There is an ancient statue in the desert, human in parts and fish in others. It is a gargantuan monument, standing dozens of feet tall. Two gems are slotted into the statue, with beams shooting out from both at nearby Mount Rushless that, for reasons scientists cannot understand, has prevented the volcano from erupting. The replica before you is not to scale, not even as tall as you. The replica of Mount Rushless stands just above your height. There is also a replica of the flying saucer, flown by time traveler Ceruleon Skye, hanging from the ceiling. These pieces are just a few of the props inside a carnival water spraying shooting gallery that takes your own achievements and the story of how you, time travelers, and an ancient civilization saved the town of Muckingham from a volcanic eruption, turning your story into a power wash simulation for the masses.

Others might consider it ironic that a carnival attraction built around the function of spraying water would end up with every square inch of itself, on the inside and outside, so caked in dirt and filth that it would itself require to be washed. You consider it another job, and you do need to get paid.

So, you pull out your sprayer and get to work. You clean off the statue and the volcano, the saucer and the replica of Blake Thrust’s airplane, the water guns in the front and the forest in the back, the toys on the walls and the cardboard cutout of bigfoot sliding back and forth between the trees.

You’re using a Prime Vista 2400 now. It wasn’t long ago that you had the best, the top of the line equipment that cut through dirt and effortlessly left every surface glistening, but it seems you’ve succeeded downwards. With the help of your friend, Harper Shaw, you were able to afford your own office building, complete with a garage for your van. The showroom floor is empty, but you know you could impress potential clients with your own personal style. You did have to sell your best gear to afford the place, but you already started from the bottom before. You’d have them back soon enough.

Unfortunately, it seems as though the former mayor of Muckingham, Jeff Jefferson XIII, failed upwards. Despite the discovery that it was a combination of his and Blake Thrust’s efforts that led to the potential eruption in the first place, Jeff has become the Mayor of the county. You’ve been taking care of his cat, Ulysses, as well as his cat’s kittens, but apparently now he wants her back, and is in legal right to the pet. Also, someone stole the gems from the giant merman statue, and the beams have disappeared along with them.

But what can you do?

You go from job to job doing what you do best: power wash the filthiest places of the greater Caldera area until they’re spotless. The jobs are consistently bigger than they used to be. You remember a time in which you were washing down vans and cars and bicycles. Sure, there’s still the odd job here or there that doesn’t measure up to the rest, but quite a few are so large that you need to make use of your new scissor lift and abseiling gear to reach the highest heights.

And so, you go over to the rock climbing park and wash off the dinosaurs and the palm trees, the decorative smaller volcanoes and the larger central volcano, as well as the pterodactyl set atop. There was an earlier job that had taken you off guard, gave false expectations of more dynamic jobs to come, but it was the exception more than the rule. Most of the places you’ve been to, like the rock climbing park, are very static locations. There are a few job sites that are more dynamic, and when you find yourself cleaning the mini roller coaster you can’t help but go for a ride.

You upgrade your sprayers when you can afford it, at least the attachments first, before moving on to their more powerful iterations, like the Prime Vista 3000. You pick up a SwilForce Surf Ace, a new cleaner that looks like someone converted a Roomba into a shower head, and sometimes you bring it out to clean flat surfaces, but not often. It’s an interesting new device but feels like a novelty in comparison to your traditional sprayers.

You’ve also been upgrading the showroom floor of your office building with mostly new furniture, bought extra cheap and covered in dirt. It’s not a problem for you, just a moment of cleaning and that bargain is ready to be placed anywhere you want, as long as it’s not on top of something else. You can have shelves, but there’s nothing to put onto those shelves. You can have tables, but there’s nothing to put on those tables. You can’t even set anything on top of a rug.

The feeling of power washing is something that hasn’t been refined, or changed, but you do notice some quality of life improvements that streamline the experience. You remember that you used to worry about the types of materials that you were cleaning, but this time around you only worry about the depth of the stain. Light stains wash off easy, heavy stains might require focus, and deep stains, the kind that have almost burned into the surface, are best cleaned with soap.

Instead of carrying around bottles of solution, each one useful on a very specific material type, now you have soap to break down the heaviest stains. First you coat a surface with soap, covering it until its features are buried within a thick layer of white foam. You follow it up with a spray of water, satisfied that even the weakest of sprays will leave things spotless. You find that you rely on soap in nearly every job as you slowly upgrade your gear, and you still use soap, every now and then, even when you’re able to afford better sprayers.

You also have an improved checklist now, one that you can use to track and locate the most minute parts of any job. You remember there was a time you’d almost finish a job, only to find yourself backtracking top to bottom just to find that one specific item that wasn’t cleaned a hundred percent.

It’s not long before you find yourself in another cozy mystery. Mount Rushless is threatening to erupt again, and someone said something about its relationship with the moon. The time traveler is back, warning of another catastrophe, but this doesn’t feel so imminent for you. Every job will wait for you to clean it up at your leisure.

You use an Urban X Stream now, its power almost strong enough to clean the heaviest of stains without soap. Sometimes you listen to podcasts as you work, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you just listen to the sound of the water as it impacts the surface, and watch as layer after layer of dirt is scrubbed off.

The jobs are big, but you know you’re good enough. You know that every big job can be broken down into the smallest of steps, and that if you take enough of those small steps tasks that seemed so impossibly large cannot help but be finished. All you have to do is take the first step, and then the one after that, and then one after that. You pull out your sprayer and let it flow.

Reviewed on Xbox

9/10