Seaside Wash gives cleaning games a ridiculously stretchy twist
I’m always looking for a new game that can help me relax and unwind after a long day, and very few genres do that job for me better than a cleaning game. There’s something really satisfying about taking something dirty or messy and giving it a new lease of life. If you like those kinds of games too, you’ll love Seaside Wash.
Seaside Wash is a cozy pixel cleaning game in the same vein as Moldwasher, but rather than being a sentient piece of sushi armed with a pressure washer, you’re a monkey with an enviable dedication to his cleaning craft and a single impossibly stretchy arm. Imagine Mr. Tickle somehow managed to produce offspring with a monkey, and you get the idea.
Idyllic and clean
In Seaside Wash, the little monkey seems to live a life that would make many of us green with envy, even if you hate cleaning. He’s on a tropical island beach, living in a comfortable shack, and he spends his days out on the dock with a scrubbing brush and a chisel. Other creatures steer their algae-, rust-, and barnacle-covered boats toward shore, and Monkey happily cleans them.
There are different tools for different jobs, which you buy using money you earn for perfectly cleaning boats. The basic brush is great for daily grime and algae, but you’ll need an Iron Brush to get rid of rust. If a boat comes in that’s covered in barnacles, you’ll need a chisel. The demo has those three tools, but the tool dial hints at many more to come in the full version of Seaside Wash.
It’s not just the outside of the boats that needs cleaning, either. Some boats need you to hop aboard or even head inside to clean different areas, with mini-games for tasks like cleaning windows and patching holes. It makes sense that cleaning boats isn’t necessarily a straightforward process, but every task is fun in this adorable little game. Even repairing your tools comes with a nice little hammer mini-game.
A bit of a stretch
I can’t write this without throwing some focus on the fact that Monkey has the most ridiculously stretchy arm I’ve ever seen, and while it is initially pretty bizarre, it makes sense in terms of the mechanics. In other cleaning games, the focus tends to be on having a pressure washer that bridges the gap between you and the dirt; in Seaside Wash, there is no pressure washer, so the stretchy arm is the bridge.
You don’t just get the “normal” stretch length, although that’s more than enough to make sure your hand arrives somewhere long before you do; you also have a cooldown ability that lets you stretch your arm even further to reach difficult places. Holding down E could let you clean an entire mid-sized boat if you can scrub fast enough.
It is a strange moment when you figure out that while you’re controlling the monkey itself, it’s actually the hand that lets you interact with the world, but once you’ve adapted to that, it’s a really neat little mechanic and definitely adds to the charm of the game.
Seaside Wash is being developed by Bitcover and doesn’t have a release date yet, but the demo is filled with cleaning satisfaction just waiting to be discovered and is available on Steam right now.
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