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PowerWash Simulator (PS5): COMPLETED!

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In some ways, this is the reverse game to Splatoon. Instead of painting everything you have to clean everything. And that’s all you do. Clean everything. With a power washer1. There are filthy buildings, and objects, and vehicles. Different materials are easier or harder to clean, and you can buy special soaps to assist. Things will be out of reach, so you have to buy longer attachments for your washer. Eventually you need to buy whole new, more efficient and powerful washers to blast away even more stubborn dirt.

And it takes ages.

With cleaning a garden (one of your first tasks) taking nearly an hour, and the final building (no spoilers) taking you, or at least, me, eight or more, it’s as much a job as the real power washing business would be. Even the smaller vehicles can take a while, especially getting into all the nooks and crannies.

Some levels are tricky as finding tiny or hidden areas to clean isn’t easy, and getting on, under or around things to reach the grime can be a challenge. You’ve only your washer, a step, and a small ladder for most of the game to assist, and even when you get scaffolding that doesn’t help with the final tucked away pixels of muck you inevitably spend both an hour looking for, and clean entirely by accident in the end.

Sounds dull, right? It is. Only, somehow, it isn’t. It’s rewarding to finish off a huge wall and get the “flash” and jingle to signify you’ve found all the dirt on it. To see what sometimes isn’t even recognisable as a thing due to the filth on it become a sparkly skate park or jet engine or plant pot or something. To be honest, the feeling of a job well done would be enough to “enjoy” the game, but there’s more here than just that.

Yeah, so you do only wash stuff. There’s nothing else to do (unless you count carrying a gnome around or playing “squirt the football about a bit”), but there is a story. What starts out as a few jobs for the locals – their house, their car – becomes “clean my jet plane that has anti-gravity plates and a laser cannon” and “there’s a dirty statue with weird glowing eyes in the desert, pointing at the volcano which is getting a bit rumbly”. I won’t spoilt it, but boy, does it go somewhere with this. There’s a whole side story about the Mayor and his lost cat. A car that was once used in a film. And the ever-present volcano.

So, after 40 hours play, perhaps even longer, I’d cleaned everything. Even all the toilets in the toilets level. Which, to be honest, was the main reason I started playing in the first place even though I didn’t know for sure there would even be a toilet level. Phew, eh?

  1. Technically, and the game does point this out at one point with a message from guy who is clearly pushing his glasses up his nose as he types, it’s a pressure washer, not a power washer ↩︎

Splatoon 3 (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Unlike 99.99% of Splatoon players, the game has always been about the single player game to me. My understanding is that most players aren’t even aware there is a single player mode. I don’t dislike the online multiplayer, and sure, I supplemented my solo play through Splatoon 3 with a few online games, but it’s not where all the fun for me is.

At the end of Splatoon 2 (as in, the single player game there), it’s teased that some mammals – who predate the squid and octopuses who have evolved in the world and were long thought extinct – are still alive. And so this is revealed properly in Splatoon 3, with Grizz, the hidden CEO of the salmon roe factory (or whatever he does) happens to be a giant bear and the main boss of the game. DJ Octavio, the end of game boss of the previous two games, does return, but he’s not the baddie here. In fact, the two new TV hosts – Shiver and Frye – would appear to be until… well. Not too many spoilers.

The single player world is set in some underground ruined research centre, much of which is covered in some furry goo. Luckily, you have a pet fish who, once fed with enough eggs earned mainly from completing levels, can eat bits of it allowing access to more levels, areas, upgrades, and so on. The levels themselves are similar to those that came before, each with a specific gimmick (such as you have to use rollers, or there are platforms that fold out, or you can’t use any ink) that often turns the level into less of a fight and more of a puzzle. A few are against the clock, and some require accurate shooting, but all of them are different and most secretly teach you skills, moves or tricks you can use in the multiplayer mode.

It felt a bit shorter than the mode in Splatoon 2, and was certainly a lot easier, but it’s such a fun game it doesn’t matter.

January 2024 Update – Fortnite Multiverse

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LEGO Fortnite game mode, explained - Dot Esports 

Playing NOW

Fortnite (PS5)
Back on Fortnite again!
The game has had a huge update with lots of different modes including Lego Fortnite & Rocket Racing. The current season pass also has a Solid Snake Skin!

I have spent a lot of time playing Lego Fortnite with my daughter, now just waiting for some new content drop. Rocket Racing has a lovely arcade feel and nice drift mechanic but also needs to introduce some quality of life features in terms of the lobby & track choice.

Assasin's Creed Mirage (PS5)
Going back to it's stealth roots, AC Mirage is a much more shorter concise expereince set in Baghdad.

Playing BIN
Persona 5 Tactica (XSX)
I went off Persona 5 Tactica because it just seem to repeat the same formula of stage battles leading up to a boss fight with no new mechanics & became very repetive.

Forza Motorsport (XSX)
Rocket Racing is currently scratching my racing itch so I have left Forza alone for now.

Playing NEXT
Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth (PS5)
Pre-order placed with Shopto, probably the only game I will buy on release this year. I need to finish off AC Mirage over the next few weeks.

Playing FUTURE
Starfield
Spiderman 2
Baldur's Gate 3
Cyberpunk 2077
Star Wars Jedi Survivor
Midnight Suns
Shadow Gambit - Cursed Crew
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Playing Backlog
In no particular order I own the following I still want to play.

Judgment
Life is Strange
Sackboy
Lost Judgment
Outer Wilds
Shadow Tactics
Disco Elysium
Empire of Sin
Bioshock Collection
Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen
Like A Dragon Ishin

The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo (Switch): COMPLETED!

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Back in the 90s, Channel 4 in the UK would sometimes show strange animated short films from abroad. I think they were part of some animation festival or something. This game immediately put be in mind of one of those. It’s a weird, nonsensical, abstract cartoon but it’s also a point and click adventure game. There’s no (recognisable) speech. Little in the way of explicit instruction, no narration, and certainly no explanation to the events. But it works!

Assembling the story yourself, Mr. Coo is given a present which manages to escape. The first half of the game is trying to get this back, with weird events and creatures that help and hinder. Like a thing which jumps on mushrooms, or a tree that un-grows back into a seed or an arcade machine which you can reach into (and get slapped by a monkey in a fez with a crowbar).

After that, Mr Coo is cut up three pieces and the rest of the game involves trying to reassemble him. Some of the puzzles require controlling each part separately, adding a level of complexity (and absurdity). That said, most of the puzzles are either reasonably easy, or solvable with trial and error. Unlike most point-and-click games you don’t have an inventory and there aren’t that many items you can actually pick up or interact with. It makes it a bit limited, but it does mean if you’re stuck you don’t have 15 items in your pocket to try on 30 different hot spots in the hope something works. One really obscure puzzle was on the end “boss fight” where I didn’t realise you could use a specific background object at a specific time with a specific part of Mr Coo, but most of the rest are work-out-able.

I was disappointed that the ending came so quickly, not least because it’s a “to be continued” rather than a completion of the story, and who knows when the follow-up will be released. It finishes on an ending of sorts, but then there’s more and it feels like the developers just decided “that’s enough game for now, we’ll do the rest later” which is frustrating. I also came across a handful of bugs; One was when an item was “spawned” in the wrong place and couldn’t be moved to the right place, and a few times the game just crashed out completely. As you can’t save manually, and you rely on non-obvious and irregularly spaced checkpoints, that was a pain too. I had to redo parts of the game several times as a result. Not a massive hassle, but a negative in a game which is otherwise so polished.

A Tiny Sticker Tale (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

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And the first completed game of 2024 is… A Tiny Sticker Tale! Which you already knew because that’s the title of this post. Free on Amazon or Epic or something (it’s hard to track these days), A Tiny Sticker Tale was on my Switch eShop wishlist following John Walker’s enthusing on his blog. But since it was free elsewhere, and Steam Deck-able, I moved there instead.

It’s not often I have to rush to complete a game. With this one, I started playing it and my daughter’s ears pricked up and she came over and started to play it vicariously so I had to send her away and tell her to wait her turn while I ran through it as there’s only one save game slot. OK, so it wasn’t exactly a rush, as the game is only a few hours long anyway, but I don’t think I touched on everything.

The ‘hing with A Tiny Sticker Tale is that you pick up items, objects and characters as stickers, put them in your scrapbook, then take them out and use them elsewhere. For example, there’s a river on one of the screens which you can’t cross, but there’s a bridge on another. Unstick the bridge, take it to the river, and plonk it down. Most of the puzzles work in similar ways, a ladder to climb cliffs, or places you have to take the animal characters to.

There’s a fun bit of inventory management (no, really) as you’ve only limited space in your scrapbook and some of the stickers are huge, so you have to move them all around. I realised you can, if you’re careful, make them overhang the pages somewhat, increasing what you can “carry”, but even then, you sometimes have to swap out things. Especially if you’re carrying trees.

None of the puzzles are especially difficult, and I expect some people will find the game excruciatingly twee, but I enjoyed the laid-backness of it, the art style, and the silly characters you meet.