Cash Cleaner Simulator Review (PC)

I’m throwing cash clips into tumble dryers, exhuming gold bars from blood-stained mattresses, and kicking my feet up against a stone furnace, wondering how I’ll spend the next paycheck. It’s an easy job, and one that doesn’t involve too great a risk. The underworld pulls the strings from the outside, and I, alone in this jolly green bunker of mine, have the sole responsibility of merely flushing out the questionable juju from bank notes and bars, and returning them to their “rightful” owners. I’ll take a cut, of course, but not to fuel my own irrelevant pastimes, but to add extra kindling beneath this portly piggy bank. With money, I can unlock additional methods of cleansing the bills, or even source innovative solutions for doing the job for me while I kick back and play a round of Moneyball. In Money Cleaner Simulator, I play by my own rules.

The day starts out simple: I browse the dark web, make invaluable connections with criminals from all walks of life, and propose a service that would prove beneficial to whoever decides to opt in. If I’m lucky enough, I receive pillow cases of bank notes, which I then funnel into one of several different cleaning appliances located around the laboratory. I clean it, ship it back, and then, with just a minor percentage taken from the lump sum, invest in more machines and upgrades to fund even more ambitious projects and business enterprises across the field. It’s dirty work, but when all’s said and done, somebody has to do it.

Money to Burn

Money Cleaner Simulator doesn’t ask questions about where the funds came from, only that you, the one in charge, are capable of rinsing the foul odor of injustice to serve a higher purpose—to fill the pockets of the underworld-based clientele who need their cash and other goods cleaned. And that’s really what this journey is: accepting jobs from eccentric individuals, and using a combination of machines, tools, and other intricate skills to wash the likes of ink, blood, and bone from the bills before sending it back for a lavish bonus.

The initial sequence begins in a similar fashion as a lot of trade-centric simulation games — with a small appliance, an inadequate bag of cash, and a selection of quick turnaround jobs that you can access via your phone. As you begin to descend even deeper into this underworld of wrongdoing, the game gradually begins to unveil itself with more tools to aid your endeavors, like UV lights to illuminate fingerprints, cash counting machines to detect counterfeit bills, and storage units to house gold bars, artifacts, and excess cash from the loftier jobs. With all of this being tucked behind a sizable campaign with numerous upgrades and trials, the goal, at least in the beginning, is straightforward: earn a passive income, and invest, invest, invest to progress further into the story.

Cash Is King

At the heart of all of these controversial practices is a surprisingly relaxing process, and one that allows you the opportunity to establish your business without having to onboard any unlawful activities along the way. Without any potential repercussions to concern yourself with, the actual process of completing the in-game jobs isn’t that difficult, or even the least bit taxing on the soul, for that matter. Granted, it’s predictable, and it does expect you to subject yourself to the same loop for several hours before it finally lets up on the perks and other goodies, but it also makes such work oddly satisfying — like popping rolls of bubble wrap, or bathing in contextless ASMR reels, for example.

As for how you clean cash in this digital laundering gig, you either spend your time scrubbing bills with a microfiber cloth, or bundling baubles of cash into a washing machine or another appliance. Admittedly, it isn’t always clear which tool to use, or even how you should go about operating them in order to achieve your goals. That said, once the operation begins to snowball, and the upgrades naturally transition into effective tools of the trade, the game, as a whole, becomes much, much easier. And after that, well, it more or less becomes the case of swinging through the same motions several times over until you either retire or squeeze the final droplets of the in-game dark net job site.

Verdict

I won’t lie to you, but I don’t think that the description does the game justice here. If, say, you had said to me prior to plugging into Cash Cleaner Simulator that I would be spending over a dozen hours scrubbing blood from a stack of bills on a frequent basis, then I wouldn’t have believed you. And yet, here I am, on the eleventh hour, still laundering cash with the machines in my laboratory, and still flinging out dollar bills from a makeshift sticker gun.

I’d be lying to you if I said that I haven’t already done everything a hundred time over — because I have. But in spite of everything, I still feel as if there’s more to see and do. The process is still as equally familiar as it was before, but that sense of accomplishment with each passing job is still alive and kicking — and I’m still chasing it. It’s dirty work, but I can’t seem to step away from it. There are more upgrades to chase, and twice as many postings to fill before I cleanse the final bill. I’m not ready to had my letter of resignation in just yet.

To make it painfully obvious, Cash Cleaner Simulator is, to some degree, the love letter to PowerWash Simulator that we never got. It’s a little more grubby and fixated on criminal enterprises, I’ll admit, and it doesn’t necessarily center its world around litter boxes and schoolyards, either. However, the gameplay itself still remains the same, and so, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys engaging in generic chore core work that makes even the most mundane of jobs come across as genuinely enjoyable, then I’d like to think that Cash Cleaner Simulator will have more than enough to keep you plugging away.