A Video Game That Shows You the Joy of Cleaning

PowerWash Simulator makes cleaning fun, and demonstrates the ecstasy of menial labor.

I do not mean to brag, but as of late, I simply cannot stop cleaning. I’ve used my expertise to make my filthy van spotless. I removed all the dirt and grime from the mayor’s golf cart in a matter of minutes. I walked into a playground covered in mud and muck, and by the time I left it was sparkling. And if you’re wondering, no, I haven’t made a career transition from writer to maintenance woman, or taken up a new side hustle. In fact, I’ve been able to do all this cleaning within the comfort of my own home.

You see, I’ve spent the last week playing hours and hours of a new video game called PowerWash Simulator, a sort of first person shooter wherein the player becomes the proprietor of a pressure-washing business, and works on jobs ranging from cleaning the muck caked onto a quasi-haunted house to hosing down a frankly disgusting skate park to helping that old woman who lived in a shoe get the soot and lichten off of her unconventional home.

Every job I take on is worth a certain amount of money and broken down into tiny tasks for me to complete — the garage roof, the eyelets of the shoelace, the window frame, etc. — and whenever I finish up one of these tiny sections, it flashes white, you hear a little ding, and a few dollars gets deposited into your bank account. A jolt of satisfaction courses through my veins whenever I hear that beautiful ding. When I finish the entire job, I get to see a timelapse of the whole process, a before and after that shows all the hard work I did and how it paid off.

It was the perfect time for me to find PowerWash Simulator, since my main non-work assignment this week was cleaning my entire apartment before my mother visited. Playing PowerWash Simulator while I embarked on a journey of cleaning in real life worked for me on several levels. First of all, every place and thing that I cleaned in the game was so unbelievably filthy that it made me feel better about my own state of affairs, since my apartment looked as sterile as an operating room in comparison to the mayor’s disgusting golf cart or whatever.