Moldwasher Review — Sushi Against Mold

Do you enjoy cleaning? Many people will surely say yes. Cleaning is wonderfully calming; it lets you distract yourself from anxious thoughts and bring order both around you and in your own head. Moreover, despite its outward routine, there is something about cleaning that brings it close to a game—namely, the sense of progress. With every movement of the sponge or mop, you get closer to the goal: perfectly clean dishes or floors polished to a shine.

Game developers noticed this paradoxical appeal of routine actions long ago. For instance, in 2022, PowerWash Simulator, whose gameplay consisted solely of walking and washing away dirt with a high-pressure washer, became a sales hit for a time and showed the way for many indie developers.

Today we're reviewing the "PowerWash Sim on a budget"—Moldwasher, a game in which a piece of sushi washes mold out of a refrigerator and sears ground meat with a flamethrower.

Moldwasher is part of an unofficial "sanitary trilogy" created by independent developer Mikhail Rublev (Rubel Games). In 2022, the trilogy opened with the strategy game Listeria Wars, about a guy who ate everything in sight, causing heated battles between immune cells and microbes inside his body. Two years later, Rublev released the tactical roguelike Staying Fresh, in which fresh food battles spoiled food on refrigerator shelves. Moldwasher became a sort of continuation of Staying Fresh.

The developer said he added a mini-game to the main screen of Staying Fresh: if you moved the cursor over the products in the refrigerator, they became covered in mold, and if you held the right mouse button and moved again, the mold disappeared. Many players found this mini-game more interesting than the main gameplay of Staying Fresh, and Rublev decided to turn it into a standalone game. By the way, the very idea of a cleaning simulator came to him while watching relaxing videos about cleaning carpets and pools.

In Moldwasher, the player takes control of a living nigiri sushi who decides to clean up the kitchen. Mold of all varieties has taken over the shelves and the refrigerator, cockroaches scurry underfoot, and new life seems to have already begun in the bowl of ground meat. To regain his peace of mind, the sushi picks up a high-pressure washer and heads off for a big cleanup.

Why sushi, specifically? Well, why not.

The gameplay foundation is simple: short missions lasting 1–5 minutes appear on the kitchen map, tasking you with cleaning shelves, countertops, a ceiling fan, and other interior elements. To fight dirt and mold, the character uses several tools: a high-pressure washer, a blower, a pickaxe, an axe, and even a flamethrower (according to the developer, it was suggested by one of his subscribers).

Initially, only the simplest high-pressure washer is available; the other tools and their upgrades must be purchased with money earned by completing missions. Besides money, quality cleaning awards coins—these can be spent in a gacha machine that randomly dispenses music discs, figurines, and stickers to decorate the hub.

The mold in the game is aggressive—it multiplies from pixels missed during cleaning. Therefore, you must clean carefully and quickly. At times this creates problems: due to the pixel art style, it can be hard to spot the last pixel of dirt. What can you do—pixel hunting is still a common occurrence in simulators.

The main complaint players have about Moldwasher is its short length. The game can be completed entirely in two hours, and the ending feels like it was made in a rush: the game has just given you a new tool—the axe—and 3–5 minutes later the credits start rolling.

Frankly speaking, Moldwasher doesn't invent anything new for the genre. It takes already-known mechanics from PowerWash Simulator, simplifies them to a 2D level, and adds a bit of madness—a sushi protagonist, a flamethrower, and a hot dog at the shop counter. However, you can't say that's a bad thing—the game has almost universally positive reviews.

So what's the secret of Moldwasher? Expectations for small indie games are always lower than for blockbusters. From an inexpensive pixel-art cleaner simulator, people expect relaxation after a hard day, nothing more, and the game delivers that relaxation. Just don't forget, while scrubbing refrigerator shelves in the game, to go tidy up your real kitchen.