Alongside a worldwide vaccination program, PowerWash Simulator is the only reason humanity survived Covid. The 2022 release, inexplicably published by Square Enix, asked us simply to clean. Clean playgrounds, houses, flying saucers, all caked in a thick layer of mud and grime. It was, and still is, a zen-like source of joy and calm, and most importantly—thanks to a growing roster of DLC—is getting weirder.
It’s actually perhaps unfair to suggest the core game isn’t weird enough already. While you could be forgiven for not noticing as you play, the easily ignored pop-up text boxes that appear as you play contain a storyline that is about a corrupt mayor who is in cahoots with an evil businessman who shot down a flying saucer sent by a time-traveling scientist from the future in order that he could continue to divert water supplies and thus cause the eruption of every volcano on the Pacific Rim. God damn, I love that I’m not making this up.
Thanks to the miraculous decision by Squeenix to publish this utterly wonderful oddity, that meant crunch-free developers Futurlab had access to some enormous IP for their DLC. Thus we received a Tomb Raider-themed free pack, that let us clean the entire outside of Croft Manor, and a bunch of Final Fantasy-related muckiness in the Midgar Special Pack. Since then, ambitions have reached even further, with a SpongeBob-based DLC, a collection based on Back To The Future, and now—perhaps most improbably—February 27 sees the release of a special back themed around Warhammer 40,000.
In this latest collection finally shown in the trailer above, we’ll be cleaning the vehicles and mech suits of various factions from Games Workshop’s 40K, using not the usual power washers, but the (and bear with my on my spelling) Mark 2 Aqua Santica Arquabus.
It looks suitably silly and epic, while still offering the familiar and calm-inducing pleasure of making a dirty thing get clean.
I have to assume that Brighton, UK’s Futurlab has a whiteboard with a wishlist of outlandish possibilities to pitch for inclusion, which is then somehow being ticked one major license at a time, everyone involved in disbelief. I’d love to know what remains—surely somewhere appear the words “Indiana Jones” (imagine spray-cleaning the Ark of the Covenant).
I also hold out hope for a full sequel that integrates physics into the cleaning, so we can remove have those “PING!” moments where a still-dirty beam suddenly glistens clean, or indeed the torture of trying to find the one pixel of mud remaining on the inside of a wheel arch.
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