• Game: FuturLab's PowerWash Simulator.
• Release Month: May.
• Quick Look: Here (not a QL; rather, it's the six-person PowerWash UPF stream).
• Started: 26/12.
• Completed: 01/01.

2022's other big Improbable Job Simulator, after the aforereviewedHardspace: Shipbreaker, was PowerWash Simulator: a game about making things very wet very fast (and yes, I did delete a blue joke about making things wet that used to be here, and no you're not missing anything). Modestly presenting itself as a janitorial sim that goes WOOSH-USH-USH-OOSH-USH a lot, PowerWash Simulator has a couple of secret weapons to elevate what might otherwise be a rote cleaning gameplay loop into one of the year's most compelling and relaxing busywork sims. However, I don't think you need to wipe much further beneath the superficial layers to understand why this game resonated so well: there's something very appealing about hitting something with a high-velocity hose and watching the dirt just disintegrate to reveal the glossy, pristine surfaces beneath. Something almost symbolic about it, like we're power-gargling the bad taste of the last few years out of our collective mouths.

So, going beyond the obvious strengths then. PowerWash is blessed with a remarkably British sensibility that I did not anticipate: I played House Flipper earlier this year (been on a sim kick of late, I guess) and you'd get the occasional oddball email to set up the next job as a cute little way to introduce the objectives you'd be pursuing next. PowerWash leans into this notion a little harder, providing a recurring rogue's gallery of personalities around your local burg of Muckington including an indifferent mayor who is clearly up to something, a couple who are fond of the arcane and bizarre, the cynical local fire chief, a bizarre rich inventor who always has some improbably cool vehicle that needs cleaning, a volcanologist friend who worryingly vanishes for a while, and a couple of competing funfair ride owners using your services to one-up the other. They'll come by with new work occasionally and even pipe up with messages as you work on their current task after 20% milestones, and due to the eccentric vibe of the game it's never all that predictable what you'll be tasked with washing next. Most jobs fall between either a vehicle or a location, the former being much quicker if not necessarily easier due to all their smaller and harder-to-reach parts, but the game's already tinkering around with a malleable sense of reality by having you clean fairytale homes or airplanes with laser beam attachments. Meanwhile, there's some overarching narrative about the mayor's missing cat Ulysses that I'm curious to see through to its end despite how down-to-earth it is. Is that little guy OK? Am I going to have to knock it out of a tree with a high-power hose, more's the point?

PowerWash's other hook are the ever more powerful pressure-washer guns you can purchase, each with various attachments that might increase its effective range or let you add a soap dispenser to make harder stains easier to shift, provided the cleaner solution matches the material you're washing (say, wood or metal). Every upgrade so far has had an immediate and notable effect compared to the previous, and they even sound way more serious too: I wouldn't be surprised if the latest model I acquired could lift me off the ground if I fired straight down, F.L.U.D.D.-style. It didn't take all that long before I could acquire the highest-level washer, which suggests the game has been iterating at a rate where it's prioritizing the things to wash rather than the things to wash with: as with Hardspace: Shipbreaker, a game format like this is ideal for the modular development process that Early Access games go through, as it might simply mean adding a few new locations or vehicles to clean every few months to keep audiences keen. I've no idea how much of the current game I've left to cleanse—I'm somewhere in the region of 28 jobs complete, and there's an achievement in it for me at 30—but given the circumstances it felt prudent to, again like Shipbreaker, make a hard cut off for the sake of a review and this GOTY feature and instead switch my playthrough style to one where I can take on a single scenario per day until I eventually run out of content or achievements (in-game or otherwise) to collect while I work on finally putting Elden Ring to bed before the New Year.

But, man, it feels both painfully easy and elusively tricky to nail down what it is about PowerWash Simulator's flow that keeps you coming back to ever filthier jobs. A few unsung heroes are its superbly clean and slick UI, which has little flashes and "ding"s to celebrate whenever a particular surface or part reaches 100% cleanliness and keeps track of the rest on the pause screen. Boons like that, or an ever-present "show dirt" button that works like the hotspot identifier in an adventure game or Infinity Engine RPG, makes the game an accessible delight to play that, for all I can tell, wants you to succeed no matter what and will give you whatever help is required to reach that perfect 100% job completion. A set of adjustable nozzles that you can alternate between with the mouse wheel means it's equally simple to find the right ratio of surface area coverage and water pressure intensity while scrubbing away whatever grimy resistance you might meet, and the game is kind enough to avoid giving us all RSIs by having the right mouse button be an "always on" toggle for the washer. If I said earlier that finding new things to wash is the game's number one game design priority, then making the game feel like an absolute zero-stress dream to play is a close number two for its team.

In addition to the core story mode, for which I've yet to see the light at the end of the tunnel, there's also a free play mode for repeating favorites (or if you missed an achievement, as many stages have specific ones that require you wash things in a certain order), a challenge mode that limits your time or amount of water if you wanted to actually add a stress factor back in, or the special jobs mode that I figure is a place meant for all the left over missions the game couldn't sensibly work into its Muckington narrative, such as washing a Mars rover on the red (or brownish) planet itself. It also feels like the developers could add more content at any time, even if the game's now as close to a finished release as they're happy with, so I'm curious to see how much of a tail it ends up having. Given each task can take anywhere from a few minutes (for the vehicles, anyway) to well over a couple of hours (the skatepark and the treehouse were practically whole afternoons) you can't argue the game doesn't have plenty to be getting on with already. PowerWash Simulator is an example of a product that takes something that was already a neat idea to build a game around to begin with and taking just the best approach possible to making the gameplay tick. Or, in this case, ding.

Current GOTY

1. Elden Ring
2. Tinykin
3. Hardspace: Shipbreaker
4. PowerWash Simulator
5. Tunic
6. Signalis
7. Return to Monkey Island
8. HoloCure
9. Ghost Song
10. Infernax
11. Immortality

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