Some of us will do just about anything to avoid having a thought, and while that constant need for stimulation is probably worth interrogating, let's set that aside for now to talk about a particularly good thought-eradicator: PowerWash Simulator. It's a bit more involved than a desktop pet, but brings me a more rewarding calm when I both want and do not want to do something.

It plays a lot like the name suggests. You get a beefy hose, fancy attachments, and hop from client to client blasting grime off of surfaces, and that's its biggest appeal: just the raw, sensory satisfaction of stripping dirt off of things. Job sites are a mix of everything from totally normal locations that look like they've been assaulted by a small, muddy tornado to more fantastical DLC destinations like SpongeBob's pineapple home or Lara Croft's mansion.

As you can imagine, there's not a lot about powerwashing to change or expand on in a sequel, but PowerWash Simulator 2 didn't need to reinvent spraying water at dirt to be worthwhile, just refine it, and it does just that. It's rich with thoughtful little changes throughout, and even in its infancy, the sequel is better in almost every way. The biggest downside is that it doesn't yet have the years of add-ons the original has accrued.

Into the cracks and crevices

Among PowerWash Simulator 2's tweaks and improvements are fresh new attachments for scrubbing grime away and soapy buffs that remove the tedium of managing too many resources.

The Swirlforce Surf Ace—a heavy-duty surface cleaner with a wide, circular head—is the best example of that. While I do get some satisfaction out of slowly running powerful wide-spray nozzles back and forth in straight lines over large, flat surfaces, it's not something that keeps me occupied for long. You've got one, maybe two, shots at those sprawling spaces in a job to keep me entertained before I'm looking for pieces of weirdly detailed crown molding to blast the dirt from.

I've already opined on how I fell in love with the new attachment while cleaning a billboard, but now that I'm done with career mode, I'm happy to report it's still a major blast for scrubbing flat spaces. It makes that part of a job quick without forfeiting the feeling of satisfaction that comes from hosing down bigger areas with a controlled, deliberate spray. If you're into the meditative motions of the first game, then I'm here to tell you that the new toys absolutely deliver.

Now couple the Swirlforce's satisfying sweeps with changes to how you soap down dirty surfaces and we're really in business. In the clean utopia of PowerWash Simulator 2, soap is free and all-purpose, eschewing the old system where you had to choose between six kinds of cleaner at $10 a bottle. It was a miserable money sink I avoided at all costs.

The sequel's superior sud system is on a short timer—you can't endlessly spray—but draining the bottle won't cost you. Instead, you soap up a target until the supply is gone, then it slowly fills back up while washing the suds away.

It may not sound like much, but soap management in the first game really ruins my relaxing brain vacations. I can't imagine paying for liter after liter of cleaning products in PowerWash 2's motel level, where even my most powerful water jets can't efficiently cleanse all the nastiness. Axing the buying and juggling of specialty concoctions makes big projects with heavy-duty demands less of a hassle, letting me sit back and enjoy what I came for: blasting stuff with water.

Good, clean fun

Co-op no longer clashes with the calm either, so I can bring a friend along with a clear conscience. While the original PowerWash Simulator had multiplayer, you couldn't share progress or profits in career mode. The host kept all the cash and unlocked access to new levels—friends had to work for free. I'm a changed woman in PowerWash Simulator 2, running an ethical gig where I pay friends for their labor and share my client list.

The change feels especially useful when recruiting for goliath tasks in later levels. I loaded into one job close to the end, saw the size, and immediately hopped back out to seek help from a friend. There were some pretty big tasks in the first game, but I can't recall any that took me as long as the handful of sprawling maps in PowerWash Simulator 2. Some seem designed with co-op play in mind, but if you're patient and don't mind spending one or two hours on a single map, you can hose them down alone.

It's even better when you remember we're living in a perfect powerwashing society with free soap. After quietly cleaning our little corners alone for a while, my co-op partner suggested, "You soap, I'll spray," and it blew my mind. That's not a fun strategy when soap is ten bucks a liter and someone works for free, but the charitable sequel universe encourages tag-teaming objects with layers of caked-on ick.

Fixer upper

I love the size variance in the available jobs—there are a total of 38 in PowerWash Simulator 2 at launch—though I remain partial to smaller, less intimidating tasks for singleplayer sessions.

New home base projects where you powerwash and arrange furniture in a personalized space add another opportunity for small-scale projects, but the system sits just on the cusp of fun in the beginning and never improves.

It's kind of like a mini furniture restoration side gig, but substantially less hypnotizing than the rug cleaning videos I watch on TikTok. Placing furniture is finicky, I couldn't even put objects on rugs, and there's no clutter. How am I supposed to enjoy a room with no lamps on side tables or trinkets on shelves? It's just hulking pieces of awkwardly placed furniture. I'm not playing PowerWash Simulator for its decor system, but this half-baked implementation feels like the antithesis of the clean, satisfying strokes its tools deliver.

The base is a bummer, but not a deal breaker. PowerWash Simulator 2 is still a major upgrade in ways that are insignificant alone, but game-changing as a whole. The additions feel too substantial to handwave as a missed update for the original, while the refinements keep me from missing all that DLC I collected for the first game.

With some of the first game's pain points sanded down, PowerWash Simulator 2 is a delightfully monotonous chore sim. If I could muster this kind of enthusiasm for any real life task just as conceptually boring I'd be unstoppable, but alas, this is the only world with free soap.

September 30, 2016 was a big day for Amazon Game Studios: It was on that day, at TwitchCon, it unveiled Breakaway, Crucible, and New World, signalling a major push into the realm of big-budget game development. Not quite a decade later, we find ourselves standing amidst the rubble of that once-great ambition, with a single question on our minds: What the hell went wrong?

Because things very definitely did go wrong. First, Amazon halted development of Breakaway in 2018 after some iffy previews and an open alpha that failed to impress. It followed that up by not halting development of Crucible, even though it probably should have given that Crucible ended up being 'un-released' just a month after it went live and was ultimately canned outright.

And yesterday, it nailed the trifecta: New World, despite appearing to be at least a moderate success (which makes it a big success by Amazon standards) was brought to an end: Amazon said the game will continue to run until at least the end of 2026 (although it also said New World would remain available for purchase, a commitment that held up for about 12 hours) but active development is over.

Various other whiffs have been interspersed throughout—failed games, forgotten game stores, that sort of thing—but for me, the fates of those three games really encapsulate Amazon's gaming misadventure: Big talk, half-assed execution, ugly endings, all of it leading to yesterday's announcement of major layoffs at Amazon Games.

Of course there's no single answer to the question of what the hell went wrong, because obviously a lot of things did. But the end of New World, and seemingly of Amazon's gaming ambitions as a whole, bring to mind what former Prime Gaming vice president Ethan Evans had to say about it earlier this year—essentially, that hubris and money are a dangerous combination.

Amazon's overarching goal, according to a LinkedIn post we reported on in February, was to "disrupt the game platform Steam." No problemo, right? As Evans wrote on LinkedIn, "We were at least 250x bigger [than Steam]," and that's a pretty good starting point.

Ah, but problemo indeed. "The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code," Evans wrote. "Not under my leadership or anyone else's."

Twitch tried to break into the digital marketplace via acquisition, and failed; then it tried to build its own storefront into Twitch, which was also a bust. Then it built the cloud gaming service Luna, which went largely unnoticed. Steam, meanwhile, continued its uncontested dominance of PC gaming, ably guided by Gabe Newell and a potato.

"At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits," Evans admitted in his February LinkedIn post. "We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems, and they weren't going to switch platforms just because a new one was available.

"We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either. Just because you are big enough to build something doesn't mean people will use it."

The extent of Amazon's failure to crack the Steam nut is revealed in the fact that not only did it fail to compete, but lots of people didn't even know it was trying in the first place. That's, uhh, really not a good sign.

Today I learned amazon had a platform competing against Steam. lol

— @3mbg.bsky.social (@3mbg.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T19:21:13.716Z

Amazon: "you took everything from me"Steam:

— @bearpigman.bsky.social (@bearpigman.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T19:21:13.771Z

Amazon was OFFICIALLY competing against Steam this whole time?

— @sliwinski.bsky.social (@sliwinski.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T19:21:13.744Z

I’ve had steam since it was a thing, and this is quite literally the first time I’ve heard they have a game store Like I knew about New World or whatever their MMORPG was but that’s it.

— @richs.bsky.social (@richs.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T19:21:13.688Z

Amazon isn't giving up on games entirely, but it's shifting focus away from major productions like New World to stuff like the AI-powered Snoop Dogg game where he's a judge. I'm sure that'll work out much better.