By this headline, I really don’t mean that Warhammer 40k is rubbish. But if you have no idea what it is apart from “thing Henry Cavill got made fun of for enjoying on the Graham Norton Show” or “reason I walk past a bunch of beardy lads taking a vape break outside a small shop with steamed up windows every time I go down Lower Glanmire Road”, PowerWash Simulator‘s latest officially licensed IP tie-in DLC could act like a sort of gateway drug. A first step on the path to buying a bunch of miniatures. It’s out now, for £6.50/$8/€8 on Steam, and it’s very fun.
You play as a tech-priest starting on, essentially, their first day on the job cleaning the huge war machines of the Imperium. If you’re reading this website it’s likely that you have some familiarity with Warhammer 40K, as I do, and so you know of the Space Marines, but here you’re hosing down some of the vehicles and larger war mechs that, when rendered in plastic miniature form, cost a lot of money. A quick Google tells me that for one Knight-Paladin in the header image above, you could buy about 12 copies of the DLC. These chonky lads provide some good, fiddly PowerWash Sim levels for washthusiasts like myself.
But, as ever, nothing has been spared in adapting an existing franchise. All this cleaning takes place in a huge, cathedral-like room, with windows looking out onto Mars. You get messages from a passive-aggressive co-worker who is upset that you’ve been given more prestigious cleaning jobs, even though they outrank you and have been there longer. But the triumph is really just that they’ve made these massive, massive killing machines, to scale, in 3D, and you can walk around them looking at all the bits of them, while trying to figure out what they’re for, as the game does some light show-don’t-tell context for you.
You get messages from a general, while you’re cleaning his favourite tank, who reveals through threatening you that the Imperial army has Penal Legions made from criminals. When you’re hosing down the giant shield on the Knight Paladin, you reveal multiple wax Purity Seals, and you’re like “weird, wonder what that’s all about then?”. One of the earliest jobs you do is cleaning a Dreadnought, which is a huge bio-mechanical mech unit that’s like 6 meters tall. You might notice that, hang on, you’re cleaning off a bit called the sarcophagus. Wait, why does this sarcophagus have a viewing window??
It makes the lore of this quasi-religious, fanatical, bio-mechanical colonial cult seem actually very interesting, divorced from the system where you have to go in a grey-carpeted shop staffed by – in my experience – extremely gatekeepery dudes with ponytails. I don’t think it’s the DLC to convert Warhams fans to PowerWash Sim, but it might convert PowerWash Sim fans into dipping a toe into the Black Library. FuturLabs are just putting out hit after hit. They can keep doing PowerWash Sim DLC forever, thanks. The Warhammer 40K Special Pack is £6.50/$8/€8 on Steam.
