I am a neurotic person, and I always have been. I get extremely grossed out at the sight of filthy things, and I won’t touch them even with gloves on. During the pandemic, I started using Tiktok, and got sucked into a weird niche of satisfying cleaning videos. Carpet cleaning videos, pool cleaning videos, people who spring cleaned the houses of people too depressed to do it themselves, I loved them all. I’m not a particularly neat person and I hate the chore of cleaning, but I hate dirt and spills and grime more.
PowerWash Simulator is on Game Pass, and I’ve endured many of my colleagues talking about it non-stop. I decided to give it a try – all I knew about the game was that you could powerwash things and places that get increasingly big as you progress through the game. I’d seen our own Andrew King write about how the game is perfect for playing while listening to podcasts, and I’m a podcast fiend, so I threw on the newest episode of Normal Gossip and gave it a shot.
I came back to my body three hours later, with a faint ache in my hands from gripping my Xbox controller and no idea what time it was. I checked my phone and realised it was past midnight. I’d lost hours of my life to jet-cleaning some old couple’s bungalow, and I hadn’t the faintest clue how. I’d been lying in bed, cleaning the house’s roof for so long that finally, I felt some semblance of peace. My head was empty – I was happy.
I have Attention Deficit Disorder, so my brain can get pretty loud. However, there’s something hypnotic about dutifully spraying every bit of dirt off a surface until you hear a satisfying ‘ding!’ sound, telling you that the item you’ve been focusing on is finally sparkling clean. Crouching underneath a playground set to do two passes on the underside of a platform, one for grime and one for rust stains, scratches the hyperfocusing part of my brain that nowadays rarely gets activated.
The best part is that it’s not just cleaning – you can upgrade your tools. I’ve purchased nozzles that increase the range of my jet, different soaps for different surfaces, and cute outfits that keep me safe from all the disgusting, nasty dirt I’m eradicating. You earn a little bit of money for every item you clean, with a checklist indicating what you’ve cleaned, how much you’ve cleaned it in a percentage value and what you have left to do. It takes surprisingly long to clean a single location, so it feels very much like I’m doing a silly little menial job. As a person who once found themselves surprisingly happy at a job where all their duties involved filing and emails, I love that very much.
It seems like such a silly thing to get fixated with, but PowerWash Simulator has the gravity of a black hole. Since I started, I keep getting pulled back to it, telling myself that I’ll just jet down one little section of this playground before I get back to work. It’s a game that requires no thinking, and finally my brain cells can have a rest. I have friends coming over during the weekend and I intend to engage in idle gossip while blasting some other location with a concentrated jet of water. From now on, my motto is PowerWasher on, head empty. It’s a peaceful way to live.