by Chris SelogyWith the sweeping success of the PowerWash Simulator games, we are starting to see our first indie games take cues from what makes a power-washing game fun and push it in new directions. That is where Moldwasher comes in: a 2D game about cleaning up this incredibly nasty kitchen full of mold, disgusting goo, and other nastiness across various parts of the room … makes you wonder what happened in that kitchen before this game began! To make things a bit weirder, you’re a sentient piece of sushi that has somehow been tasked with cleaning up these areas with a power washer and various other tools in a game that doesn’t try to be any bigger of a game than it has to be.
There’s not much more story to it — which makes sense for this small of a game–and that’s still a bit disappointing, not having a bit more fun with the premise. There are several fun character portraits for the various jobs you can take, and it would enhance the fun if there were proper silly stories to go with them. Maybe it will be in the sequel if this game sells well.
Read more: REVIEW – “Moldwasher” is sloppy at times, but cleans up nicely
You begin Moldwasher with a basic pressure washer, and you earn cash for upgrades as you complete jobs. The first three tools you unlock, along with four more beyond that, allow you to take on tougher and more unusual tasks. You quickly buy a leaf blower to blow rice off tables and other parts of the room, with modes to both suck and blow as needed. Next is a more advanced pressure washer with two unique spraying modes, like the ultimate nozzles in PowerWash Simulator: a swirling three-spray mode and another with a wider spray. That has the neat detail of pushing your little sushi body backward as you use it because it’s so powerful! The other tools include one for breaking crusty chunks of food, a flame blower to burn up certain items, and an extinguisher that seems like a weak washer, so it isn’t used for much.
I enjoyed using the washers and the leaf blower a lot for their ease of use and great versatility in most of the jobs you’re given. The rest of the tools were more frustrating to use because they have a very limited purpose with no way to upgrade them to be more powerful. The limitations worsen as you upgrade the washers and leaf blower. They’re not bad tools, and they work well enough for their specific uses, but you don’t really get tutorials for them to explain their alternate modes or what use they offer beyond the obvious. Also, there’s no sort of control mapping memo to indicate which controls I’m using when I’ve swapped between controller, mouse, and keyboard on my Steam Deck … though I may have missed a button that could make those extra tools even better.
The game is very light on settings and options that leave something to be desired, especially for remapping controls or seeing which actions on the controller translate to the mouse and keyboard. That said, the game is light enough that it doesn’t really need any visual options besides the CRT filter toggle and basic audio levels for music and sound effects.
The campaign takes you all across this kitchen, starting in the refrigerator, moving to the kitchen table, the countertops, the stove, the floor, the sink, and even some other fun places you can probably guess based on your own kitchen at home. The dirt regenerates if you don’t clean quickly enough, adding an unusual challenge for this genre. It can be frustrating at times, but it adds a little liveliness to this mold (or whatever it may be) covering that part of the kitchen. Once the washers are upgraded enough, it stops being an issue, but it is nice while it lasts. There are things beyond the kitchen grime, including living things like a fly, some roaches, and maybe even something fun for the finale. There probably isn’t enough of it for my tastes, especially with one particular job that indicates that a dog might return to their water or food bowl soon when there’s no real threat of that beast showing up at all.
After you unlock the shop, the earned cash and some coins let you buy tools and upgrades as mentioned, plus the coins are used in a fun little gacha toy machine to give you some toys to put on the shelves in your room. Your room acts as your home between jobs. You can place the stickers on the walls in the most obnoxious places you can find to clutter it up in any way you wish. You also unlock a stereo for the CDs collected during gameplay, allowing you to change up the music with mostly chill beats of various kinds, which is appreciated. The nice touch is that you find a lot of these knick-knacks in various jobs hidden under the muck. You have to clean it off before using them — an additional thing to wash off.
My only issue with the collectibles is that you only find out whether or not a job has them after finishing the job. The map of jobs never indicates whether you got the hidden item after finishing it, so the achievements for finding all of the toys, stickers, and other collectibles requiring random replays of those jobs. That is a frustrating amount of extra time potentially wasted on jobs that don’t have collectibles on them. I hope that gets fixed in an update soon, just for completionists like me who like to wring every last drop out of smaller games like this.
I call Moldwasher a smaller game because each job takes a few minutes to finish, and I finished the whole campaign within two-and-a-half hours the first weekend I had the game. It was a fun, quick ride until the end. It ends with a “nice job, well done,” as your sushi person relaxes in a chair watching the credits scroll by before you’re dumped back to your room. Post-credits, you can replay the jobs, finish buying upgrades, and get the rest of the collectibles, which I’ve been able to add another hour or so to my playtime beyond that. For the $8.99 that Moldwasher costs, that seems like a great afternoon playthrough of a game that you can enjoy and move on if you want, but it also has a good variety of achievements to show you fun little extra things you might have missed to maybe get another hour or two out of it.
There are definitely some rough spots, like the lack of a way to track which jobs still have collectibles to get. I hope to see that addressed in a future update to make this game as good as possible. I’d love to see new jobs added, too, because if the kitchen is in this kind of shape, the rest of the house must be a disaster! Imagine what the bathroom must be like, and please give me that as an expansion or a sequel to make me really happy.
Moldwasher
