Getting Clean with Powerwash Simulator 2

By Moises Taveras | October 28, 2025 | 11:30am

Video Games Features powerwash simulator 2

Getting Clean with Powerwash Simulator 2

Powerwash Simulator 2 pulls a sick trick in its early hours. During one of its first cleaning jobs, the player is charged with handling a “public facility” that looks, on its face, like a simple bench. Like its predecessor, Powerwash Simulator 2 will often throw a number of missions at the player which vary in size—sometimes a gig is a five-minute session of cleaning a small vehicle, while other times it’ll be an hours-long endeavor washing the entirety of a playground or train station—so I took the the job without batting an eye. However, hosing the bench and the immediate area around it instead prompted a ding, one distinct from the familiar sound of a completed job. I stepped back from the bench and an entirely new structure rose from the ground, signaling to me that my real ordeal had just begun.

I was here to wash a pretty foul public restroom, and the job was far more intensive than I thought it’d be. It also turned out to be Powerwash Simulator 2‘s first example of a multistage level, where rinsing off one layer of muck revealed another, and then maybe even another after that. Once I washed the exterior of the high-tech lavatory, its door popped open and revealed an even bigger mess inside. Some of the game’s stages act like this, withholding messes just outside the player’s reach as a proverbial twist of the knife should they ever mistake their job for nearly done. As a mind-numbing palette cleanser, I was more than happy to tackle jobs that unfolded like this where minutes melted into hours.

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But there was something else to that progression, as well as that visual—that of a sort of shit-filled matryoshka doll masking increasingly onerous problems in need of fixing—that struck a chord.

(Ding)

A few years ago now, I wrote about my relationship to the then freshly released first installment in the Powerwash Simulator series. I’d been losing sleep over it and its alluring domestic fantasies and pondering how my own life might look when structured around routines and responsibilities like the ones I was cultivating in the filth-soaked streets of Muckingham, the games’ setting.

In truth, I was dreaming of a life I’d achieve shortly afterwards once I finally struck out and began living on my own. I longed for days driven by purpose and obligation to myself and my loved ones and before long, I was at it. I had attained my dream job, I had a healthy social calendar, and more crucially, I was doing my own groceries and cleaning. I’d settled into a routine and felt…clean. In Powerwash Simulator, you can press a button that highlights all the dirt in the environment, giving them a fiery orange glow. For a time though, things were good. I didn’t see orange.

(Ding)

I overslept on the day I was laid off from my dream job. When I came to, my phone was awash with condolences. I spent a harried few seconds making sense of it all, but like my blurred vision that late morning, the picture began to come into focus before long. I’d have a few months’ severance for my loyal adherence to our owner’s boneheaded demands—demands which jeopardized my livelihood and job rather than theirs—and that would be the end of that. By the end of day, I was out on my ass. It was my mother’s birthday.

The time since has been filled with half-starts and dead ends. I’ve spent the year laughing off my circumstances at friendly gatherings. I temporarily became a depressive recluse. I stood up to the wee hours of the morning doing nothing but ideating for weeks on end. I played lots of games, Powerwash Simulator included. Job opportunities turned sour. Any semblance of structure my life briefly enjoyed crumbled to dust, and yet its collapse revealed an entirely different and crueler routine than the one I’d imagined. All the while, that familiar orange glow has slowly crept back into my life.

Through it all, I’ve felt as though I’ve just been moving from one personal mess to another. Whether it be personally or professionally, I’ve begun to feel as though I’m leaping from one metaphorical frying pan and right into another fire and back again. Cleaning a bench just to reveal a whole restroom ad nauseam, if you will. And it’s exhausting feeling like no matter how many of them I clean up, there’s always anothe-

(Ding)

Every time I get to the end of a job in Powerwash Simulator 2, especially one that eats up a lot of time—considering I play the game alone, some of these missions take me several hours—I feel a deep sense of relief. Finally, a chore done and crossed off of my list. Finally, a respite from the drone of my washer’s nozzle. Finally, a problem solved. Then, like clockwork, I get the notification that another job has been posted. A character texts me with a problem, and I try to meet them with a solution.

And I am so determined to clean that mess and make things right that I jump right in. Against my better judgement, one job quickly (and frequently) snowballs into three or four, no matter how it drains me. I don’t know how to shut it off. My best hope is that someday soon, I’ll run out of sites to clean. That I’ll beat back that orange menace again.

I feel…stuck in Powerwash Simulator 2‘s vicious cycle. I reckon I’m not alone in that feeling either. I think I’ll get out someday. Until then, I’m learning to accept that cleaning these messes is just my lot in life until the day where, finally, everything is clean.

Moises Taveras is a struggling games journalist whose greatest aspiration in life at this point is to play as the cow in Mario Kart World. You can periodically find him spouting nonsense and bad jokes on Bluesky.