Find peace through blasting grime

PowerWash Simulator pairs water-powered cleaning with relaxing tasks, resulting in a surprisingly zen-like gameplay experience.

There is something inexplicably therapeutic about cleaning. Perhaps it’s the sense of accomplishment you get from completing a task, the satisfaction of seeing something restored to its original state, or the feeling of control and mastery over your belongings. Regardless, the $19.99 PowerWash Simulator delivers those bizarrely satisfying feelings by letting you blast numerous filthy objects with high-powered water streams. As a Steam Early Access title that's still in development, the PC game has expected kinks and quirks that could use improvements. However, the flaws are minor inconveniences. Once you pick up your pressurized hose and point it at dirt, you’ll revel in the joyous emotion that only eradicating stains and restoring beauty can bring.

In real life, cleaning can feel like a chore if you have someone standing over your shoulder or if you must meet a deadline. Thankfully, PowerWash Simulator’s campaign lacks that pressure. You start as an entrepreneur opening a power washing business in the ash-riddled mountainside town of Muckville, and your first task is cleaning the mud off your soon-to-be business van. There's no water consumption to manage, and no time limit to stress. You simply point your nozzle at the grime and blast the dirt away, bit by bit.

You need to manage gameplay elements, of course, but these are more a matter of efficiency, rather than necessity. You start the game with a basic power washer and four nozzles. The 0-degree nozzle blasts high-powered water in a concentrated stream. It blows away the grime you come across, but it has a tiny area of effect. There are also 15-, 25-, and 40-degree nozzle fans. Every jump up in degree widens the water stream’s area of effect, but radically decreases the cleaning power. This means that you must make multiple passes with a wide-degree nozzle to clean as effectively as a smaller one. Conversely, a narrower nozzle has more concentrated cleaning power, but it must be used more extensively to get the same coverage.

PowerWash Simulator doesn’t hold your hand; you have freedom to clean how you want, so long as the job gets done. You can cycle between nozzles to suit the job at hand, and you can rotate the nozzle for vertical and horizontal water streams. In addition, you can tap your keyboard's Tab button to highlight any dirt you may have missed. This is useful when you can’t seem to find that last bit of grime. You quickly get a feel for this, so it becomes second nature by the time you start your first real job.

Beyond the campaign, you can also tackle challenges and special jobs. Challenges are where efficiency come into play, so you are tasked with completing a job quickly while using as little water as possible. Special jobs, on the other hand, are similar to campaign jobs in that they don't have any efficiency demands. They're just quirky tasks you can complete on the side, like cleaning a Mars rover.

You earn cash from every campaign job. Smaller jobs, such as cleaning a bike or car, net you $100-$300. Larger jobs, such as cleaning a home, garden, or structure, pay between $500-$1000.

PowerWash Simulator lets you purchase upgrades and accessories to make cleaning faster and easier. There are four washers that you can buy to improve your kit, which are essentially nozzle upgrades: Light, Medium, Heavy, and Professional. These upgrades become more powerful and effective as you go up in tier, but they are also more expensive. The medium-duty upgrade costs $900, which you can earn in two or three jobs. The professional-duty upgrade costs $5000, which you probably won’t have enough for until late in the campaign.

There are also purchasable nozzle attachments and extensions that extend the range and functionality of your washer. Extensions give your water jet greater range, but they're machine-specific add-ons. For example, an extension for your Light washer is incompatible with the upgraded Medium, Heavy, and Pro tiers. You can replace the 0-degree nozzle with a spinning nozzle to give yourself a slightly larger area of effect at the cost of some control.

Lastly, you can purchase soap nozzles for each machine. Like the washers themselves, these get progressively more expensive, with the basic soap nozzle costing $75, and the late-game Pro soap model costing $600. These nozzles don’t do much on their own, but when you use them with the appropriate cleaning liquid, you can radically improve your dirt-removal time. There are specific liquids for glass, metal, plastic, stone, and wood, as well as a multipurpose cleaner. Soap works by instantly cleaning whatever surface it touches, provided it is the correct liquid for the job. However, no jobs really require its use; you can brute-force stubborn stains with the 0-degree nozzle. Plus, soap costs money that could be better used upgrading your washer.

PowerWash Simulator emulates the tasks and overall feel of using a power washer, but there are areas where the simulation falls flat. For example, the game lacks real-world physics. Water doesn’t run like it would in real life, so it doesn't flow or carry anything with it. Blasting stains with water essentially deletes the dirt. On the one hand, you don't need to manage water or deal with streaking filth. On the other hand, it takes away some of the realism you'd expect in a PC simulation game.

Your character moves just fine when on a flat surface, but walk speed slows considerably, and unpredictably, on uneven ground. In fact, it feels like you're walking on molasses—but not always. PowerWash Simulator isn't a high-stakes game, so this sluggishness isn't too detrimental. Still, it's slightly inconvenient.

Soap is another aspect that needs rebalancing. As it stands, soap instantly cleans whatever it's sprayed on. That’s convenient, yes, but not at all true to life. Rather than instantly cleaning a surface, cleaning liquids should lower a stain's stubbornness value. The toughest stains, such as graffiti or rust, require extensive work with the 0-degree nozzle. Cleaning liquids should soften these stains so that you can more easily remove them with wider, weaker nozzles.

Cleaning liquids should be easier to acquire and better integrated into each job. You can buy cleaning liquids from a limited stock in the game’s shop; the devs clearly don't want you to blow your cash on soap, and have none left for upgrades. However, this puts cleaning supplies in an odd spot where they are somewhat superfluous, and don’t feel particularly useful or even integral to the overall cleaning process.

PowerWash Simulator lacks video game music, so you only have the sound of work and ambient noise to keep you company. As someone who has used a power washer on my property in real life, the sounds the water makes on different surfaces is almost as satisfying as the cleaning itself. PowerWash Simulator has numerous water sounds, but not to the degree that you would expect given the many surfaces you can clean. In real life, stone, wood, plastic, metal, glass, tile, and roofing all sound a bit different when blasted with water. Metal should have a ringing chime. Glass windows should make a hollow thumping sound. Soil should have a muffled splattering sound. Sure, it’s a minor nitpick, but sounds are important in a game that lacks music, and the effects sound a bit too generic.

To play PowerWash Simulator, your PC needs at least the 64-bit Windows 8 operating system, an AMD Phenom II or Intel i5-760 CPU, an AMD R7-260X or GTX 760 GPU, 4GB of RAM, and 6GB of storage space. The game utilizes a clean, flat, cartoonish graphical style that looks good and isn't graphically intensive. On a desktop PC with a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080, and 16GB of RAM, PowerWash Simulator performed incredibly well at 1440p resolution. With its graphical settings ticked up to max, the game looked great and moved at a smooth 60 frames per second.

PowerWash Simulator features support for gamepads, as well as keyboard and mouse controls. Both control schemes work well, but the game's point-and-click nature works best with a mouse. Like most Steam games, PowerWash Simulator supports Steam Cloud saves.

The sim also supports multiplayer action, which offers an interesting approach to cleaning. You can host a job you’ve started, or join another player's job, and collaboratively work to finish the task. Career jobs support two-player co-op cleaning, while free play supports up to six players.

PowerWash Simulator demonstrates that a skilled development team can make even a banal chore fun. The game lacks high system requirements, so its cartoonish visuals should run well on most computers. In addition, the easy controls, simple premise, and minimal gameplay management make it incredibly accessible, despite some movement issues. Fortunately, PowerWash Simulator is a Steam Early Access title, so the issues we've cited may vanish as the game's development progresses. Give it a spin if you’re itching to clean without getting your hands dirty.

For more on oddball simulations, check out the Most Niche Simulation PC Games We Could Find. In addition, check out PCMag’s Steam Curator Group.

PowerWash Simulator pairs water-powered cleaning with relaxing tasks, resulting in a surprisingly zen-like gameplay experience.

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Gabriel Zamora has dabbled in a little bit of everything over the years, including contracting, construction, professional cooking, and podcasting. Yet, he keeps things geeky with more than a decade’s worth of gaming and electronics-related writing contributions. Gabriel now lends his eclectic insight to PCMag as an Analyst who covers the web hosting, streaming music, mobile apps, and gaming beats.

When Gabriel’s not juggling monitors, he's hard at work in the kitchen perfecting new recipes, savoring new foods and brews across NYC, and improving his amateur art projects.

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