When cleaning your house, there’s something irresistibly zen-like about spending serious time on one tiny blemish. A fleck of dried toothpaste lodged between two tap handle indents. A triple-seared smear of plum sauce nestling under an oven hob. But it’s easy to lose sight of this stuff in cleaning sims once you start sprucing up entire parks and statues. Not so the wonderful Moldwasher. You play as a plucky piece of Sushi, and with the larger world far beyond your blissfully rice-brained comprehension, the small details are there all is.
Powerwash Simulator is great and all, but it can’t conjure the private, tiny joys of cleaning individual eggs, because cleaning eggs with a regular-sized powerwasher would destroy the eggs, and also drown any small dogs you happen to have scurrying about the place. Here, you get the best of both worlds. A tiny set of power cleaning implements, including a flamethrower for some reason, to make a variety of mundane and miniature stages sparkle.
Every stage doubles as its own lovely pixel art diorama. Sometimes, its a grimy bathroom window that slowly reveals a lush midnight garden flanked by towering firs. Sometimes, it’s a wooden ceiling fan so uniquely disgusting you’ll be thankful your real-life arms are long enough to never have to gaze upon the topside of one. Despite being largely cheery, simple, and colorful, Moldwasher’s art style does a convincingly gross job of bringing to irksome life every variety of common housescum.
There’s even a few new strains of evil mould I’m thankfully yet to encounter growing in my own house, but all great horrors necessitate an equal force of good. Here that’s the care and juice poured into making the cleaning itself feel, look, and sound so trigger-fingerly satisfying. Like Powerwash Sim, this is ultimately a game designed to let you sit back and leisurely enjoy making the world shine again. Water sprays are fresh, sharp, and glittering, condensation lingers for fleet moments on freshly-cleaned surfaces before dissipating, and brain-tickling ooooshes and swishes accompany it all. As do some great silly details, like the way the more potent tools push your tiny sushi back as they try to grapple with their immense power.
Moldwasher wants you to chill, so it’s never demanding on your thumbs, although does gradually introduce light mechanical twists that encourage you to pick up the pace. A fly spreads muck you already thought you’d cleaned around the fridge, until you stun it into temporary submission with your water gun. In the fridge’s innards, after chipping down nests of dried noodles with an axe, an impromptu wind tunnel blasts the shards back and forth while you sprint to catch up, and use your own tiny leafblower to finish the job.
Your cleaning arsenal consists of that windblower, plus small and large powerwashers, a pick, an axe, plus some cleaning fluid. And then there’s that flamethrower. It’s a fairly short first playthrough at around four or five hours, but gear and upgrade cash is dolled out smoothly enough to give you a nice sense of progression. The difference between any given tool at its base power and with a few upgrades feels hefty, and it’s very gratifying to return to those first few levels with juiced-up tools and blast through them in seconds.
As befits the burgeoning subgenre, you’ll often encounter muck and messes you’ll need specific tools to clean. Stubborn stickers won’t peel off the fridge without your default nozzles alt-fire mode, for example. When stages start getting stranger and introducing bug’s nests and cosmic mushrooms, you’ll eventually have to reach for the flamethrower. Most everything has its place, although I never found any real use for my canister of cleaning fluid. The weak links here are the pick and the axe, used for chipping through stubborn dry goods, such as stale biscuits. Both are fiddly and laborious, and I ended up dreading stages where I’d need to break my flow to use them. Plus, once you’ve given me access to a flamethrower, it’s hard to justify employing manual labour over incineration. Why can I simply not turn the biscuits to ash?
Still, I have to admit this is likely more of a case of my own impatience than anything. I’m fond of the space games like Moldwasher occupy in the landscape because they seem to challenge so many ideas about mastery and progress in games that we often take for granted as necessities. A message at the beginning of Moldwasher says something to the effect of “take your time. No-one is judging you”. It feels twee at the time, but later I caught myself trying to rush a stage and think, ah, touche, sushi boy. Sometimes, you really do need a sentient rice oblong to remind you that life isn’t a race. The game isn’t interested in boasting challenges, but just giving you a space to hang out in.
As a final lovely bow on the package, this extends to offering an actual space – a little home for your sushi to shop, decorate, watch videotapes, and listen to music between levels. I mentioned above the attention to even the small details here, and that extends to the collectibles scattered around levels – each of which you’ll need to quickly spray the grime off before nabbing.
You can even pop in and out of stages to change the music on your CD player. Spacy, bouncy trip-hop and jazzy beats join bubbly ambient tracks, and retro game-themed jungle. They’re all visualised as floating CDs when you pick a track, and looking flicking through those CDs to pick something I fancied felt much like I feel about Moldwasher as a whole. Something wonderful to sit tucked away in my Steam library until I get in the exact mood for the very specific kind of miniature escape it offers, and dust it off again.
