I knew what the video game PowerWash Simulator was probably about immediately, just from the title. So do you, even though if you are anything like me you right away told yourself: Surely not. You just … blast things clean with a high-powered hose? This is fun? Let me assure you, then, that it is very fun.
PWS is set in a city called Muckingham, which sometimes seems to be in Britain and other times in the United States. It’s your average sort of place, with homes and playgrounds, a subway and an airport and a fire department. And an active volcano just down the road, which has of late covered the entire place with soot. But you — you have a van, and a waterproof coverall, and a spray wand. And an apparently limitless supply of water. You are the person for the job. And one by one, the jobs come to you, or you go to them, and slowly, methodically, you splash the stream back and forth across every surface, dislodging the schmutz and restoring Muckingham’s cars and boats and houses and strange monasteries to pristine condition. Take all the time you need; the objective here is to face down grungy chaos and restore it to gleaming order. Oh, and possibly also to save the world — but honestly it hardly matters. By that point, it certainly wasn’t why I was there.
When I first encountered PowerWash Simulator in 2023, it had been out for over a year. Once I watched a trailer, I knew I had to have it right away. I’d never needed to pressure-wash the side of a house myself; I was unaware that there was a whole genre of A.S.M.R.-adjacent YouTube videos dedicated to such activities. But I’m a copy editor — I spend my days polishing language, revealing its full potential. I take joy in bringing beauty to a disheveled world. I couldn’t resist the chance to tidy up a skate park. With a hose.
PWS, created by the British indie developer FuturLab, was like nothing I had ever played, or even seen. (I enjoy the PlayStation version; skip the knockoffs made for iOS and Android devices, because they’re terrible.) Whether your task is a bicycle or a bungalow, the approach is the same: Walk around with a spray wand, slowly panning a jet of water — make it narrow to apply more force to stubborn gunk, or wider to cover more surface at once — across its facets. Each window or bumper or concrete wall flashes at you when it’s fully clean, and a little chime sounds, like a right-answer cue on a game show, or an interval bell during meditation. It’s all extremely chill.
If you’re new to gaming, you’ll find that all sorts of the tropes you might expect are missing. There’s nothing to defend yourself from, no marauding hordes of any sort: no robots or dinosaurs or robotic dinosaurs. There’s nobody to talk to, so you needn’t worry about whether to insult, amuse or seduce that shopkeeper you just met. There are no diabolical puzzles to solve, no floating platforms to race along, no inventories of food ingredients or building supplies to manage. The most complex decision you can make is how often you feel like spending your income to upgrade your gear. Or maybe buy some soap.
You have no active opponent, no ticking clock; no further grime falls from the air to push back against your efforts. It’s just you and the sound of the water. As you progress, the tasks become more time-consuming. But at least for me, thoughts like Oh, no, it’s a gigantic abandoned subway station immediately gave way to Oh, awesome, it’s a gigantic abandoned subway station. I’d take a deep breath and start making the world a better (and wetter) place.
I was surprised at just how satisfying a video game about doing imaginary chores could be. (I like blowing up robotic dinosaurs!) And yet it took the wrinkles out of my soul. Some of this feeling was probably related to the state of my apartment at the time. I love order, but I also love to read, and I had run out of shelf space. As the storage crisis got out of hand, it was draining my emotional resources in ways I barely realized. Books and papers were piling up everywhere, and that felt beyond my control; 2023 was rife with war and political upheaval and climate crisis and death, and that was definitely beyond my control. But here, here was somewhere I could improve things. I spent hours at my console, letting the tensions of the day sluice down the drainpipes, promising myself that I’d put down the controller after just one more garage door, one more fiddly bit of architectural trim. My whole body softened, like a sponge in water.
Meditative qualities aside, there is a narrative at play here. If you read between the lines in the messages your clients are sending you, you start to realize that all sorts of strange things are afoot in Muckingham — missing house cats, intimations of political corruption, even whispers of the supernatural. But PWS is perfectly happy to let you ignore all of it if you like, waving away the trouble in Muckingham as mere window dressing in favor of blasting the spray paint off the mayoral mansion and the mud off the carousel. By the last few missions, the weirdness becomes inescapable, and the various plot threads come together into something deeply bananas that I’m reluctant to spoil here. Even then, though, any sense of urgency you may be feeling comes entirely from you. The end of the world will wait as long as you want it to.
Andrew Willett is a copy editor for the magazine. His speculative fiction has appeared most recently in Abyss & Apex.
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