YMMV / PowerWash Simulator

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Lara Croft sends a large number of texts to the Power Washer about her obstacle course, mansion, and habits. Many gamers have interpreted her as trying to awkwardly flirt with the Power Washer and having no game despite being a hot Adventurer Archaeologist.
• Breather Level:
  • The jobs where you clean a vehicle tend to be much shorter and easier than those where you have to clean a whole building or plot of land.
  • The last three or four jobs leading up to the final one are surprisingly easy, usually due to consisting almost entirely of large sections without fiddly nooks and crannies... which just makes the final job all the more intimidating.
• Funny Moments: From such a quaint little game, there's a lot of small and large moments for things going on in the background, alongside just the things you're tasked with cleaning.
  • Throughout the game, you get hints of the mayor's cat, Ulysses, having gone missing from the townsfolk. During each job they're mentioned in, you can find very telltale pawprints in the different layers of muck. It crescendos with people finding Ulysses next to an active lava flow during a nearby volcano's eruption, completely fine and outright enjoying the heat, but out of range of any recovery efforts before the situation is back under control and they've lost track of the cat again after it wandered off.
  • In the paintball arena, you can find a wall absolutely splattered in paint shots, with a gap in the shape of a person, as if an entire paintball firing squad just unloaded everything they had on them.
  • One of the game's bonus story taking place in, of all places, Midgar.
    • You start out getting a message of a job from Reeve, who wants you to clean the Hardy-Daytona and the Shinra Hauler, which have been... very unkempt. Once you finish, you can practically feel yourself cringe at the fact that all your hard work is going to be undone later on the highway.
    • Once you're done with those, Reeve lets you know to expect another job from Heidegger, and lets you know to be wary about how eccentric he is while assuring you the next job may not be as orthodox as a vehicle. Heidegger's job for you? Cleaning the Scorpion Sentinel, which is covered in Mako-colored guts from having slaughtered some of Hojo's experiments in a pit fight the two had to see if Heidegger's military tech could hold up to Hojo's bioweapons. Furthermore, a bit of Black Comedy is added by the fact that it's live, and is only standing still because you're stored in its non-hostile database. You can even "ask it" to raise its gun turrets like a very patient elephant getting a bath.
    • You get a quest to clean up the Seventh Heaven bar from Tifa after Don Corneo's goons decided to order two of everything on the menu and turn the place into an utter sty. Hitting the "highlight dirt" button near the start is almost eye-searing. On top of that, you get the chance to clean Cloud and Barret's weapons. Cloud's Buster Sword has the same layer of grime as everything else, but Barret's Gatling Gun has a telltale stain of bioweapon gunk dripping from the rotary barrels. Cloud is the one to give the final thank-you for the job since Tifa has to make plans for a particular mission, and it's clear he's not in the mood to talk even as he admires the work you did.
    • It's then that Reeve calls you back for one last job to clean a scale model of the Shinra headquarters and the surrounding Sector Plates, which are covered in black, blue and yellow goop after one of Hojo's experiments got out and started nesting there. The job itself isn't too eventful, but about half way through, an enormous booming sound echoes around the room, and afterwards you get a Wham Line to end all Wham Lines;
    Reeve: Did you hear that? It sounded like an explosion...
  • One level in the Spongebob Squarepants pack has you cleaning The Invisible Boatmobile.
  • The Back to the Future pack gives us Alex's interpretation of the first film's climax. Even though he's watched the scene being filmed several times, he was forbidden from reading the script due to being an intern at the time, so instead he interprets the scene as Doc Brown attempting exposure therapy to conquer three fears at once (big cats, heights, and lightning).
    Alex: Doc celebrates overcoming his final fear by dancing in Marty's fiery trail. How all this ties in with time-travel is anyone's guess.
• Fridge Brilliance: The inclusion of the Prime Vista PRO Triple Tip Nozzle leading up to the game's end seems like a rather whimsical choice at first glance, until you realize what the statue inside the Lost City Palace is holding - A trident. Attach the extra-long extension in addition to your TTN and guess what you have in your hands now?
• Game-Breaker: The Prime Vista PRO Triple Tip Nozzle, once you've figured out how to use it right, trivializes every part of any job that doesn't require working at extremely close range... and those parts are quickly taken care of by the game's most powerful washer, the Prime Vista Pro; theonly one that can use the TTN and powerful enough in its own right to make short work of any dirt with its yellow nozzle. It's probably a good thing you don't get the TTN until Career Mode is almost over. That said, the TTN isn’t as effective on overlapping surfaces or items with lots of small spaces and tight corners. Especially in the Final Fantasy DLC, you see almost nothing else.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Fences. They're well within that sour spot of being small, having several surfaces, and self-obstructive, meaning you will need several passes with even the strongest washer on the market to fully clean since each stake will likely have to be washed individually.
  • Oil stains aren't too fun either, needing the Prime Vista PRO to even make a dent in them, and even then only with the tightest nozzles. Fortunately, and quite logically, the soap nozzle can make shorter work of them.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Harper Shaw spends the first act of career mode seeking to buy a new RV at an auction, only for two of them to be sold to other people instead. Later, after Aura Smith and Jenny Pebbles asks the protagonist to clean their RV, Aura decides to trade it off to the protagonist after finishing, suggesting that they either take their job worldwide with it or telling them that "maybe you know someone on the lookout for one". The protagonist decides on the latter, and gifts Harper it.
  • After you finish the final level in career mode, in the end credits, you are given a montage of all the vehicles/structures you cleaned throughout that mode.
  • After the credits, you hoist your power washing equipment into the back of your van, which now has photos of all of your accomplishments. This might feel bittersweet, since you also find a poster for the Mayor's missing cat, Ulysses, making you wonder if he can ever get found. But then you see a yellow tail sticking out... Seeing that, you lift of the cover to find... Not just Ulysses, but her two kittens. All three of them start gazing expectantly and lovingly at you.
  • By the time of the final level of the Tomb Raider pack, Lara considers you a trusted friend and lets you into her trophy room (something she hadn't even let her lifelong butler have access to). After cleaning it, Lara is so inspired by the sight of it that she decides to set off on another adventure.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: A common complaint of the SpongeBob SquarePants pack, especially since it's the game's first paid DLC. Three of the six levels are standalone vehicle levels that can be completed within ten minutes each ^note for comparison, the Tomb Raider pack bundles the Motorboat and Jeep together in one level while the Quad Bike is part of the Obstacle Course, and the Final Fantasy pack bundles the Hardy Daytona and Shinra Hauler together in one level while both of the mechs are fairly sizable. Two of the three locations themselves also don't take too long either for a good player, with both Conch Street and the Krusty Krab (which also includes Chum Bucket) locations taking around half an hour each, and only the Mermalair taking a significant time to complete.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The ding indicating you've completely cleaned a surface.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Special Mode tab, which includes the community voted levels in update 0.9, forces a specific washer upon you for each job like in Challenge Mode, which some have noted to increase tedium due to the large size of the jobs when a stronger washer would've been desirable (especially the Gnome Fountain, a huge level with numerous hard-to-remove graffiti that forces you to use the Urban X U2, the second weakest washer in the game).
  • Challenge Mode isn't too popular either, mostly because it's a textbook case of a game feature marketed at the wrong target demographic. With PWS explicitly being a casual game that players pick up to kick back and relax, adding very tight time or ammo limits to certain jobs basically tries to appeal to a group of gamers that is unlikely to play the game, while alienating the ones that do. The argument that Challenge Mode is optional doesn't hold much weight either, as the devs saw fit to include two achievements related to it, so if you're a completionist you have no choice but to engage with it, unless you're playing on the Nintendo Switch version which has no in-game achievements.
  • Minor example, but it can be annoying that once you've picked up the ladder from the ground, there's no way to put it back down. You can only place it upright at any of the predetermined spots, meaning that if it happens at the start of a job, you have no choice but to move the ladder at least once even if you don't need it because it will be in the way at some point.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Because the Prime Vista PRO Triple Tip Nozzle is so ridiculously overpowered, some players refrain from using it.
  • Players unhappy with the game's relaxed approach to realism may decide to take things into their own hands by only using nozzles and washers that would realistically make sense to be used on the surface in question. They also usually clean objects top to bottom as much as possible. Needless to say this requires a lot more consideration and time than it otherwise would.
• That One Achievement:
  • Anything that requires cleaning specific parts of a job last. The "Delaying The Inevitable" achievement in particular is seriously buggy, often failing to trigger even though you did everything right, which inevitably forces you to redo the entire job from scratch.
  • The "Good Dings To Come" achievement requires completing any job to 95% without completing any individual component of it. This gives you a very narrow margin of error between reaching the necessary percentage and the auto-complete feature voiding the achievement. While theoretically possible on any job, there's only one (the Ancient Monument, as it lacks small parts that can be accidentally completed in a single sweep) that offers a half-decent chance at accomplishing this without rage-quitting a couple times, and even there it's an arduous task.

---