Zen Buddhist monk and personal hero of mine, Thich Nhat Hanh, spent much of his life writing about mindfulness. He stressed that when we do anything, we should commit to it fully, giving it our undivided attention and allowing ourselves to become immersed in it, be it simply eating, walking, or anything else. “Drink your tea slowly and reverently,” he said, “as if it is the axis on which the earth revolves–slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.”
Like its predecessor, PowerWash Simulator 2 is a stage on which one can play out Thich Nhat Hanh’s message. The simple pleasures of washing away the grime from dozens of walls, floors, cars, and couches act like an on-ramp to a flow state. For a while, I let the sequel wash over me, giving it my entire being and enjoying it thoroughly. But long before I sprayed away the last patch of mildew, I was back to my old ways, multitasking my way through a game that asks of me more patience and attention than I was willing to give it.
PowerWash Simulator 2 is exactly what it sounds like, though if you haven’t played the first game, its title alone may not make it apparent why it can be so much fun. In this first-person job sim from FuturLab, you’ll live out a career as a powerwasher, taking on nearly 40 jobs in solo play, split-screen, or online multiplayer with other soapy experts. You’ll begin with a few simple tools–hoses with different nozzles that provide a range of spraying intensities and patterns, almost like an arsenal of guns in a traditional shooter. In essence, this is a shooter, but rather than zombies or Nazis, your targets are buildings, furnishings, and vehicles absolutely blanketed in filth, with each mission ending when you’ve completely cleansed the area of its grime.
The fun of the game is revealed as soon as you start spraying down dirty surfaces; like a masterful painter, your brushstrokes with your hoses bring the vibrant world to life, erasing mossy, darkened layers to reveal something beautiful and supremely satisfying that was once lost to time. In the same way you may find yourself mesmerized by the lawnmowing prowess seen on a baseball field, or the revitalizing effect of the Zamboni between periods of a hockey game, there’s something visually stimulating about the before-and-after differences that make up the gameplay loop of PowerWash Simulator 2.
Each time you hose down a level, it’s split up into micro-segments and tracked helpfully in the game’s menus, so you’ll never lose track of that one last bit of grime that is, say, underneath a playground’s slide or a billboard’s guardrail. For example, rather than have a tracker that tells you when a bathroom has been fully cleaned, you’ll have individual cleanliness meters for the sink’s base, its faucet, the hot and cold levers, the toilet seat, the toilet base, the light switch, each floor tile, pieces of the ceiling, the walls, and so on. You only ever see the meter for the segment you’re aiming at, too, making this approach both visually unintrusive and also extremely helpful and gratifying. It feels like progress is constantly occurring, with a Pavlovian ding that will elicit a spark of joy each time any single segment is polished off.
The simple pleasure of spraying away the mess was present in and similarly responsible for the success of the first game, and though this central mechanic remains a joy in the sequel, it’s not enhanced in many major ways, leaving PowerWash Sim 2 feeling like a whole lot more of what you may have already experienced–albeit it with some smaller, definitely welcome touches.
Among the best new features is a new tool, the SwirlForce Surf Ace: a floor and wide-surface cleaner that spins a disc-like scrubber quickly over surfaces big enough to accommodate it. It works more quickly than the legacy tools in some situations, and though it gets a little wonky when moving between floors and other surfaces, if used as the first step in a multi-step process to efficiently wash the grime away from a big level, it’s super handy.
Levels are more dynamic, too. Rather than jump into a job and immediately see all you must clean, now some levels hide secret portions of themselves. In one early example, I was cleaning a surface built into the sidewalk. Once I’d finished making that surface pristine, it revealed itself to be a public toilet that could sink above and below the walkable area. This meant I was tasked with cleaning the newfound walls next, and once I’d finished with those, one last portion of the level opened up: the bathroom’s doors, letting me finish the job inside the restroom itself. As before, each level ends with a fun time-lapse video that quickly recaps your run, even if you save mid-session and come back to finish your work later.
There’s also a new customizable hub space that acts almost like a fire station–it’s your hangout between jobs, customizable via new furniture items that can be unlocked and placed however you’d like, a la The Sims–provided you clean them off first, of course. At launch, the offerings in this realm, much like those that apply to your character and their tools, are pretty lackluster. Given how many exciting DLC packs and licensed crossovers the original game had, I expect this feature to grow into something much more interesting eventually, but it’s not compelling today.
Perhaps the best new feature, though, is shared progression in the online multiplayer. In the original PowerWash Sim, you could jump into other players’ missions, but you didn’t get credit for finishing other players’ jobs in your own game. Now, mercifully, that’s no longer the case. If you complete a job with a friend, then hop into the solo career mode, your progress is tracked. Given how long the game can take if played solo, this is a major quality-of-life fix.
Broadly speaking, PowerWash Sim 2 does feel like a big quality-of-life update, for better or worse. The visuals, while still cartoonish and not even attempting something especially detailed, are much brighter and prettier. The game wisely leans into using a lot of vibrant colors like orange, yellow, and baby blue. These really pop off the screen as the slime is sprayed away, further enhancing the constant sense of progress. Similarly, glass more realistically and beautifully glimmers as you rinse off the gunky top layer. The new default control scheme is much improved, too, reassigning some of the game’s core functions to more sensible buttons–though for the purists at heart, you can revert them to the classic controls easily in the options menu. If someone has never played the original PowerWash Sim, this is quite obviously a better game, and it’s arguably best to just cut right to this one.
For players who have spent many hours removing the mold from barbecue grills already, however, the sequel’s staying power–spraying power?–is in shorter supply. Thirty-eight new levels make for a massive campaign, especially in solo mode, where several levels take over an hour each to complete. PowerWash Sim 2 is much more enjoyable and manageable in co-op. Like any manual labor, it’s just a much smoother process when a team can tackle it together. Even as PowerWash Sim 2 taps into the gratifying gamification of simulated labor, the line between game and work does blur eventually. Offering more than three-dozen levels amounts to dozens of hours of new jobs, but it’ll feel like overly familiar work before you clock out.
It was in those times that I let my idol down and overloaded my mind with stimuli. Given the game has really nothing to offer from an audio standpoint–unless you find the spray noises to be soothing in an ASMR sort of way that I don’t relate to–there’s nothing in the game’s audio design that demands you listen to it. The helpful ping of a finished segment is accompanied by the visual cue of the meter totally clearing away, so PowerWash Sim 2 ends up playing like one of the best multitasking games out there. While reviewing this game, I could catch up on my podcast queue, put on an audiobook to double-down on what I’m reading this month, and listen to some new music I was in the mood for.
This is ultimately a benefit to the game. I’m generally happy to play this way, at least sometimes. But seeing as the game adds to the serie’s positively wacky lore about mermen and stolen gems, taking all kinds of unexpected angles through a story delivered via in-game text messages and bulletins, it’s striking that the developers didn’t try to incorporate any of this into the game’s audio. You could play PowerWash Sim 2 on mute and lose nothing vital to the experience.
To its credit, though, I also see this as a way in which PowerWash Simulator 2 is versatile. It’s a platform for that other thing you want to do with your time, whether that’s listen to a podcast, chat with some friends in a Discord or console voice channel, or–earmuffs, Thich Nhat Hanh–watch a movie on a second screen.
PowerWash Sim originally owed a lot of its success to the pandemic. It was an awesome hangout game at a time when everyone was just sort of… hanging out. PowerWash Sim 2 arrives in a different world than its predecessor, though the gameplay at the heart of the series is essentially timeless; it’s a lot of fun even without a pandemic forcing us into taking fake jobs for fake money. Before the end of the game, I was looking to change careers, but there will surely be times in the future when I’m itching to get back to it, too. Maybe PowerWash Simulator 2 is best approached as a game where you’re your own boss, working on your own schedule. If you can avoid burnout and work as a team with a few friends, it’s a good gig.
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