PowerWash Simulator 2 favors welcome improvements over big improvements, but it's, as always, wonderfully engaging and winningly silly.
Is there a sound more beautiful than ringing about a well squirted squirt and a job well done? Children's laughter, you object, or the chirping of a new day. But as someone who put a good 92.7 hours into the original PowerWash SimulatorI feel confident saying this ringingAnd the Pavlovian pleasure it evokes is truly the most magnificent sound of all. And with the advent PowerWash 2 Simulatorit's time to do it – and ringing this is it again.
Several months passed between the events of the original PowerWash Simulator and its sequel, which is important for two reasons. First, it gives developer FuturLab an excuse to reset the balance after giving away pressure-washing supplies at the end of the first game in such over-the-top excess that if it came back, it would make the sequel downright trivial (this time, officially, you've sold all your equipment in the store at the swanky new headquarters). And secondly, it means the narrative gap needs to be filled with even more of that brilliant story.
If you're new to the series, the idea of a game's story about non-stop hosing may seem absurd, but – as anyone who found themselves inevitably caught up in the first game's ludicrous tapestry of petty grievances, corrupt politicians, missing cats, time-traveling aliens, long-lost civilizations and erupting volcanoes will tell you – it's one of the biggest appeals PowerWash Simulator. However, let's go back a little.
At its simplest, PowerWash Simulator is a game where you point a nozzle at something dirty and then violently blast it—bit by bit, or if my friends are any indication, crudely drawn dick by dick—to a flawless shine with a stream of high-pressure water. If it helps, you can think of it almost as anti-painting, but there's more to pressure washing than just pointing and splattering in the first person. You'll spend just as much time clambering through each stage's muddy environments—climbing ladders, scaling scaffolding, or simply relying on a good old-fashioned jump—to reach nasty pockets of dirt hidden in awkward nooks or on ledges several stories high. And as your pressure washing odyssey continues, you'll encounter increasingly challenging stains. From pop-up public restrooms to Art Deco mansions, the scenes grow larger and more complex over time; stains become more stubborn, and the key to your continued success is a slowly expanding arsenal of equipment.
In PowerWash Simulator, hardware is everything, and at the heart of it all are the injectors. Essentially, the wider the radius of the nozzle, the weaker the jet, so when faced with this trade-off, you're always looking for the nozzle that will give you the best spread in any given situation while still cutting through layers of varying stubborn dirt. Later levels can be intimidatingly expansive, sometimes taking over an hour to clean up, but by keeping up with your upgrades – spending the money you earn on missions on attachments to extend your reach, or on more powerful trigger guns – you can maximize your dirt dispersal.
Not that there's a lot of skill involved. All this moment-to-moment evaluation and adjustment quickly becomes second nature, at which point you'll either run away in horror from the unspeakable ordinariness of it all, or become hopelessly lost in the primal pleasures of restoring each stage to its flawless, retina-searing glory with a single hit of dopamine. ringing at a time. calls sounds every time an item is checked off a level's clearing list, breaking down each seemingly Sisyphean task into more manageable chunks. A ringing means progress; one more tiny victory on the way to a larger goal, and soon enough the strange hypnotic rhythm – that continuous ASMR hiss of water, the relentless Pavlovian ring – disappears for whole hours of your time in pursuit of another ringing.
Of course, none of this will be news if you spent any time with the original PowerWash Simulator at all, and it's fair to say that PowerWash Simulator 2 takes the formula forward in only minimal steps. This is very much a game with modest tweaks and expansions, the most obvious addition being a new hub-like headquarters where you can lounge around, decorate with unlockable furniture (after a thorough deep clean, of course) and pet cats in between tasks. Sure, it's essentially just a prettier menu interface, but there's a certain appeal to seeing your accomplishments presented in a more tangible form. Mementos from your adventures appear on your office shelves; newspaper clippings help flesh out the increasingly outlandish corkboard narrative, and a huge map of Caldera Country, where you'll find your new job, adds another layer to the series' delightful world-building, giving everything a greater sense of cohesion. So while it's hardly a significant addition, it does help provide a significantly more polished look compared to the slightly sloppy menu confusion of the first game, and it's a good hub for communication between tasks in online co-op, which now supports four players.
When it comes to basic pressure washing, the FuturLab sequel brings welcome, if not particularly significant, changes and improvements across the board. For example, the controllers feature a more intuitive control scheme, as well as a new on-screen indicator that shows exactly where those few remaining unwashed items are hiding. Elsewhere, climbing equipment has been expanded to include a pneumatic lifting platform and a sort of suspended seat that can be controlled, and the soap used to loosen particularly tough mud has received a major overhaul. The original limited-use, material-specific soap is now universal and has an endless supply, meaning it's much easier to incorporate its soap into your workflow (though you now have to manually hose it off), which is often used in FuturLab's level design. As far as these stages are concerned, there is a lot of good stuff here.
First, PowerWash Simulator 2 ditches the labor-intensive and rather unpopular vehicles of the first game, instead focusing on larger, more diverse environmental issues. After just a couple of levels, you're pressure washing a giant billboard hanging over a vast deserted highway (PowerWash Simulator's quirky combination of classic Americana and very British whimsy remains in full force here), and then you're taken to a fairground shooting range full of funny callbacks, roadside gas stations, comparatively modest bandstands, and more. other. At this point, FuturLab has the level design formula down to an art; PowerWash Simulator 2's offerings look great—filled with enticing, slow-revealing visuals and primary color detail—and play well, intelligently breaking everything down into smaller chunks that require different approaches (tall bits, flat bits, complex bits, etc.) to compensate for the monotonous repetition. And to further reduce potential fatigue, new missions are unlocked periodically as you reach checkpoints in a level, meaning there's usually a new challenge popping up if you're itching for a change of scenery. Or you can always head back to HQ to hose down the couch if you're in desperate need of a palette cleaner.
It may not be a revelatory achievement for the series, but it's good, fun entertainment that's further enhanced by the series' boundless charm. The original PowerWash Simulator didn't really need to work as hard as it did in terms of story, but its ridiculous tapestry of absurd storytelling certainly helped elevate it well above the asset-flipping tendencies of its peers in the work sim genre. And the pure, unfiltered fantasy of PowerWash Simulator 2 is just as much fun, full of callbacks and fun silliness that permeates every vibrant inch of the game. You will help a janitor after an unpleasant incident during the city's annual blueberry festival; you will repair the damage caused by an enthusiastic hairdresser who was mistakenly hired instead of an engineer; you will become entangled in even greater fair offense. And it's all conveyed through a chorus of text messages from scores of locals who seem to have discovered group chat and picture messaging since the first game. This makes for a surprisingly fun bit of world building, complemented by a huge background environment that gives the proceedings a great sense of place, which ultimately speaks to the care and attention that FuturLab puts into their extremely strange series.
Like its predecessor, PowerWash Simulator 2 is definitely not for everyone, and it offers little to convince skeptics that continuously rocking the attachment back and forth is a worthy use of their time. This isn't a sequel that reveals its ambitions in broad strokes, but rather in smaller, more subtle refinements – which, taken together, I think justify its existence as an entirely new game. PowerWash Simulator 2 may be much of the same, but when it's so charmingly ridiculous and so blissfully entertaining – whether you're looking for a place to socialize or an excuse to relax and empty your mind – it's hardly a criticism. As for me, I'll probably be back for another 92.7 hours, and I can only hope that a whole new generation of PowerWasher machines will succumb to that siren's call. ringing; their hours slip into days as they gleefully zip through the endless mud, one crudely drawn dick at a time.
A copy of PowerWash Simulator 2 was provided for this review by FuturLab.
