PowerWash Simulator 2 Review – Mostly more of the same dirt, but that’s okay

PowerWash Simulator 2 opts for welcome improvements over big improvements, but it’s as strangely addictive and winningly silly as ever.

Is there a sound more beautiful than… ding good ejaculation and a job well done? A child’s laughter, you might argue, or the giggling chorus of a new day. But as someone who put a good 92.7 hours into the original PowerWash simulatorI feel confident saying this dingand the Pavlovian pleasure it produces is indeed the most wonderful sound of all. And with the advent of PowerWash 2 simulatorit’s time to do it – i ding then – again.

Several months passed between the events of the original PowerWash Simulator and its sequel, which is significant for two reasons. First, it gives developer FuturLab an excuse to reset the balance after releasing a supernatural glut of pressure washing products at the end of the first game. The sequel would be completely trivial if it came back (you officially sold all your equipment to set up shop in a flashy new headquarters). Secondly, it leaves a narrative gap that could be filled with more of this great lore.

If you’re new to the series, the idea of ​​a game plot about constantly throwing water may seem absurd, but as anyone who’s inevitably been drawn into the absurd tapestry of petty grudges, corrupt politicians, missing cats, time-traveling aliens, long-lost civilizations, and erupting volcanoes will tell you, it’s one of the biggest draws. PowerWash Simulator. But let’s backtrack a bit.

In its simplest form, PowerWash Simulator is a game in which you point a nozzle at something dirty and then furiously blow it up – piece by piece or, if my friends point out, crudely drawn penis by cock – until it achieves a pristine shine with a high-pressure water jet. If it helps, you could almost think of it as anti-painting, but there’s more to pressure washing than just pointing and squirting from a first-person perspective. You’ll spend an equal amount of time traversing each stage’s filthy environment – climbing ladders, scaling scaffolding, or simply relying on good old-fashioned jumping – to reach troublesome pockets of grime accumulated in awkward nooks or on multi-story ledges. As you continue your pressure washing adventure, you will be faced with more and more dirt. The scenes – from pop-up public toilets to Art Deco mansions – become larger and more elaborate over time; stains become more and more persistent, and the key to continued success is a slowly expanding arsenal of equipment.

In PowerWash Simulator, the equipment is everything and the nozzles are its heart. Generally, the wider the nozzle radius, the weaker the blast, so – faced with this trade-off – you’re always looking for a nozzle that will provide the best distribution for a given situation while cutting through layers of varying degrees of stubborn dirt. Later levels can be dauntingly vast, sometimes taking up to an hour to clear, but by keeping up with your upgrades – spending the money you earn from quests on attachments to increase your range or more powerful trigger guns – you can maximize the dispersion of dirt.

Not that it required much skill. All this moment-by-moment assessment and adjustment quickly becomes second nature, and at that point you either flee in terror from the ineffable mundanity of it all, or become hopelessly lost in the primal pleasures of restoring each stage to its pristine, retina-burning glory with a single hit of dopamine ding at once. Dingas sound whenever an item is checked off on a level’s clearing list, breaking down each seemingly Sisyphean task into more manageable parts. AND ding means progress; another tiny victory on the road to a greater goal, and soon the strangely hypnotic rhythm – that constant hiss of ASMR water, that inexorable Pavlov sound – disappears for hours of your time in pursuit of just one more ding.

Of course, this is nothing new if you’ve spent any time with the original PowerWash simulator, and it’s safe to say that its sequel evolves the formula in only the subtlest of steps. PowerWash Simulator 2 is largely a game of modest refinement and expansion, the most obvious addition being a new headquarters-like area that you can wander around and decorate with furniture that can be unlocked (after a thorough, deep clean, of course) between tasks. Sure, it’s basically just a fancier menu interface, but it’s definitely more appealing to see your achievements in a more tangible form. Souvenirs from adventures appear on the shelves in your office; newspaper clippings complement the increasingly absurd corkboard narrative, and the giant Caldera Land map where you’ll find your new job adds another layer to the show’s stunning world-building, giving everything a greater sense of cohesion. So while it’s not a major addition, it helps present a much more polished face compared to the first game’s somewhat sloppy jumble of menus, and is a good focal point for socializing between workstations in co-op, which now supports two-player split-screen or four-player online.

When it comes to the heart of it all, the FuturLab sequel brings welcome – if not particularly dramatic – fixes and improvements across the board. For example, the controllers offer a more intuitive control scheme, as well as a new on-screen indicator that shows exactly where the few remaining, unwashed items are hiding. Elsewhere, climbing equipment has been expanded to include a stepladder, a scissor lift and a type of hanging seat that can be operated, and the soap station – used to loosen particularly difficult mud – has undergone a major overhaul. The original limited-use, material-specific soap is now versatile and available in unlimited quantities, which means it’s much easier to incorporate its foaming goodness into your work (though you now have to wash it off by hand), which FuturLab’s level design often takes advantage of. As for these stages, there are a lot of good things here.

For starters, PowerWash Simulator 2 builds on the complex and somewhat unpopular vehicle tasks of the first game, instead focusing on more diverse, larger-scale environmental challenges. Just a few levels later, you pressure wash a giant billboard hanging over a vast desert highway (PowerWash Simulator’s odd juxtaposition of classic Americana and very British fantasy remains in full effect here), and then you find yourself at an amusement park shooting range filled with fun callbacks, roadside gas stations, relatively unassuming stages and more. At FuturLab, the level design formula is a work of art at this point; PowerWash Simulator 2 looks great – filled with tantalizing, slow-reveal gags and primary-color details – and plays well, judiciously breaking everything down into smaller chunks that require different approaches (high bits, flat bits, complicated bits, etc.) to balance out the monotonous repetition. To further alleviate potential fatigue, new quests unlock sporadically as you reach milestones in a level, meaning there’s usually a new challenge if you crave a change of scenery. Or you can always go back to HQ and wash your sofa if you’re in desperate need of a pallet cleaner.

So it may not be a groundbreaking progression in the series, but it’s good, solid fun, further enhanced by that boundless charm. There was really no need for the original PowerWash Simulator to be as challenging as it was in terms of story, but its goofy tapestry of narrative absurdity undoubtedly helped elevate it well above the asset-flipping tendencies of its work sim peers. And the pure, unfiltered fantasy of PowerWash Simulator 2 is equally a delight, full of callbacks and hilarious silliness that permeates everything. You will help a street cleaner after an unpleasant accident during the annual blueberry celebration; you will repair the damage caused by an enthusiastic hairdresser who mistakenly hired an engineer to replace him; you’ll get involved in even more merry grudges. And all of this is delivered via a chorus of text chats from a huge number of local residents who have apparently discovered group chat and picture messaging since the first game. This creates a wonderfully immersive element of world-building – enhanced by elaborate background environments that give the proceedings a charming sense of place – ultimately speaking to the care and attention that FuturLab devotes to its incredibly strange series.

Like its predecessor, PowerWash Simulator 2 is definitely not for everyone, and it doesn’t offer anything to convince doubters that constantly moving the nozzle back and forth is a worthy way to spend your time. This isn’t a sequel that takes its ambitions in giant strides, but rather smaller, clever improvements – which, taken together, justify its existence as an entirely new game. PowerWash Simulator 2 may be mostly similar, but when it’s this delightfully absurd, this blissfully addictive – whether you’re looking for a place to socialize or an excuse to relax and empty your mind – that’s not a criticism. I’ll probably be back for another 92.7 hours and I can only hope that the entire new generation of PowerWash washing machines will heed the call of this siren. ding; their hours imperceptibly turn into days as they gleefully wade through the endless mud, one crudely extended cock after another.

FuturLab provided a copy of PowerWash Simulator 2 for this review.