It’s been almost two months since I last played one of those games that almost feels like therapy. In mid-October, I told you about my wonderful experience in the Crime Scene Cleaner demo, which basically tries to clean crime scenes in the style of Mr. Wolf from Pulp Fiction.
It was quite liberating because I was coming from playing Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen… something that almost destroyed my mental stability. When you tend to like slower experiences that are recreated frequently, facing more frenetic and demanding ones can become quite a strenuous task.
It has been an exciting month: Rockstar Games presented the long-awaited GTA VI trailer and other companies such as Epic Games and Santa Monica Studios have given us free content for Fortnite and God of War Ragnarök respectively. And more recently, I have once again delighted in the wonderful No Man’s Sky. The only thing that can get me out of the Hello Games game is Baldur’s Gate 3…and perhaps it has done so by the time you are reading this post.
Now that 2024 is just around the corner, we can say without fear that we only have to drive the last nail into the grave of 2023. And that is precisely what this publication is. I knew that Destiny 2
PowerWash Simulator: cleaning as relaxation therapy
It is the ideal time to slow down and start leaving 2023 behind. The free games from the PlayStation Plus service in December have given me a key experience for this purpose: PowerWash Simulator. If it sounds familiar to you, it is because it was quite popular during its launch in 2021 and included DLCs dedicated to Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Back to the Future and even SpongeBob SquarePants.
The FuturLab video game is not difficult to understand: we are a cleaner who aspires to set up his cleaning company and we must progress little by little, job by job. As we make orders, we earn money and reputation to access new work tools: from cleaning machines to aesthetic equipment to look better.
It all revolves around a tablet that we use to accept orders, buy new equipment and receive messages from clients. The rest is simple: clean everything that comes our way alone or cooperatively. The range of dirty things ranges from a van to entire houses and parks, which means that assignments can last ten minutes or two hours.
When I tell you that an order can last two hours, it is not a way of speaking. One of the most laborious jobs that has taken me the longest to complete has been cleaning a playground. It cost me a lot, but paying $600.00 for 100% cleaning made it worth it. I forgot to take a screenshot to show it.
Not all works are colorful and original. Some are simply houses, motorcycles and gardens that have nothing special, but I can assure you that they all have a design that complicates things in many ways. The quality of the equipment and knowing how to choose the tool for each purpose is essential.
Another laborious job was the house you see just below (“Clean the chalet”). Except for the grass, everything was dirty from top to bottom. And yes, the area of the house that faces the garden was also dirty. This took me about an hour and forty minutes, including a couple of short breaks to have a snack and watch a few minutes of the Twitch live stream that was playing in the background.
The magic of PowerWash Simulator: simplicity and clear objectives
PowerWash Simulator It is a perfect video game to relax, turn off your brain and put something in the background to set the mood for the game. It doesn’t matter if it’s a live stream on Twitch, a video on YouTube, a movie or series, music or even a podcast. And if you want to stay immersed, think that the character has headphones while he works.
I’ve thought a lot about why games like Crime Scene CleanerLake, PowerWash SimulatorSnowrunner and similar have such a powerful ability to relax so many players, including myself: their simplicity and clarity when setting specific objectives, without 800 other activities to distract us.
And specifically this case is the perfect example of what I’m talking about: small-sized scenarios with something in the center (structure, vehicle…) and the sole objective of leaving it clean as gold. No side objectives, collectibles, empty conversations or NPCs yelling at you what, when and how to do. And let alone have a message on the screen all the time to remind you of your obligation.
FuturLab introduces everything we need to know about the game in a tutorial in the form of a first job. During the rest of the experience it is limited to letting us loose in different scenarios so that we do the only thing that is expected of us: clean whatever we touch. Without time or conditions. Do it when, how and with whoever you want, you can even close the game and continue at another time.
And it’s not laziness on the part of the developers, but rather trust that the player is responsible enough to know that getting all the stars in each job is essential to unlock better tools. Although we may not get all the stars and go from one job to another with the same dirty tool that we got at the beginning. We can even achieve 100% of all jobs without having to invest in different parts and cleaning products.
In short: clean in PowerWash Simulator is not as exciting and charismatic as Crime Scene Cleanerbut I cannot deny that it is giving me back all the years of life that 2023 has taken from me. I never imagined that this year would end with such a tremendous vice for this video game.
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