satisfaction that comes from mindlessly watching those videos on Facebook where some guy cleans a filthy carpet until it’s sparkling white and fluffy.
While the base game remains unusually engaging, what captured my imagination recently is the absurdity of the post-launch content. It asks what would it be like to step into Croft Manor or Seventh Haven and be tasked with sprucing up iconic locales or classic weapons with the use of your ultra powerful cleaning tools?
Turns out it’s rather incredible, almost otherworldly. You step into the shoes of an everyday worker only to interact with iconic places that are, in many ways, larger than life, and see them through new eyes than you once did.
Croft Manor was more subdued, throwing you through a handful of stages big and small with little in the way of narrative foundation to justify your soapy pilgrimage. Everything looks like Tomb Raider, at least once all the mud is blasted off, although most of the experience is spent washing in relative silence. You can obviously join a session with friends and chat the night away, but otherwise the act of power washing is a lonely one as hours are spent transforming your surroundings with such intense focus that hours can fade away before you know it.
This isolation makes crossover DLC that much more appealing. It cements us in a familiar time and place with a connection we already have, albeit with a similar level of silence as context is fed to us through text messages and item descriptions. This ambition is reached with flying colours across the upcoming Final Fantasy 7 expansion, which is set to launch later this week and comes packed with a bunch of cool surprises. Based on the beloved remake and developed in partnership with Square Enix, you can basically label this weird little selection of jobs as a canon expansion of the JRPG universe. Seriously, it’s that good.
Things start off small as you’re dumped into the Shinra Headquarters and asked to clean a couple of familiar vehicles. Cloud’s motorcycle and the blue pick-up truck his friends use to escape the dystopian corporation at the end of Remake are covered in filth. They’re dirtier than Tifa in the Italian senate, they are. Fear not though, since a few blasts of your jet will clean them right up. Maybe I’m just a slave to nostalgia, but it was fascinating to watch designs I felt so intimately familiar with in a new light.
Each spot I cleaned unveiled new details of a magnitude we’ve never been privy to before, whether it be subtle marks on the windscreen or unorthodox accessories littered throughout that make it clear this vehicle originates from a fantasy world. Cloud’s motorcycle is iconic already, and an absolute chore to clean with its winding mess of exhausts and pipework. I managed it though, all while the likes of President Rufus and Heidegger waxed lyrical over WhatsApp about how important these things are to their company history. Listen dudes, I’m just here to do a job and get paid, stop waving your millionaire dicks in my face. It ain’t cool.
There’s something hilarious about two corporate big wigs hiring a local power washing company to clean up their lobbies while trying to take over the world. While it’s slightly comical in the context of this gig and the task you’re assigned of cleaning the Scorpion Sentinel of blood and viscera, others like Seventh Heaven are defined by warm emotional dialogue that does a stellar job of bringing these characters to life with no voiced dialogue.
Tifa Lockhart is your port of call when restoring Seventh Heaven, the bar seemingly a victim to local goons who decide to vandalise the place while Avalanche is away on a mission. You can feel the anguish in Tifa’s words as she briefly describes how this place will always be a home to her, Cloud, Barrett, and Marlene. Changing circumstances will never take that away, and to know the value it holds for so many people make wiping away the grime more than a menial task for middling returns.
Power Wash Simulator gained a large audience thanks to the satisfaction of slowly bringing a neglected setting back to life, and that concept holds even more weight when the tasks you’re burdened with are grounded in a familiar, oftentimes nostalgic context. You could call it pandering, or leaning on IP to a lazy degree, but so much love and craft has been put into this single content pack alone that it deserves all the attention. Simulators have never really done something like this before, with Power Wash understanding the absurdity of its own design and leaning into it with ideas that make a menial chore interesting.
Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy 7 are both excellent inclusions, and hopefully just the beginning of a very bright future for a game that seems to be taking over the world.