Oh, hey, PowerWash Simulator lets you clean up for war criminals now
With its Final Fantasy VII Remake expansion, PowerWash Simulator lets you clean up the villains' messes
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
It’s a question tailor-made for the Kevin Smiths of the gaming world: Who ensures that all the machinery used by gaming’s various evil empires looks so shiny? Who buffs the sci-fi battle tanks to gleaming, fascist-friendly perfection? Who busts their ass so that every weapon of mass destruction the heroes desperately fend off looks utterly immaculate?
You, as it turns out.
At least, the “you” who plays the free new “Midgar” expansion to first-person clean-em-up PowerWash Simulator, one of the strangest examples of gaming corporate synergy that I, personally, have ever experienced. (And I play Monster Hunter games, which never met a whacko Street Fighter integration they didn’t like.) The corporation, in this case, being Square-Enix, which publishes PowerWash Simulator, which presumably made it fairly easy for developer FuturLab to set up an expansion set in the world of SE’s beloved classic, Final Fantasy VII. (And specifically in the extra-glossy world of 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake.) The basic, soothing verbs of PowerWash Simulator are all still in evident abundance: You methodically spray incredibly dirty things with soap and a stream of water until they’re clean, mercilessly hunting down every little scuff mark or lurking piece of grime. You climb on ladders. You wonder how a simple bar can get so damn filthy—and then impose order on the chaos with a white-noise-ish stream of purifying H2O.
The only difference is that now you’re doing it for, well … the baddies. With the exception of the aforementioned bar level—in which an unseen Tifa Lockhart hires you to clean up her iconic 7th Heaven watering hole, while plying you with ecoterrorist propaganda—all the jobs you’ll be taking during “Midgar” will be at the behest of the Shinra Electric Power Company. Which, if you’ve never played the games, is essentially the answer to “What if the power company also controlled a municipal government and had its own military and Fox News analogues?” Some of these tasks—like a wash job on the bike from both games’ infamous motorcycle sequences—are at the behest of the company’s one token good employee. But two of them are straight up about cleaning up massive war machines while on the payroll of one of Shinra’s many innovative psychopaths.
The expansion doesn’t shy away from it, either: As you clean the massive Airbuster tank, dutifully wiping grime off its numerous machine guns and bomb launchers, you’ll get regular updates from your clients about how it’s going to be used to kill the shit out of the good guys soon. The base PowerWash has these little updates, too (they help break up the pleasant monotony when you’re halfway through cleaning an entire playground, sweep by deliberate sweep). But they were mostly about funny little interludes and not, y’know…war crimes. I’m not trying to wring my hands about this or anything—presumably, the Guard Scorpion murder tank works just as well whether it’s shining like a brightly polished brass button or not—but it is a damn weird tonal shift for one of the gentlest video games ever made.
Enough moralizing, though: How’s the wash? As a PowerWash aficionado, I can attest that these are, indeed, fun cleans, especially the two tanks, which are big, elaborate machines that you can look at in incredibly fine detail, cleaning each of their village-destroying laser cannons one by one. It’s kind of like having an in-game model viewer that someone dumped a bucket of unidentifiable gunk on; the action-figure appeal of climbing all over these big beautiful bastards (and even making their guns move and hatches pop open for better cleaning) is undeniable. One of the magic things about PowerWash Simulator is that it forces you to reckon with how detailed the objects around you are; that love letter to video game artists is only more intense when you’re dealing with fantastical weapons of war. The only real shame in the package—besides the, uh, moral one—is that PowerWash stuck to its typical “no music” approach here; having some of Final Fantasy VII’s classic soundtrack pounding while you cleaned would make aiding and abetting a planet-killing propaganda machine for cash go down all the smoother.