Do you have time to talk about my lord and saviour, PowerWash Simulator? The unexpected cult hit hooked weirdos like me back in 2022 with its relaxing, satisfying premise; clean dirt off things. Has the sequel, PowerWash Simulator 2, changed the fundamental act of power washing? Has it given new meaning to slowly blasting graffiti off a wall? Will it make you question what it truly means to be filthy in 2025? No. And thank Mr. Clean for that, because it’s the simplicity that makes it so satisfying. What you do get is what fans like me – I’ve got over 400 hours logged in the original – really needed; some quality of life upgrades and lots of new things to wash. I can see myself racking up another 400 hours on this installment easily.
In case you missed out the first time, it really is as straightforward as it sounds. You are given a vehicle or location to clean, a selection of power washers (they all function the same way, just with varying power), soap, and if a level is feeling saucy, some ladders. You choose your washer, your nozzle (I’m a green girl, yellow for detail work, any one who uses white wasn’t loved enough by their mother), and you’re left to clean at your own pace, sluicing down sections in whatever way you please. One of the real beauties of PowerWash Simulator is that you can’t eff it up. As long as you’re blasting water at dirt, eventually things will get clean. Even if you never upgraded anything, you’d still get there in the end.
The big headline for the sequel is all the new cleaning jobs to work your way through, and they don’t disappoint. There are vehicles like a mobility scooter or a car decorated like a dog; there are buildings like bandstands, public toilets, and grand houses; and there are even new multi-stage jobs where you’ll need to clean a particular part of a map to reveal a new area. There is the perfect balance of large buildings and complex structures, for when I wanted to spend a solid hour spraying, alongside smaller vehicles for a quicker splash of dopamine. Less exciting for purists like me is the addition of a home base you can decorate (but alas, not clean) and some pet cats. I mean, everyone likes virtual pets, but unless I can tie mops to their feet I have no interest in them when I’m busy jetwashing a billboard.
You’ll understand the beautiful mundanity of this game when I tell you that one of the most exciting innovations is that soap is now free and multipurpose. Not just a blow against capitalism, it actually removes one of the biggest annoyances about the first game. Soap had to be purchased, came in limited quantities, and a different soap was required for each surface. Now you just switch to the soap attachment and any surface, on any job, can be your own personal foam party as it breaks down tough stains. I’ve gone from a soap dodger to a detergent dilettante. While you’re cleaning there are also new icons to help you track down things that still need polishing up, which might sound minor, but as someone who spent hours of their life looking for a 1% speck of dirt on a huge restroom wall, I am hugely grateful for it.
The other new tricks in your cleaning kit similarly make things that were a bit of a fiddle or a grind easier, without letting you skip the work. There’s an abseiling rig for large structures like billboards, a cherry picker lift so you’re not balancing on ladders to get to hard to reach areas, and a spinning surface cleaner – you know, like school janitors mysteriously push around after hours – to make polishing up large flat surfaces a little less daunting. There are even tiny tweaks, like that tall scaffolding now has a ladder on the outside when you just want to get to the top, no more zig zagging up and down.
What’s key is that the improvements aren’t about speeding you through the jobs more quickly or letting you skip chunks, because the whole point of PowerWash Simulator 1 and 2 is the meditative flow state you achieve just working away at the grime and graffiti, back and forth, up and down, all with the gentle hiss of water accompanying your progress. It’s underrated as an ASMR experience, although you will need to pee every 10 minutes.
If you’ve yet to discover the wonders of jet washing random buildings and vehicles, good news; there’s no lore you have to catch up on. The loose story is delivered through text messages while you’re working, but you could skip them all without a problem. They usually explain why you’re cleaning, for instance, a street sweeper covered in huckleberry jelly, or will give you weird information about the area. There are some nice touches for devotees of the original, too. A shooting gallery has miniature versions of the landmarks you’ll recognize, and the chatter will reference the iconic merman statue or strange temple. It’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense I appreciated.
