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The original Powerwash Simulator is the indie success story any small team dreams of. First released as an experimental prototype on itch, the game grew in early access with support from Square Enix to become a global hit. After collaborations with everything from Final Fantasy to Shrek, the game has sold over 10 million units, before even talking about the sales from DLC released at regular intervals since the game's full launch in 2022.
Yet with this regular churn of updates and constant community that remains strong, why even make a sequel? Why leave the support of a publisher and go independent with a new title? And is there actually enough introduced with this sequel to justify the cost of a new game?
As the team worked towards the game's recent launch, they tell us during their showcase at Tokyo Game Show that they'd hit a ceiling with the potential for expansion and flexibility in the original game, in part because the team never expected the game to be as big or long-running as it ended up being. The new release, in theory, will not only bring new features, but provide them a platform to be more open and varied in how they update and support the title moving forwards.
"With Powerwash Simulator 2, we included almost everything that the community wanted in the first game," explains Jess Green, marketing manager on the Powerwash series. "We've had that learning experience, and we wanted to improve the visual effects and everything with this new game. When we were developing the original we weren't thinking on the scale we are now, so things like navigating through the UI are not as easy as we would have liked. Who was to know we'd be working with things like Warhammer back then [...] We've been able to streamline and consider stuff like that all the way from the start this time."
Scrubs up well
Powerwash Simulator 2 has made me abandon my favorite nozzle and I don't know how to feel
PowerWash Simulator 2 introduces streamlined interface for new jobs and for downloadable content, along with new content within the game itself. The biggest change will be obvious to anyone who picks up the game having spent time in the original: new tools. If you need to get up to higher levels, you now can build scaffolding, alongside platforms that can raise and lower. But most notable are the new attachments that come with your primary washer, such as the floor scrubber. The tool does exactly what you would expect, helping you wash the ground beneath you, and the greater arsenal then allows the team to mix new dirt and environments into any given job.
While trying the tool out for ourselves, it's amazing how one tool can mix up the possibilities on offer when cleaning. The game has always had a meditative flow at its center, whether cleaning a carousel, the Holomax Theater from Back to the Future or areas of Midgar, but there were always limits on how large of a setting could be featured or how vertical and large it was built due to the limitations of the tools and the tech. There's a satisfaction to just walking around cleaning the floor like a vacuum cleaner with the new tool, even beyond how much simpler it is to clean the floor or the roof of a truck using the tool compared to the workarounds used in the previous game.
You aren't limited to using it as a floor cleaner, just how you could clean the floor the same as ever if for some reason you didn't want to use it. The tool does increase options without increasing complexity, keeping the cozier aspects of the game to the core. According to lead designer Dan Chequer, the introduction of these new tools has had both intended and unintended effects when introduced to testers.
"We have this adaptable nozzle where you can customize how wide or narrow it is," he explains. "I was really keen for players to get their hands on it because it's a more understated and optional nozzle since you could use the regular nozzles just fine, but this gives you finer control where, if you have a few inches of a wall left to do, you can tailor their nozzle to that exact width and get that last nice clean line. But I hadn't thought that some players would use it in other ways! I hadn't thought about how it would give you more control over drawing in the dirt, since I was only thinking about it from a job angle. It's also been funny seeing people use the surface cleaner in different ways: since that tool is built for big, flat surfaces we expected people to use [it] on floors and walls but it's being used on ceilings too."
Much of the work going into this new game is not just on these headlining features, but smaller upgrades you may not notice but will likely appreciate as a quality-of-life upgrade. For example, if you were to play with friends, the new tool allows for better delegation of tasks, and it's in multiplayer where the less-flashy but certainly-notable improvements over the original are most noticeable, according to Green.
"One of the little quality-of-life things I think people will really appreciate, for example, is that the career progression is now shared," she says. "Lots of people play with their friends or their partners or their kids, but it didn't share progress equally so you would have to repeat jobs on your own save files. Now we've got true shared progression. There's now also split screen, which isn't particularly flashy, but it means you can now play in the same room."
While the aim is to please fans and add the much-requested features not possible in the original, it must be done without breaking the balance. Saying yes when it's requested is important, but so is saying no if the development team believes it's for the betterment of the core game.
"We're really a community-led game,” notes Green. “It's not that if people don't ask for something they're not going to get it, but it's more that if they do ask, we tend to just do exactly what they want. That being said, the team reckons with the question of balancing [their vision with fans] a lot. One thing people have requested along the way that we've batted away is adding some particular elements of friction and challenge like walking dirt back through the stage if you step into it, or cleaning a window and having dirt splashing off of it. It takes away from the core concept of the game as a relaxing, zen-like experience."
This increase in scale hasn't extended to pricing. The market for indie games and non-AAA releases since 2021, when Powerwash Simulator first released in Early Access, is unrecognizable in the four years since that original launch. It's much harder to release new games when there are simply so many more games being released than ever before – there's a reason that many indie developers chose to delay their games to move away from the monolithic launch of Hollow Knight Silksong! That's before considering how US tariffs, global inflation and cost-of-living are causing many players to cut back on non-essential costs like gaming. Naturally, these concerns factored into Powerwash Simulator 2's development, according to Chequer.
"Our objective has always been to have this game with a really good core, singular mechanic that can sit within a library of games. We're not in a game industry anymore where people are just going to play one game and that's it, people will bounce around and try different things, so when we were making the first game we were considering whether this was the kind of game people would jump into for 20-30 minutes and come back to later. We realized that wasn't the case, so with this we've been ensuring the core mechanics are solid so people can spend time but also that it can still sit in a library of games."
This has inevitably influenced DLC and plans for the future, keeping fans satisfied for whenever they do come back. This was a core part of the first game, and a roadmap for new content has been made (Green: "We have a plan for all of 2026 already!"). As Chequer adds, with this plan, the hope is that the team can not just continue to surprise but please fans moving forwards.
"We know the longevity of this game, and it's definitely factored into our plan [with the game's development] to consider how to keep this game going into the future. I can't speak with any sort of specificity on what we're going to be doing with DLCs, but we know the heart of the game is the breadth of its content. There's a ravenous sense that people want to wash more stuff! A lot of our job is keeping up with that demand, trying to put out jobs so people have more interesting things to wash. That is the core of where we're going to be expanding on in the game, in as many different ways as possible too."
Powerwash Simulator 2 is being developed by a team far more assured than they were when their quaint little cleaning game first hit early access. The game is in line with its development team in that sense, a definitive step up with new tools bringing a meaningful change from what came before, rather than a shiny coat of paint on a repetitive experience. As the team launches into a new era with a new game, on their own without the support of a publisher this time, the question is whether they can maintain that. The first game satisfied fans with new DLC, but will they feel the same with the sequel a year from now? Or will those new cleaning tools get another unexpected use?
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