Video Game / PowerWash Simulator

Wash away your worries with the soothing sounds of high-pressure water.

PowerWash Simulator is an indie casual game developed by FuturLab and released for Microsoft Windows via Steam Early Access preview on May 19, 2021, with a full release published by Square Enix on July 14th, 2022 for Steam as well as for Xbox One and Xbox Series X. On January 31, 2023, it released for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.

In this job simulator, players take on the role of a professional cleaner who, alongside their business partner, has set up a power washing business of varying names in the town of Muckingham, Caldera City. Players will use a power washer to clean various items, vehicles and entire locations, earning money as they go along. This money can be used to purchase more powerful washers, cleaning solutions and equipment such as additional nozzles and washer extensions.

The game features four modes:

• Career Mode, where the player progresses through jobs of increasing complexity, uncovering the past of Muckingham and the residents that live in it. Compatible with two-player multiplayer co-op.
• Free Play Mode, which allows the player to replay any level previously cleared in Career Mode with all the currently unlocked tools and infinite soap to use.
• Challenge Mode, where the player must complete jobs under time or water usage limits to attain a high score.
• Special Mode, unique cleaning scenarios with no bearing on the other modes.

The game is planned to have multiple free and paid level packs as additional DLC, including some which are crossovers with other properties. Currently, these are:

• Community Map Pack 1 (May 19, 2022, free)^note 1 vehicle map, 2 location maps, voted for by the game's playerbase
• Tomb Raider (January 31, 2023, free)^note 2 vehicle maps, 3 location maps, all set in and around Croft Manor
• Midgar (March 2, 2023, free)^note 3 vehicle maps, 2 location maps
• The Muckingham Files, Part 1 (April 18, 2023, free)^note 1 vehicle map, 2 location maps
• SpongeBob SquarePants (June 29, 2023, paid)^note 3 vehicle maps, 3 location maps
• The Muckingham Files, Part 2 (August 31, 2023, free)^note 1 vehicle map, 2 location maps
• Back to the Future (November 16, 2023, paid)^note 3 vehicle maps, 2 location maps
• Santa's Workshop (December 14, 2023, free [January 8, 2024 for Switch])^note 1 location map
• Warhammer 40,000 (February 27, 2024, paid)^note 5 vehicle maps

---

Tropes present in this game:

• 11th-Hour Superpower: By the time you unlock the game-breaking tri-nozzle, Career Mode is almost over, but it still does an excellent job making those final levels a lot easier.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Implied in the Final Fantasy VII Scorpion Sentinel level. While you're told that you've been registered as a non-target to the Sentinel, Heidegger also says you may not wanna stick around longer than necessary.
• Alien Animals: While cleaning the Monster Truck, one of the rumours texted to the player about the missing cats is that they're all aliens that were on a recon mission and have left Earth to make their report. They aren't.
• All for Nothing:
  • On one of the final levels, while Mount Rushless is erupting, Grandpa Miller texts the player to inform them that all of the soot is undoing all of the hard work they did cleaning his house. (But his car's safely in the garage, so that's okay.)
  • In the Final Fantasy VII pack, the Scorpion Sentinel you cleaned is later destroyed by Cloud and co., while the 7th Heaven Bar is crushed later when the Sector 7 plate collapses. After you finish cleaning the Airbuster, Heidegger says he's going to immediately sic it on Avalanche (the group Cloud works with). You can probably guess how that's going to turn out.
• All Just a Dream: With the April 2023 update adding client messages to the original bonus jobs, the Mars rover job becomes this. You receive a job offer right before bed for the next day, dream about cleaning the rover and strange hatch (likely due to some space/alien wording), and receive a message the next day saying that the job was cancelled since an overnight rain cleaned the thing pretty well.
• All There in the Manual: Players of the Warhammer 40K DLC who aren’t familiar with the lore may pause for a moment of thought when they realize that the Dreadnought includes a sarcophagus, and the sarcophagus has a window.
• All Up to You: The final level, the Lost Temple, is especially hilarious as the nearby vehicles have four of your previous clients in them watching you cleaning the building while being too lazy to come out and help despite everyone being kind of aware that the building has something to do with the nearby exploding volcano.
  • slightly subverted if you tackle the level in multiplayer mode, as the additional powerwashers running around can be explained as your previous clients choosing to lend a hand.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Most of the Crossover DLCs imply that the Player Character is still the same one from the base game (with how they got to Midgar or Bikini Bottom glossed over). The Warhammer 40,000 DLC by contrast has you playing as a cleaning focused member of the Adetus Mechanicus.
• Animal Motif: Cats feature prominently in Career Mode. The disappearance of the mayor's cat Ulysses is a recurring plot point, followed by every other cat in town going missing as well. The mayor's frolic boat has a golden cat figurehead wearing a tricorn. One mid-game job has you clean a cat-themed monster truck that's also called Ulysses. Cat footprints in the dirt are a frequent occurrence on many jobs.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The game includes a number of helpful features to ensure that each job the player completes is as stress-free as possible.
  • Once the player has washed off roughly 99% of dirt from a given surface, said surface will flash blue and remove all remaining spots the player might have missed. This ensures that each job doesn't devolve into strenuous pixel-hunting in order to clean 100% of each surface.
  • Equipment like ladders can be grabbed from any distance, so there's no need to worry about getting them stuck on roofs.
  • Pressing the "Show Dirt" button (TAB by default on PC) briefly highlights all present dirt in bright orange, allowing the player to more clearly see dirt on darker surfaces or that has only been partially washed away.
  • Selecting a surface type from the "Details" tab of a given job causes all unclean surfaces of that type to continuously flash white, allowing the player to find them easily.
  • When the player has three surface types left to clean in a given job, a small checklist of the remaining surfaces appears in the top-left, just below the level's total cleanliness percentile.
  • The scaffolding can be moved around just as easily as the ladder or steps despite being way too big and heavy for one human to carry. It would be pretty much useless otherwise, though.
  • New equipment can be purchased at any time. Very convenient if you run out of soap or unlock something new while in the middle of an active job.
  • The Fire Truck has a folded ladder on top that's easily one of the most fiddly bits in the game, plus it's made of rusted metal, which at this point is arguably the most annoying type of dirt you have to deal with. Fortunately, the ladder seems to have a much more forgiving auto-complete percentage than normal to compensate for that.
• Anti-Grinding: Replaying jobs in Freeplay Mode only pays out 25% the amount of cash you got for the same job in Career Mode, possibly because most jobs are balanced around a specific washer model and can get a tad less enjoyable when played with overpowered equipment.
• Apocalypse How: As Ceruleon Skye reveals, Mount Rushless's eruption would lead to tectonic instability so severe that the entire volcanic system of the Pacific Rim also erupts, leading to a Planetary Species Extinction. This is what motivates them and their group of time-traveling scientists to prevent the trope from happening.
• Appease the Volcano God: During the Monster Truck level, one of the rumours texted to the player about the missing cats is that they're being sacrificed to the volcano to prevent it from erupting. Again, they aren't. In fact, they're nowhere near the volcano at any point of the story.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction:
  • The first three jobs in the Special category mandate the use of low-level washers.
  • Many achievements also have these, like requiring you to clean certain parts of a job first or last, use specific equipment, not use specific equipment, and so on.
  • The Spongebob and Warhammer packs force you to use a washer that's almost functionality identical to the best one, but without the option to use the tri-nozzle.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • The game glosses over a lot of real-life complications for pressure washers to provide a casual gaming experience.
    • Pressure washing, like pretty much any cleaning method, is normally done top to bottom, to avoid contaminating already cleaned surfaces with dirty runoff water. In the game you can clean components in any order without consequences because dirt just magically disappears instead of being dissolved and blown away in the direction of the jet.
    • You can't normally clean every surface with any type of nozzle. Narrower, more powerful jets must be used with caution to avoid damaging sensitive materials; an industrial pressure washer on max settings can easily shatter glass panes, pop tires, blow the plastering off walls, carve through wood or utterly annihilate plants, none of which can happen in the game.
    • Pressure washers aren't usually used to remove rust and verdigris, at least not the deeply ingrained sort the game likes to put on many metal surfaces, and even if it is done, the cleaned surface will never be pristine again without extensive refurbishment. Similarly, oil stains aren't fazed much by a jet of cold water. You might be able to remove the top layer, but the part that actually sticks to the surface you want to clean can only be removed with the help of chemical detergents or high temperatures (AKA power washing); ideally both.
  • The Player Character can rapidly scale near-vertical inclines that even mountain goats would have trouble with, supported by a total lack of Fall Damage.
• Atlantis: A Pacific Ocean version of the lost city exists in the game's setting, foreshadowed by the Ancient Statue and Monument levels but only surfacing sometime before the last level. Sonya outright calls it Atlantis before realizing the name isn't so appropriate due to its location in the Pacific Ocean (rather than the Atlantic). Indeed, it turns out to be the lost civilization of Pacifists.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The soap nozzle will cut through dirt in a wide area faster than any other nozzle in the game. However, as the name suggests, this nozzle requires a constant supply of soap to remain effective. Soap must be purchased as individual bottles that offer ~25 seconds worth of continuous spray before needing to be reloaded, with six soap varieties needed for different surfaces. These issues are further compounded by a hard limit to the number of bottles the player can purchase at a time and the nozzle itself having the shortest range of any nozzle type. What it does excel at - the rapid removal of tough dirt and rust - can also be accomplished simply by committing a bit more time using the stronger washers and/or narrower nozzles.
  • The tri-nozzle is great at cutting through swaths of dirt from afar due to its design being three zero-degree nozzles attached in a straight line to a common frame, allowing for a wider area of effect compared to the normal zero-degree nozzle. However, that same design is also a liability when trying to clean up close as the streams won't have the space to overlap into a seamless whole. Instead, they'll leave streaks of dirt in between which can be tedious to clean up after, especially if the streaks are too narrow to stand out.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Done twice in quick succession. At the end of the fishing boat level, you get a text from Harper saying that his RV needs cleaning again... even though earlier in the level, Harper contacted you from a new phone because he lost his old one in the desert. You turn up at the location, the RV is there... then it's suddenly replaced with an alien saucer. Then the real contact clarifies that no, they're not actually aliens. They're a time traveller from the future instead.
  • The excavator job from Muckingham Files 2. You're initially led to believe the excavator is dirty because it was digging up the client's yard. Instead, it turns out the excavator was buried and the client dug it up with a trowel.
• Beard of Evil: According to the pilot of the Stunt Plane, Muckingham's Mayor Pain has an absolute unit of a moustache.
• Benevolent Precursors: The ancient Pacifist civilization not only believed the tale of time-travelers from another species that 8,000 years in their future, an erupting volcano would trigger The End of the World as We Know It; they went to great lengths to help prevent the catastrophe from happening in the first place, including converting a lavish palace of theirs into a monument to a stranger they'd never get to meet in person, all to save a world that by then would have forgotten the Pacifists ever existed. That's some serious altruism right there.
• Big Bad: The Dirty Bubble is responsible for all the messes in the Spongebob pack (though Spongebob suspects regular neglect is why the Mermalair is dirty).
• Big Fancy House:
  • The mayor owns one, as befits an ostentatious Corrupt Politician like him. He contracts you to clean its exterior early in Career Mode.
  • Croft Manor. Unlike the mayor's mansion, you're allowed to set foot on the property. It's far bigger than the mayor's house and has a large fountain, a hedge maze with a secret passage, and a trophy room with several relics and a stuffed T-rex on display.
  • As part of the Muckingham Files 2 update, a Spanish villa.
• Bling of War: "War" might be a bit of a stretch, but with PWS playing like a First-Person Shooter and the power washer handling like a gun, some of the purchasable washer skins being ornate designs with lots of gold ornaments still fits the bill.
  • The Warhammer 40,000 DLC has you cleaning several of that famously over-the-top franchise's vehicles in all their absurdly ostentatious glory.
• Boring, but Practical: The actual power washer is a rather boring tool to use in-game but with a variety of nozzles it can clean a large variety of dirty items that couldn't be cleaned with standard water.
• Bottomless Magazines: The small tank on the Player Character's back looks like it barely holds enough water to clean a bicycle, but it usually provides an unlimited amount of water without needing a refill. Averted in Challenge mode where the available water may be limited (but still contained in that small tank), as well as for soap bottles, which run out after 25 seconds of spraying and need to be exchanged for a new one when they do.
• Call-Back:
  • Repeat trips to certain locations will often display previous completed jobs alongside the current one. This is most evident in the fairgrounds, with previously cleaned attractions all being present each time you return.
  • The Subway contains four advertisement boards that run along each of the two tunnel walls, three of which allude to previous jobs:
    • An advertisement for the City Stadium Caldera Tour Dirt Championship features Grandpa Miller's Car front and centre.
    • A poster for the movie "Driving Me Nuts" starring Esther De'ath, featuring De'ath's Vintage Car with Herbie-like headlight eyes.
    • Finally, an advertisement for Kevin Bernard's funfair prominently features the Helter-Skelter.
  • Access to the Lost City Temple is done by having the player's van carried by the fire helicopter, and the fishing boat is present as well. Additionally, the temple is full of murals depicting the jobs the player has completed, and the level ends with a brief dogfight between Blake Thrust's laser jet and Ceruleon Skye's UFO.
• Cannot Keep a Secret: The Mayor. Not only does he accidentally sign off with his correct initials after creating a Paper-Thin Disguise, but he tells you how important he takes secrecy at his private airport right before telling you all about everything that's going on.
• Conspiracy Theorist: A bunch of them. The clients that give the Detached House, Vintage Car and RV jobs are a pair of cryptozoologists and general conspiracy nuts. The owner of the Tree House is on the hunt for Bigfoot. And then the whole town gets in on it as well because of their cats going missing and all the other weird stuff going on as Career Mode progresses.
• Contrived Coincidence: Career Mode comes up with a lot of very unlikely events and circumstances to explain why all the stuff you get to hose down is so spectacularly dirty. They're usually hilarious, like a random twister raining manure on a nearby Viking temple, or an entire, fully assembled Helter-Skelter falling off a truck and rolling down a muddy hill, so no-one's complaining.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The game offers numerous cosmetic items that, although often quite expensive, have no gameplay effect at all. To add insult to injury, you don't even see your outfit except during the ten-seconds completion time lapse at the end of each job. It's generally advised to invest the money you make in better washers and their attachments instead.
• Cool Car: You get to clean multiple examples, including, but not limited to, a beautiful antique, Grandpa Miller's vintage race car, and a cat-themed monster truck.
• Corrupt Politician: It rapidly becomes apparent that the mayor is not the most honest individual out there and is using the hunt for his cat Ulysses to divert attention from various shady deals.
• Creative Closing Credits: The credits display time-lapsed videos of all the levels in the game as a retrospective of how far you and your business has come.
• Crossover:
  • January 2023 adds in a Tomb Raider Special level pack where you clean the Croft Manor, with Winston Smith acting as the client while Lara is "recuperating in Egypt after being 'Set' upon"; after the first level, Lara comes back and becomes the client for the remaining four levels.
  • March 2023 adds in a Final Fantasy VII special level pack in which you are enlisted alternately by Shinra employees Reeve and Heidegger - cleaning the Hardy-Daytona motorcycle and Hauler pickup; the Scorpion Sentinel; the Mako Energy Chamber and Airbuster - unlocked early into the second job is what may be the piece de resistance of the pack: Tifa enlists you to clean an utterly filthy Seventh Heaven bar, in which Corneo's thugs befouled every square inch of the place, including Cloud's Buster Sword and Barret's Gun Arm!
  • June 2023 adds a Spongebob Squarepants pack with the main cast as your clients. You clean the main characters' houses, Krusty Krab, Chum Bucket, a bus, the Invisible Boatmobile, the Patty Wagon from the first movie, and the Mermalair. The player and washer also get a makeover, with the player looking like one of the show's background characters, and the washer having a more nautical look in line with the show's aesthetic.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The tri-nozzle, unlike all other nozzles, loses effectiveness at both close and long range. If you're too far away, its power falls off rapidly. Too close and the three jets don't overlap anymore, leading you to carve three separate lines in the dirt instead of cleaning a wide swath. However, get the distance right and the tri-nozzle removes even the most stubborn dirt much, much faster than anything else, effectively trading increased training time and tactical positioning for maximum efficiency.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Forest Cottage level, in which your clients are definitely not retired bank robbers, has some bright pink liquid stains around the chimney and basement hatch reminiscent of blood. The specific type of dirt is described as 'bubble gum'. Later, in the subway, there's another large pink splotch at the bottom of one of the stairs described as 'milkshake'.
• Dug Too Deep: In his obsessive search for the Lost City of Pacifists and the rare ore they used for their technology, Blake triggers the premature eruption of Mount Rushless—along with all the other volcanoes along the Pacific Rim—and nearly dooms the planet to another extinction event. It takes a time-travel gambit involving the player and the Pacifist civilization to stop the apocalypse from happening.
• Eccentric Millionaire:
  • Blake Thrust. If his client icon being a dollar sign didn't already tip you off, his jobs involve cleaning an unmanned mining drill and a highly advanced Private Jet with a mounted laser cannon. He's also incredibly obsessed with the Lost City of Pacifists and willing to go to great lengths to discover its secrets, even at the expense of the world.
  • Lara Croft. Ignoring her actions in her own series, her dialogue in the expansion pack has her give her butler challenges (like trying to escape a locked freezer) despite his advancing age, and practicing her sneaking by stalking the player on the training course.
• Effortless Achievement:
  • Impeccable Balance. Awarded for "balancing" on the penny-farthing for ten seconds straight, the fact that the bike is a completely static object that won't move a nanometer no matter what you do to it means all you have to do is jump on it and stay there until the achievement pops.
  • Other achievements require knocking over coconuts at the fairgrounds or buckets at an excavation site, or taking a garden gnome on a ride in the Ferris wheel. The hardest part about these achievements is finding the objects in question, and most of them are just standing around in plain sight.
• Egging: The Mansion level involves cleaning up the Mayor's mansion and front gate, which are covered with graffiti and a bucketload of eggs. The Temple reveals that the culprits behind the eggs were an order of silent monks, who egged the Mayor's house as revenge for his not-so-secret pipeline deal diverting water from the monks' crops. The Stunt Plane is also egg-splattered, its pilot having been too eager to be in front during an act of revenge egging against the temple.
• The End of the World as We Know It: In the endgame, it's revealed that Mount Rushless is the keystone of the entire Pacific system of volcanoes—if it erupts, all of them will follow quickly, and the fallout will lead to a major extinction event. Later, it's also revealed that Blake Thrust was ultimately responsible for destabilizing the keystone through his illegal mining activity, setting said apocalypse in motion.
• Energy Weapon: The Private Jet, for reasons that are never quite explained, mounts a huge Raygun Gothic-style laser cannon under its fuselage that looks like it was ripped straight from a Fallout game. It's seen in action at the climax of the final job where the jet gets in a brief Oldschool Dogfight with a Flying Saucer.
• Excuse Plot:
  • Thanks to nearby volcanic activity, the entire town is covered in soot, in addition to whatever mould, graffiti, and rust things had before. You own a power washing business. Get to work!
  • There's also a B-Plot with the mayor's missing cat Ulysses, whose absence has put the local Spring Festival to a grinding halt due to local tradition. You actually see Ulysses in one of the early missions before the game even makes you aware of the situation. There are rumours floating around however that this festival-delaying cat search is to draw attention away from a pipeline deal the mayor is working on. By the time you finish the job to clean the Mayor's ship, he flees the city and tells you that if Ulysses ever does turn up again, you can consider him yours. And in The Stinger, she does turn up in the back of your van.
  • Eventually cats up and vanish from Muckingham entirely, but eagle-eyed washers will continue to find evidence of Ulysses at many of their jobs in the form of paw prints left on the dirty surfaces they're meant to clean. The entire situation eventually makes the news far enough away that Harper, the player's first contact and associate, messages them from travels abroad to try to figure out what the hell is going on.
  • And not long after, ancient monuments get involved with the story, one of which can shoot laser beams from a large gem on its forehead when fully cleaned. Then time-travelers and the lost civilization that built said monuments get involved to stop Muckingham's resident volcano from erupting and triggering an apocalyptic event.
• Fairy Tale Episode:
  • One of the levels is a request by "Martha Hubbard" to clean a shoe-shaped house used as a preschool for rambunctious children, referencing both "Old Mother Hubbard" and "There was an old lady who lived in a shoe".
  • You also get hired by H. and G. Hexenjager for a different task.
• Fake Difficulty: Much of the challenge of Challenge Mode comes from the fact that you often aren't allowed to use the stronger washers even if you have them unlocked in Career Mode.
• Featureless Protagonist: While they do have a visible humanoid model with an average build, the player character is clad in a full-body clean suit alongside a full-face respirator mask with an opaque visor, completely obscuring any discernable human characteristics. It's then averted to some degree near the end of Career Mode when Harper realizes that the Ancient Statue was shaped in the Player Character's likeness by the Pacifist civilization, giving some idea on what they look like under their mask. The statue's face is fairly androgynous though, leaving their gender for the player to decide. Given that the murals in the Lost Temple depict male and female powerwashers together, it's likely that the statues are meant to represent the powerwashers in general.
• First-Person Shooter: Despite its peaceful premise, PWS is, at its core, an FPS with an arsenal of exactly one "gun" that happens to shoot a jet of water.
• Fish People: The Pacifists, an Atlantis-style civilization that existed 8,000 years ago, were ocean-dwelling humanoids with webbed hands and feet, webbed spines along their back, and what is implied to be blue, scaly skin. They end up playing a crucial role in saving mankind from The End of the World as We Know It through their near-magical technology, coupled with some time travel shenanigans by human scientists from the future.
• Flying Saucer: The penultimate level of Career Mode has you clean up one at the request of a time-traveling scientist. It also has the capacity to disguise itself as something mundane like Harper's RV.
• Foreshadowing:
  • At the start of the Mining Drill job, Blake Thrust instructs you to ignore any traces of mysterious ore that might be left on it. His mining that ore turns out to be the cause of Mount Rushless's instability and eventual eruption.
  • The Fortune Teller's Wagon has a crystal ball, which once cleaned shows Ulysses standing on a rock above the RV from a previous level and some tents. This is the location of the Ancient Statue level which comes immediately afterwards.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: During The Stinger, messages briefly pop up from your various clients over the course of the game thanking you. Most of them are generic, but two of the messages indicate that Leonard Miller is texting the wrong number and one of Martha Hubbard's kids got hold of her phone again.
  Leonard Miller: UNSUBSCRIBE FROM WASP FACTS
  Martha Hubbard: cant find my finga
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • While cleaning the Race Car, the owner texts that his neighbor tried to power wash it once, but it didn't clean up well because their powerwasher was too weak. Use a weak washer yourself and you won't have any better luck.
  • The owner of the Carousel asks you to use a plain van so the fairgrounds competition doesn't get the same idea of getting ahead with deep-cleaned equipment. When you roll up to the job, your van does indeed have your company logo on the sides covered up (albeit poorly).
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Your very first job is to clean your future van, a ridiculously dirty vehicle that a buddy of yours bought at an auction. Yet somehow it already has your company logo printed on the sides underneath all the dirt.
• The Ghost: Barring Esther De'ath, Everyone in the game is this, with the exception of the player, whose model was added along with multiplayer in update 0.7, and various cats. Story updates are provided by means of text messages. From the way it takes off immediately after you finish cleaning it, it's implied that Ceruleon Skye is inside her craft for the duration of her vehicle's job, but the canopy is completely opaque from the outside.
• Gimmick Level:
  • Unlike the other clients, the Mayor himself forbids you from stepping onto his property when he asks you to clean his house following a vandalism event, forcing you to use an extra-long extension ^note you're given the one for the Prime Vista 1500 for free, but the ones for the other washers must be bought to clean the house from outside the gates.
  • Special cleaning maps force the player to use a particular set of cleaning equipment.
• Great Offscreen War: The humans of the future apparently fought and survived at least two wars against Mars, if time-traveling scientist Ceruleon Skye's text messages are anything to go by. The second war in particular destroyed so much historical knowledge that the future humans had to time-travel to the past to figure out why the entire Pacific Ring of Fire suddenly erupted all at once in our time.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • While you're shown a picture of the control scheme at each loading screen by the time you reach the point you need to make use of the keys to rotate your equipment there's a chance you'll have forgotten you can do such a thing and find the scaffolding—the only piece of equipment you need to rotate—unwieldy to use without knowing it.
  • The Carousel can be this especially if the player isn't aware that the poles move up and down as the carousel rotates, hiding enough dirt at the top and bottom to prevent them being fully cleaned while stationary.
  • The game never bothers to tell you that you can click on any component in the Details tab to highlight that component on the actual object you're cleaning. Not knowing this can make finding the Last Lousy Point you're missing that much more frustrating.
  • Some of the achievements have confusingly worded requirements. The one for the Private Jet for instance wants you to clean the antigrav and laser parts first, but if you clean everything that has "laser" in its name, you won't get the achievement because only the actual laser cannon is required. Contrarily, the achievement for leaving the toilets in the washroom until last requires the toilets and their seats and lids.
• Hammerspace: By the end of Career Mode, the Player Character is carrying around four different power washers, between three and six attachments for each of them, and potentially hundreds of bottles of soap, all without any visible place to keep even a fraction of that stuff. Also, their van seems a tad too small to transport the scaffolding even in a disassembled state, especially on jobs like the Fire Station or the Ancient Statue where it's at its tallest.
• Haunted House: The Detached House gained this reputation after its previous owner, an eccentric actress, vanished under mysterious circumstances. It also suffers from some spooky phenomena like moving furniture, to the point that no other cleaning service in town dares to set foot inside. When you accept the job it turns out that all of these things have perfectly mundane explanations, though.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: The pilot of the Stunt Plane, when contracted to fly an Egging attack on a certain target, somehow managed to overtake the thrown eggs while dive-bombing, egging his own plane in the process. You get to clean the result afterwards.
• Humongous Mecha:
  • In the Final Fantasy VII Remake level pack, Heidegger of Shinra Corporation assigns you to fully wash the Scorpion Sentinel and Airbuster bosses from the games, and you can have some of their parts move around or open compartments to clean them as well.
  • Not to be outdone the Warhammer 40,000 pack has you cleaning a Space Marine Dreadnaught and an Imperial Knight.
• Incest Subtext: Almost certainly unintentional on the writer's part. The description of the level "Clean the Forest Cottage" reads: "We are two humble confectioners, brother and sister, living on our own deep in the woods of the National Park and there’s absolutely nothing strange about that." The intended joke is that they're hiding after a bank robbery, but out of context, well...
• Irony: Blake Thrust is obsessed with a society of Pacifists but his private plane is heavily armed. He also attacks Ceruleon Skye's ship with said armed plane multiple times.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The Prima Vista PRO Triple Tip Nozzle is three zero degree nozzles in a line. It's a bit awkward to use as it behaves like it's singular sibling, and costs a fair chunk of change, but when you get it it will give you the potential distance of the zero degree nozzle with more than sufficient width of your spray. It makes the last jobs of the game much easier than they would be without it.
• Interservice Rivalry: While cleaning the Fire Truck, on the roof of it you'll find "Police Rules, Fire Drools" written in the dirt.
• Jerkass: The mayor and the park warden are both dicks in their own ways, the former being a corrupt sleaze ball and the latter repeatedly expressing open disdain for the very people he's supposed to care about, like the children at the playground.
• Last Lousy Point: Trying to find the last unclean piece in a level, especially if it's extremely small, extremely numerous, or in a very strange location. Trim pieces, which can be all of these, are the most common culprit. Fortunately, the devs added a feature that allow you to visibly highlight pieces that aren't fully clean in the menu to try and help alleviate this, and another that lights up all remaining dirt. However, the dirt highlight is always yellow, so if the surface is yellow itself (and the speck of dirt is small enough), it could be next to invisible.
  • The Washroom has a serious problem with this. At least two of its white-tiled cubicle walls are regularly flagged as not quite clean yet although even the highlight button claims they are absolutely pristine. This forces you to methodically clean these surfaces two or three times in the hopes of finding those last, totally invisible dirt spots.
  • The fairleads on the fishing trawler. They're extremely small, meaning they don't highlight well, and there are eight of them. Five of them are in obvious locations, two are less obvious but in similar places to the first five, and the eighth is somewhere completely different and very hard to see unless you know where it is already. Their tiny size means it's easy to clean them by accident or without entirely realizing where they are, but woe betide the washer who misses the 'rogue' fairlead because they're going to be looking a while.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: While you're cleaning the Fortune Teller's Wagon, the owner offers to read your future. What he says next sounds like it could be directed at the player just as much as the Player Character.
• Marathon Level: A job's price tag generally gives a good idea of just how long you're gonna be at a place no matter how strong your washer is. As of the full release, the three biggest levels in terms of price (all $1500+) are the Treehouse, the Subway, and the Lost City Temple, each of which takes an average of 3-4 hours to complete with the strongest washer you can have at the time; even more than that if you go at it without an efficient strategy. Replaying these jobs with the strongest washer cuts the required time down by quite a bit, although they still take far longer to complete than any other.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The treehouse in the middle of the woods has some texts from a client claiming that he saw Bigfoot nearby. Loud rumbling booms are audible throughout the level, and large footprints can be seen in the filth on the treehouse. That said, Bigfoot never actually appears, the client's description matches what could probably be his own footprints interspersed with cat pawprints, and the nearby volcano could be responsible for the loud noises.
• Mayor Pain: Mostly on the evil side. Muckingham seems to be doing well enough under the mayor's rule, but the guy himself is a pompous, entitled jackass who's clearly lining his own pockets with lots of taxpayer money before skipping town entirely with his ill-gotten wealth aboard his luxurious frolic boat. He's also in league with the guy who nearly triggered another dinosaur-level extinction event due to pure greed.
• Mistaken for Profound: The Detached House (featured prominently in the game's logo) has been graffitied with what the client mistakes for angelic script keeping ghosts at bay. It is then revealed that they're just construction shorthand for a recent pipe installation.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Let's be frank: pressure washing is fun when done occasionally, but as a full-time job it's about as mundane as it gets. The game turns it into an engrossing experience with plenty of spectacular(ly dirty) set pieces, and lots of intrigue and mystery going on in the background.
• Mundane Utility: On finishing the last level, Ceruleon Skye explains the truth behind the whole plot, that your skills as a power washer just saved the timeline and the world, and that you should "feel free to use this message as a customer review if you think it would help your business".
• Mythology Gag: One message Lara sends you as you're cleaning the front of Croft Manor has her wonder if her butler Winston has managed to free himself from the freezer. Locking him in was something many a Tomb Raider II player did, to the point that the Blood Ties expansion for Rise of the Tomb Raider made it canon (though only when she was a child).
• Never Trust a Title: Lampshaded during the Fire Station: a power washer uses high-pressure jets of hot water. None of the tools available (as of the full release) heat the water before spraying it, so they're just considered pressure washers.
• New Game Plus: Played with. Although there's currently no way to restart Career Mode with advanced equipment, you can replay any story job you've completed in Freeplay Mode with all the gear you've unlocked at this point, plus unlimited soap.
• Noodle Incident:
  • At the stern of the fishing boat is a warning sign indicating that in the case of fire, evacuate by jumping overboard. There are a set of muddy footprints across the deck leading up to the sign.
  • Another sign on the Fishing Boat, this one at the bow, warns the reader to look out for anchors, and that the captain is not responsible for any more anchor-related incidents.
  • The Skatepark is completely caked in mud, including the walls to a height of about four meters. Unlike the similarly soiled Temple, no explanation is offered as to how the place ended up in this sorry state. There's not even an obvious source of mud nearby that delinquents could've used to vandalize the park.
  • During the "Croft Manor" DLC, while cleaning up the Obstacle Course and Quad Bike, Lara mentions that she's gotten the bike onto the roof of the manor. There are also quad bike tracks visible in the dust of her trophy room, implying she rode it through a room filled with priceless artefacts at least once.
  • At Santa's Workshop:
    • One poster has a number box with "days since last eggnog incident" written after it, with a zero filling in the box.
    • On Santa's List, the 'Nice' side has three names striked out, with those same three names appearing late on the 'Naughty' side.
• No OSHA Compliance: You're generally free to clamber around on anything without any safety measures in place, which includes, for example, jumping from pod to pod on an active Ferris wheel while hosing down its beams and struts. One achievement requires you to clean a fairgrounds carousel without turning it off at any point (you actually must turn it on at least for a bit to access certain parts). Your one saving grace in all this is that the game has no damage model, so if/when you fall, at least nothing happens other than you having to climb back up again.
• Oh, Crap!: At 80% of the way through cleaning the Ancient Statue, Calvin Miller comes to the realization that Mount Rushless is about to erupt and urgently suggests you evacuate the area. Fully cleaning the statue causes it to release a beam of light that calms the volcano, but he's still sure that it's just a matter of time until it actually goes off.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: The small print at the bottom of the political advertisement in the subway.
  This political advert is sponsored by the Jeff Jefferson XII 1984 election campaign fund. Jeff Jefferson XII would like to make it clear that he is talking metaphorically about 'cleaning up' the city and that he has no intention of getting on his expensively tailored knees and scrubbing the city, or any kind of manual labor for that matter.
• Out-of-Character Alert:
  • After the Fishing Boat level, the player gets a text message from Harper from his usual number about needing his RV washed again. This wouldn't be remarkable except for two things: Harper doesn't call you "Wishy" like he would at that point of the game (and is unusually terse at that), and previously he mentioned having lost his old phone to the desert heat and needing to get a new number as a result. This foreshadows that the "Harper" that contacted you was actually the time-traveling scientist Ceruleon Skye in need of a wash for their UFO.
  • Another example occurs earlier throughout the Shoe House level, where the client suddenly talks like a little kid where before she spoke like one would expect a kindly old schoolteacher would. Turns out one of her little students stole her phone.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: Wherever you go in Muckingham, there's always a garden gnome to be found and hosed around. They're even on the surface of Mars! Plus one of the Special jobs is the aptly named Gnome Fountain with over a dozen gnome statues of various sizes.
• Pet the Dog: Even though the Mayor is corrupt and shady, and leaves on his boat to save himself, he still has enough heart to promise that, whomever finds his cat, can keep it. You find that cat, and her two kittens in the back of your van
• Product Displacement: In the Back to the Future pack, the DeLorean is only referred to as "the Time Machine" or "the car" and nothing else.
• Punny Name: Multiple.
  • The player's best friend, Harper Shaw.^ExplanationHigh pressure.
  • The game's resident volcano is named Mount Rushless.
  • Muckingham, the quaint but incredibly dirty little town where you make your living as a professional cleaner.
• Railroading: Averted for the most part - the player can clean any part of a job in any order - but the Lost City Temple forces the player to clean the Pyramidion Gem last. This is because it isn't actually present on the map before everything else is clean.
• Red Herring: In Croft Manor's trophy room, there's a button on the wall you can press. Fans of the Tomb Raider games might expect this to open a secret room, but all it does is make a noise.
• Replay Mode: Free Play Mode, in which you can play any of the levels you've cleared in Career Mode at your leisure.
• Retired Badass: One of the clients, "Grandpa" Leonard Miller, is a retiree who needs help washing his car before taking his wife on a date downtown. It turns out to be a professional race car with various Bland-Name Product sponsors still printed on the sides.
• Running Gag:
  • During the tutorial job, the Van, Harper Shaw offers to come up with a few names for the player's new power washing business. It would seem that Shaw never decided on a single name, as each new client addresses the player by another unique business name.
  • A number of cleaning locations including the skate park and the mayor's riverboat have cat paw prints that need to be cleaned off.
• Scenery Porn: Turning Scenery Gorn into this is essentially the whole point of the game. The locations you're contracted to clean tend to look absolutely gorgeous when you're done with them.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After the Frolic Boat gets cleaned, the mayor takes it and bails on the town completely, asking only that the player lie about which way he went, and saying that if his cat ever turns up the player can keep it.
• Secret Ingredient: Ella Goode's Volcano Burgers boasted a one as its main draw, which was actually just an enormous amount of salt. However, when Muckingham's cats started disappearing a rumor started spreading that she was using them as her secret ingredient, forcing her to publish her ingredients list and subsequently ruining the burgers' reputation when it was discovered how unhealthy they were.
• Shout-Out:
  • Multiple ones in the graffiti in the Skate Park, like the Illuminati eye, a smiling daisy, and the symbols of Khorne and Chaos Undivided (the latter before being removed in an update due to copyright concerns).
    • The backpack of the statue in the center of the Lost City Temple heavily resembles the ones that're part of Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine Power Armor. The statue in general incorporates numerous design elements from Space Marine commander miniatures.
  • The Pacifist Temple murals talk about the game in a tone and pseudo-Biblical language obviously reminiscent of the Slayer's Testament, complete with your cleaning mask as a stand-in for Doomguy's.
  • One of the clients Tim Timmerson talks about at his airfield is fairly obviously Batman.
  • Players were quick to point out that the Tri-Nozzle looks and behaves an awful lot like Isaac Clark's iconic Plasma Cutter of Dead Space fame.
  • One of the treehouse's platforms has animal footprints on its underside.
  • The achievement for purchasing all of the game's best equipment is called Unlimited Powerwash.
  • The address of the Detached House job is 212 Acacia Avenue.
  • The SpongeBob SquarePants crossover has a bunch of references to its source material:
    • The trailer for the DLC does one of the show's famous title card gags.
    • One of the items to clean is Patrick's drivers identification card, which is lifted from its appearance in "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy III". In that same location, you can see the superpower outfits that SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward, and Sandy wear in "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy V".
  • The Naughty and Nice List in the Santa's Workshop level includes names such as Cloud and Tifa and Gizmo in the Nice list and Grinch In the Naughty list. Also likely unintentional are the names Ruby, Neo and Roman in the list (Ruby and Neo being in Nice and Roman in Naughty)
• Shown Their Work:
  • The devs took great care to give even the most specialized components of each job their proper name.
  • On the optional Mars rover level, the gravity is set to the Martian standard (about 38% of Earth's), so if you jump it takes longer to land. Also, the Perseverance mini-helicopter can be seen circling the rover.
• Slave to PR: The only reason the park warden has you clean the Skatepark is because there's a televised tournament coming up and he wants the park to look good for the cameras.
• Stalker without a Crush: While you're cleaning Lara's training course, she mentions some new maneuvers she's practicing. One of which is being stealthy so she can spy on a certain powerwasher as they work...
• Stating the Simple Solution: While cleaning the Monster Truck, despite the many conspiracy theories about the missing cats, your client believes they're just looking for food and will come back home when they're good and ready. She's practically right; the cats have all gone to Crab Bay Marina because they smelled something delicious coming from the Pacific... namely, the Lost City Palace.
• Stable Time Loop: Cleaning Ceruleon Skye's time machine allows them and their associates to keep time traveling and piece together the how and why of Mount Rushless' activation. With this information, they go far back to the time of the Pacifists to both warn them of the future disaster and tell them of the protagonist. The Pacifists, in turn, convert their palace into a monument to the player and a contingency to stop the volcano from erupting.
• The Stinger: After the credits roll, the player opens the back doors of their van to take in all the accomplishments they've done in their career. They also finally find Ulysses resting inside a box...along with her new litter.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial:
  • The Forest Cottage has graffiti depicting a robber on one of its walls. The client denies being a famous bank robber that fled to the woods to bake bread; they're much older than what said robber looked like when they were last seen years ago.
  • After Mayor Jeff Jefferson XIII fled town after his Frolic Boat is cleaned, the player will receive messages from a "Tim Timmerson I" while cleaning the Stunt Plane, starting with "Hello, nice to meet you for the first time ever." He then immediately slips up by signing off his first text batch with his JJ initials.
  • As you clean the Solar Station, your contact from Thrust Industries brings up and then immediately denies that the water station that the solar farm is built around is connected in any way to the Mayor's pipleline and Muckingham's water shortage.
• Technologically Blind Elders: Grandpa Miller can't seem to figure out how to turn Caps Lock off.
• Tempting Fate: From the trailer to the SpongeBob SquarePants DLC pack:
  Narrator: "Well, seems like it's a slow news day here in Bikini Bottom."
  [Title Card: "A few moments later"]
  Narrator: "Oh my goodness! Breaking news! It seems the town has suddenly and inexplicably become covered in a thick layer of dirt and muck!"
• Theme Naming: As shown by the station map in the Subway Station, pretty much every city in Muckingham's general area has a dirt- or cleaning-related name.
• This Is a Drill: One of the vehicle jobs is a manned one-person mole drill used for ore prospecting. It, or at least one like it, is a major reason why Mount Rushless is about to erupt, as their accidental penetration of the volcano's magma chamber destabilized its geology.
• Useless Useful Spell: Most players apparently never use the soap nozzle, and for good reasons. For one, no type of dirt in the game actually requires soap to clean; just keep a strong jet pointed at it for a bit longer and it's gone just the same. Other downsides include the nozzle's extremely short range, the very limited size of the soap bottles you need to load it with, and the fact that these bottles must be purchased for quite a bit of cash ($10 apiece), which is far too much for what little help they offer. There's also six different types of soap, one for each surface type, so the whole thing becomes highly wasteful on areas with multiple different surfaces in close proximity; plus switching back and forth between soaps quickly becomes a chore. Many players only purchase one bottle per type for the achievement and leave it at that.
• Villainous Lineage: Both the Jeffersons and the Thrusts seem to have been working together in shady dealings as far back as 1923, revealed from text messages received while cleaning the Subway; following the stations' reopening in 1923 by Mayor Jeff Jefferson XI, it was forced to close again when Wilberforce Thrust, who originally funded the station's construction, was revealed to have been using it to funnel stolen money from the town.
• Visual Pun: The windmill in the medieval-castle-themed Mini Golf Course has swords for blades.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Barring his brief stint as Tim Timmerson I, the Mayor completely leaves the story after the player cleans up his Frolic Boat, abandoning the town and his cat in the process.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Muckingham is a generically Anglophone township/village... next to both a traditional cone-shaped volcano and a sandy desert. Needless to say the only English-speaking country in the world with both doesn't have them anywhere near each other.^note Though it does have less conventionally-shaped volcanoes in other kinds of desert. Further map development in the final release levels indicates it's somewhere on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Finally, they use British/Commonwealth English terminology, but some clients have stereotypically American farm yokel speech patterns.
• Wingdinglish: The murals on the walls of the Lost City Palace contain a foreign-looking script which can be transliterated to English. Decoding them reveals the Pacifists who built the palace knew about your career and the various locations and vehicles you've cleaned up, thanks to Ceruleon Skye explaining the yet-to-unfold situation to them.
• Your Tomcat Is Pregnant: Everyone in Muckingham considers the Mayor's cat Ulysses to be male, but the last shot of the game heavily suggests otherwise, what with her sleeping inside a box next to her kittens.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe:
  • Algernon Evans, owner of the Penny Farthing, speaks a pretty archaic form of English. It's unclear if he really talks like that or is just putting on a show to go with the subject matter.
  • Lady Pip uses pseudo-medieval English-speak in the job request for the Mini Golf Course, but then switches back to modern English for her messages throughout the level. In her first set of texts, she tells the player that management has them speak that way to address the guests and to hire outside help, which usually results in the latter not bothering to turn up.

---