In the past, I have had a hard time understanding what draws people to the simulator genre. I have been told that it’s the sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek comedy of these titles. Instead, I would mostly find a generic and cynical take on our modern life. Whether that be about farming, surgery, or a job simulator, it all felt the same. Cash Cleaner Simulator is another attempt at that genre and another time for me to understand the appeal.
The simulator genre is different from other games like life sims or management sims. Instead, the main focus of these games is to take a mundane job and make it slightly more fantastical. This objective always felt out of place because of the tendency for these titles to get stuck in the minutia of day-to-day tasks. Can Cash Cleaner Simulator break that mold for me, or am I destined to never get it?
Who Am I?
So, we have all been there, right? I bet you have woken up with severe head pain, and with the loss of knowledge of who and where you are. Well, if you haven’t before, you do now, because this setup is exactly how Cash Cleaner Simulator starts its story. You have been kidnapped by an organization and told that you must work for them. The main task is taking on jobs from the dark web to clean, sort, and redistribute cold, hard cash. Your ticket for freedom? Use the extra cash that your clients accidentally sent and pay back one million dollars.
This story is mostly told through voice messages left by Betty Oops and The Collector. I honestly find Betty more interesting than the Collector, because of her antagonistic stance towards you. Granted, this is at first hidden behind a pleasant facade that, admittedly, lured me into a false sense of security. However, this facade slowly fades away as she reveals her intentions and plans for you. I would have preferred for her to be the main antagonist for the entire game and have this reveal dragged out.
Instead, she is a quick blip in the story that quickly fades away with the voicemails and text messages. She is then replaced by various customers who are not as interesting as her. This is mostly because they are designed to fit into a small mission structure instead of a larger story. I would have much preferred each character to have a presence in the plot that would culminate in something special. As it stands now, there are some reasons to get interested in the plot, but more interesting characters are pushed out too soon.
Count More Money
The general gameplay loop goes something like accept job, sort money, pack money, send money, and repeat. In fact, I found that each job would take anywhere between five minutes to half an hour, depending on the task. The issue I really have with the missions is how mind-numbingly mundane each task is. While tools can make tasks faster, I would spend most of my time sorting through the cash and attempting to remember how much money I had on hand.
Frequently, I would have a calculator out to attempt to keep track of the cash. Until I realized that my phone in-game had a handy way to keep track of all this, the scanner. The scanner is a tool that has you point at an object, and the application will tell you if the object has any mission objectives tied to it and how much money is there. This handy feature made my life so much easier, but the game never told me about it upfront.
Instead, I randomly found it while looking at my phone, deciding whether I should take another job or buy some more supplies. There it was staring me in my face, daring me to click it and see what it had to offer. I was shocked at how much I missed out by not using this handy feature. Even now, after playing the beginning of the game at least twice, I couldn’t tell you when the game exactly unlocked this feature.
The main issue I can point to is that most of the tutorials for the game aren’t actually very good. However, I will give it some credit – I don’t really need tutorials to count cash or throw it into a washing machine. So much of the game is self-explanatory and expects you to just discover gameplay as you buy tools. This mentality does work mostly because I was in control of adding in every new gameplay mechanic through purchasing, except for the phone.
The phone is the only gameplay mechanic that you will not have control over to unlock items. Almost all of the features are already unlocked, and the game won’t tell you about anything new that appears in it. So, when I finally decided to check it out, I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy about it. Instead, I felt exasperated and that so much of my time was wasted on attempting to keep track of everything.
Looking back on it, I could easily sum up my feelings as, “That was a waste of time.” This doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy my time, but after a while, I stopped caring, and higher values felt suffocating. This is the point of simulator titles, but in other titles, I always felt like I was making progress. In Cash Cleaner Simulator, I felt like I had already seen everything on offer in the first two hours of gameplay.
Is the Money Worth It?
I can’t deny that I did enjoy my time with Cash Cleaner Simulator; there is a rhythm that you will find in these tasks. You can fall into a zen-like trance, but with almost no fulfillment behind it. My tasks blended together to the point of feeling like a giant task with no end. I still can’t think about doing anything besides separating bills by number, by marks, or by whether it was fake or not. It all felt like I was working a job that I no longer cared about or wanted to care about.
You will be able to get some joy here, especially if you are a fan of this genre. In fact, I think that Cash Cleaner Simulator perfectly represents the genre, including both the thrill and the hollowness of any job that you could do for cash. I felt like I was drowning in a job perfectly down to the migraine I developed dealing with the job.
Disclaimer: Forklift Interactive provided Final Weapon with a PC (Steam) copy of Cash Cleaner Simulator for review purposes.
