PowerWash Simulator 2’s developer “blown away” by the series’ unexpected success

After revolutionizing the cozy gaming industry with its oddly satisfying mechanics and myriad wacky collaborations, FuturLab’s PowerWash Simulator 2 quickly became one of our most anticipated games of 2025. Expanding on the original’s core gameplay with new levels, updated soap systems, and adding local co-op, it brings us more of what we already love.

As a team, we’re rather fascinated by the game, with Holly raving about its relaxing elements in her PowerWash Simulator 2 review, and Connor delving deep into his family’s lineage while blasting muck off of a car in his feature. Plus, I gave the original game a 10/10 score on the Switch, so I was beyond excited to get to chat with FuturLab’s Design Director, Dan Chequer, about the sequel.

Pocket Tactics: Where did the inspiration for PowerWash Simulator and its familiar yet unique urban levels come from?

Dan Chequer: From all over the place, really! We are always open to ideas from anyone in the team and the community. The main aim is for each job to be as much of an iconic, relatable concept as possible, and that it has what I refer to as a ‘unique silhouette’. That is to say, each job needs to feel like something unique about its dimensions and proportions compared to any other job.

We also always wanted to avoid the jobs becoming predictable, and to ramp up in scale and weirdness as you progressed through the career. With the above criteria, it’s been really fun working out where the gaps are and what to add to the game!

Vehicles tend to be quite uniform in the elements they are composed of, and as such, are the trickiest for this. But we have found variety through dirt bikes to penny farthings, monster trucks, vintage cars, and fire engines. It’s one of the reasons why we have moved further away from vehicle jobs in the sequel.

Did you ever expect the game to take off as much as it did?

No, not at all! We were hoping for a modest indie success, but the attention and love that it has received and continues to receive has blown us all away. The response to the initial early access release gave us the confidence that the core gameplay was exactly what people wanted, and empowered us to commit as much care and attention to the production of the rest of the game features and jobs for the rest of early access.

We were fortunate to get a lot of fantastic attention from lots of content creators, which really helped get the word out about the game, and we’re very grateful to them all. It’s so great for the team to see so many people enjoying both playing and watching the game.

What’s your favorite level? Ours are the skate park and all of the Shrek-themed locations.

In the first game’s career mode, my favorite job is the Washroom. It was the first job we made in which the player was completely enclosed and surrounded by dirt, which is a job style that has become a fan favorite. Once cleaned, the shiny white tiles contrast with the dirt in an incredibly satisfying way.

We had to make a few interesting decisions for that job. The first was a clear rule on where the mud dirt type could and could not be placed in the scene so that it wouldn’t be ‘misinterpreted’ in what was already a pretty gross location!

Another was taking the doors off the cubicles, as the room was going to be too tight to comfortably close them again when inside one. This was justified in the story of the new owner about to turn it into a nightclub, and having already begun to rip the place apart. It was a good example of a fun storyline that came about largely through necessity.

How do you decide which equipment to add? Is there a powerwash manual or a standard list of items that washers use?

A lot of research went into the initial lineup of washers, extensions, and nozzles in order to really understand the real-world considerations. In the early stages, there was a lot of research into electric and gas-powered washers, with different factors being taken into account regarding their pound-force per square inch (PSI) and so on.

This all got simplified down to a straightforward range of increasingly powerful washers with the most common real-world nozzles, using their standardized real-world color conventions. We also threw in the more fanciful ‘triple tip nozzle’ for the endgame.

In an industry that has moved away from split-screen co-op as a whole, what drove you to make it such a large feature of PW2?

The PowerWash Simulator experience has proven to be great as a background experience for chats between friends, and we saw a lot of this occurring in live streams and anecdotally from players. We thought it would be a lovely addition to allow people to easily do the same in the same room.

As players can only ever contribute to but never hinder progress, coupled with no enemies or threats, it’s a really safe and collaborative space for players of any age or experience to join in and help as little or as much as they can.

I always love it when games let you play together, and it’s one of my personal favorite additions to the sequel!

The addition of the Home Base feature really feels like you’re leaning into the cozy genre that PW2 has found itself in. Did you always aim to appeal to this kind of audience, or was it a happy accident?

The game idea originated during a brainstorm for first-person games that could be made by a small indie team. When it was suggested, our CEO Kirsty immediately leapt upon it, as she had recently been strangely transfixed by power washing videos on social media and could immediately imagine the general outline and structure of the game.

The game’s focus on being purely about the cleaning experience without any time limits or fail conditions was there from the start, which was a hard sell to publishers, many of whom weren’t convinced that there was enough of a game there.

We are now more aware of its place in genres such as the cozy one, but we are not really steering the game’s design in that direction. The priority is building on the game’s theme and core mechanics in natural ways.

How does the team approach DLC? Do you reach out to collaborators, or vice versa, and how do you decide what makes the cut?

Usually, it’s us reaching out to potential collaborators, but we do get approached sometimes, too. It’s always incredibly flattering when that happens, and we’ve been sent some amazing proposals. There are often more collaboration opportunities than we have time to create, so the decisions as to what gets made in what order usually come down to logistics as much as anything!

We especially love creating DLC collaborations that the players don’t expect, and we intend to continue that for PowerWash Simulator 2.

Was it always on the cards to have a story going through the game, or did the campaign emerge midway through production?

For the original PowerWash Simulator, it was a bit of both! From the very start, we knew what we wanted some of the more ‘out there’ final jobs to be. We also knew we wanted to start with very traditional jobs that the player would be expecting. So we were very conscious that we faced the challenge of bridging those two contrasting scenarios.

We were also aware that no one was probably expecting a game about power washing to have a story, so we ensured it was enough in the background to be ignored by anyone who was there exclusively for the washing.

We wrote the story in two chunks, the first for the initial early access launch, ending around halfway through the career mode. This then gave us some in-progress storylines to tie together in the second half that also needed to lead to those final levels somehow. There were a load of incredibly serendipitous opportunities along the way, and we managed to pepper lots of references to earlier jobs through the latter ones.

It was so fun working on tying everything together with our writer, Mark. We loved watching it slowly dawn on players who were reading the messages during early access that there was actually a story linking the jobs all together!

FuturLab recently announced the roadmap for PowerWash Simulator 2’s updates and DLC, and we can’t wait to continue cleaning up Caldera County and some exciting IP locations. Keep your eyes peeled on Pocket Tactics for more news about the best Switch games and upcoming Switch games.