Find Your Joy in Blasting Filth
Video games have traditionally let us live digital lives more exciting than our real ones, full of adventure, exploration, and copious amounts of violence. But a surprise hit game coming out of Steam Early Access this week shows that there’s a market for electronic experiences that are a little bit more…mundane.
PowerWash Simulator first appeared on itch.io(Opens in a new window), the marketplace of choice for indie developers messing around with goofy ideas, in April of 2020. The team at FuturLab, most notable for creating a tie-in game for the TV show Peaky Blinders, had run across a subreddit dedicated to videos of people using power washers to remove built-up filth from all kinds of surfaces. They decided that with the world stressed out by a global pandemic, the time might be right for a little relaxing and satisfying simulated cleaning.
The game is simple: Take a dirty object and, with a variety of nozzles and soaps, make it clean from top to bottom. You’re scored by how much water you use and how satisfied your client is, but there’s nothing riding on your performance, and you can’t get fired. Instead, it’s just about the slow, simple satisfaction of spraying off dirt and grime from a variety of objects.
Although the demo had been out for a while, things really got sudsy in May of last year, when developers FuturLab dropped it on Early Access. Steam’s unfinished-game marketplace is home to a whole lot of asset swaps and derivative crap—just trying to count the half-baked zombie survival games alone would take you the better part of a day—but it’s also a way for unique ideas to get public exposure. And it wasn’t long before PowerWash Simulator found an audience with streamers and YouTubers.
PowerWash Simulator
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