If you are anything like me, you may have some dirty laundry on the floor, maybe last night’s glass of water sitting next to today’s coffee cup, but your Animal Crossing fields are weed-free and the farm is clear of every rock and log in Stardew Valley.
Simulator games can emulate many commonplace activities from running a gas station or managing a cafe. There’s something incredibly soothing and zen about playing these sorts of games where you get to clean, organize, or decorate the rooms you’re working on. Here are some of this year’s most popular cleaning games.
Powerwash Simulator
Thanks to a few noteworthy YouTubers, one of the most renowned games that have been popularized this year is PowerWash Simulator, a game where your role is to take on small jobs like washing vehicles or cleaning up sites such as playgrounds and houses.
With a vast range of different nozzles of varying uses and strengths accompanied with soaps, the player is free to blast away dirt, rust and muck away for hours and enjoy the pure zen that accompanies the cleaning experience. Now available with Co-op mode, players can either enjoy that time to themselves or with friends for some of the larger tasks.
Unpacking
As stressful as moving can be, Unpacking makes the experience fun with adorable graphics and a puzzle mechanic as the player works through boxes of stuff and places their items around the corresponding room they are unpacking for.
It’s a short story that follows a female character moving from place to place such as from their college dorm room to a larger apartment and eventually a house as time passes and some items that age with each move.
With a few hours of content, Unpacking is a sweet game with a cute story that is perfect for relaxing at the end of a stressful day whilst ignoring the pile of laundry in the hamper nearby.
House Flipper
House Flipper is a multistep game where players get the chance to clean, construct and decorate a variety of different houses, but the cleaning aspect has to be one of the most satisfying parts of the game. Seeing a small home transform from being covered in cobwebs with messy floors and trash everywhere to a cleaned space with fresh painted walls and renewed floors is very satisfying.
Players get small jobs to start off with like in PowerWash Simulator before gaining the ability to buy houses, clean them up, maybe perform some renovations and decorate it to sell to a selection of buyers so the player can then buy another house to renovate.
The game is still updating and releasing several DLCs that continue to add more and more to the game, allowing for players to have more freedom when it comes to decorating all aspects of the house such as through gardening and nabbing more stylish and modernized houses through the HGTV DLC. Depending on what aspects of the game players enjoy, there seems to be a DLC available to make the game even more fun and cozy to play if you’ve ever thought you could do a better job than some reality TV hosts.
Jordan is a student studying Digital and Print Journalism at the University of North Texas. After discovering how much fun gaming journalism can be, she hopes to make a career in it once she graduates. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys playing games such as Genshin Impact, Ace Attorney, and Fire Emblem or watching Murder, She Wrote late at night on weekdays.
