Cleaning Simulator: A satisfying journey to cleanliness

I have a love-hate relationship with cleaning. In real life, I’m the kind of person who will procrastinate the weekly deep clean for as long as is humanly possible, even though there’s nothing I love more than the feeling of a pristine house to relax in. However, I also know that I’m motivated to clean by either watching others do it or playing games that involve it.

Cleaning Simulator, developed by Damaged Games, has quickly earned itself a place on my list of “virtual cleaning” games that I play when I need a little motivation to get away from my desk and whip out the mop bucket. With realistic graphics and an array of tools to don in your fight against the muck, there’s a demo to play right now. 

A clean-a-holics dream

As someone who watches hours and hours of cleaning content on social media every week (yes, I know how bizarre that is), I can safely say that any game that allows me to live out my cleaning fantasies without getting off the couch is definitely one I can see myself playing a lot. Cleaning Simulator is no different, and even if you don’t use it as a motivational tool for some real-life cleaning action, it’s extraordinarily satisfying. 

If you’ve played House Flipper or any other similar game, you’ll know how this works: You’re armed with an arsenal of cleaning tools from sponges to pressure washers, and you use them to remove the dirt and trash in a series of homes that need some TLC. There are no time limits, although you are timed and racing against yourself every time you jump into a particular level. 

New levels unlock as you complete previous ones, with new tools seeming to be added with each level. In the Cleaning Simulator demo, you can play through two levels, and the second adds a pressure washer and a vacuum cleaner. There are additional empty slots on the pop-up radial tool menu, so other tools will likely be available as you progress through the full game once it’s released.

More “squatter’s rights” than “sanctuary”

Look, I have to question the logic of anyone who is more than happy to live in a house where the corridors are piled with trash and the walls are caked in what I hope is mud, regardless of how close we are to the bathroom, but then gets pedantic about my cleaning techniques. I have to question even further someone who thinks that putting a bar of soap in a bucket is an effective way to clean the floor. 

Most of all, though, I have some questions about the techniques on display for removing bags of collected trash from the property. I spent far too long trying to find an exit from the first house, aimlessly wandering around with a trash bag in my hand as I searched for an escape, only to find that the game wanted me to put the trash bag in the fireplace in the living room. 

Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but I can’t help but think that’s a bit of a fire hazard, not to mention how utterly disgusting the smell of burning trash inside the house must truly be. It’s one thing to incinerate your garbage; councils do it all the time after all, but it’s a completely other story to skip over trash collection day and use your own smelly trash piles as fuel for your cozy living room nook. 

The second apartment’s trash disposal method was somehow even more bizarre, with a doorless oven in the garage that was seemingly on fire being the designated spot for filled trash bags. 

I have to admit that, while I’m not sure quite why this is the disposal method the developer seems to have gone with, once I got over the weirdness of the situation, it was strangely satisfying to fling bags of trash into the burning space and watch them shrink and disappear. Still, I’m very glad that ‘smell-o-vision’ has never come to fruition.

Not perfect, but satisfying

I always strive to be honest in my impressions of games, and that means pointing out some of the imperfections that bothered me while playing through the demo. None of them were game-breaking or particularly troublesome, but there are some ways that the game could be improved in terms of quality of life. 

First, and perhaps the most annoying issue I encountered, was a piece of trash that seemed to have merged into the stairs and therefore became impossible to pick up. To complete a level, you need to complete 100% of everything, and because I couldn’t pick up this piece of trash, I had to restart the entire level. Thankfully, the trash was very much outside of the stairs on this second try, so I was able to complete the level quicker than I would have done the first time because I knew where everything was.

Note: While writing this, an update was released. I’m not sure what this update did, but there’s a chance it MAY have fixed the stuck trash issue, but that’s hard to test as it isn’t a consistent issue.

Secondly, the percentage completed displays for the entire house, rather than the room you’re in. While it definitely works this way, it does sometimes mean that you’ll be at 99% complete with removing dirt, for example, and then have to scour the entire house to figure out where that one speck remains for you to clean. It would be better for the percentage to cover a room, or even the floor that you’re on, rather than the entire property. 

But, even with those little niggling irritations, I thoroughly enjoyed playing through the demo of Cleaning Simulator, and it definitely served as motivation to get my own little bit of cleaning done. 

The demo of Cleaning Simulator is now available through Steam. The full game is set to release at some point before the end of 2025, so there’ll be plenty more cleaning gameplay on the way soon.