The rise and rise of 2022’s PowerWash Simulator is everything that’s right with video games. It’s a game about washing the dirt off stuff, delivered with absolute sincerity, and extremely well made. It got me through a horrible bout of Covid, as I meticulously scrubbed every fleck of dirt from adventure playgrounds and country mansions, and rightly became a huge hit. Which makes it all the better that its post-release additions have leaned in. And today developers FuturLab have revealed plans for much more to come in 2023.
The first update back in January was the completely free addition of five brand new levels set in the world of Tomb Raider. You can clean the front of Croft Manor! You can scrub down the obstacle course! And it was delivered with equally as straight a face as the main game. Then in March came a bundle of free Final Fantasy-themed areas! Last week saw its first paid DLC, which was naturally based on Spongebob Squarepants.
Today FuturLab have laid out their roadmap for the rest of the year, and while it is quite frustratingly vague, it does give me the all-important opportunity to post the teaser for its Warhammer 40K crossover! That’s the farthest away inclusion in the roadmap, however. It seems we have much to look forward to before even then.
What we’ve learned from their tweet is that there’s to be another paid DLC due to appear in Q3 (whatever that means in this instance), along with more from what the game calls The Muckingham Files—the title it gave to a slew of free new content it added in the 1.2 update back in April.
Then following that, toward the end of the year, FuturLab is promising even more free “seasonal content,” which of course means, Christmassy cleaning!
If you’ve not played PowerWash Simulator, and you think this is either an elaborate wind-up, or that Kotaku has gone completely nuts, be assured it’s neither! It’s a legitimately stupendous game, available on Game Pass, creating a zen-like methodological happy place, where you get all the satisfaction of making dirty things get sparkly clean, without having to even pick up a vacuum.