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I feel old, and not just because I remember when money wasn’t plastic or digital dogs. The aesthetic of Cash Cleaner Simulator is that of the youth with their hips and hops, spray paint, generative AI, and cryptocurrencies. You play as someone who has basically been kidnapped, has amnesia, and is forced into “cleaning/”sorting money for criminals who need their cash to not attract attention when they buy that new Ferrari parked outside their My Name is Earl-style double-wide.

Developed by Mind Control Games and published by Forklift Interactive and Forge The Win, Cash Cleaner Simulator is the latest in trying to add a story to the simulator genre. I say simulator, but it is more the Gas Station Simulator-style of comedic/light-hearted redundancy of doing the same monotonous thing over and over. You are placed into a dilapidated hellscape that I’m sure is just the basement of a semi-destroyed mall, in which someone who is crazy enough to have a “mommy kink” placed you, but also wants to kill you once you’ve done her work. Though, of course, she doesn’t because that’s not exactly going to amount to the 25+ hours I’ve put in.

The repetitive yet soothing gameplay loop is simple. You take a job, you are given a bunch of cash, and you have to sort it. Sounds simple enough. Eventually, you’ll be working with more than just requests for $5,000-$10,000; eventually, you’ll be working with more currencies and more specialized requests. Sometimes you’ll even get Federal Reserve Bank bags with the explosive dies, which is really fun to clean up individually off of every single note that you have that is affected. Even as I write this, I’ve got 869 fifties in a pile waiting to be cleaned. Super fun!… that’s sarcasm.

The gameplay of Cash Cleaner Simulator is exactly that: you take jobs, money is dropped into your lair of organized crime, and you sort it into boxes with the perfect amount. Maybe you put the paper bands around it, maybe wrap bricks of cash in plastic, and ship it off. I couldn’t explain it any more simply than that. However, it is the way Cash Cleaner Simulator goes about it that made me put in far too much time over the last two weeks of playing.

In your very basic layer of fraud, you are alone and get messages through the smartphone you are left with. Through the phone, you are given orders via an encryption text messaging service and a third-party app that lets you claim jobs. You need to at least suspend a little bit of your grip on reality here, as every time you claim a job Payday 2-style, you are given a bag, box, or otherwise full of money, and you must return their order. With only a handful of jobs, you’ll amass enough money to buy a small country.

Even as you fulfill orders like you were in one of Jeffrey’s tax-dodging sweatshops disguised as warehouses, you can have pallets of banknotes of the three currencies, separated by each denomination, and still have enough to Scrooge McDuck yourself into an early grave. Not all money is legal tender, though, and sometimes it is your job to separate that off by hook, crook, and only sometimes through your money counting machines. Though I am getting ahead of myself.

The story of Cash Cleaner Simulator isn’t too complicated, and in fact, I think it’s the best way to do a sort of story like this, I.e, ignorable for the most part. Your handler, going by the user name Betty Opps, is your tutorial on getting jobs and how the phone works. Texts are pre-emptive answers you click on, sometimes with simple choices between one of two things to say, and it pushes the story along without the need to focus on it for too long. That’s perfect if you’re the type of person to use these simulator games to second-screen a show or listen to a podcast.

Eventually, you make “friends” with other criminals who need their cash cleaned, and you get boilerplate, “Hey kid, you did a good job” texts. It isn’t deep or revolutionary. It is just fine, and that’s really all it needs to be. Cash Cleaner Simulator is a gameplay-first sort of experience for the most part, and some may have noticed this about me; that’s what I like. I enjoy a game where I can put on a podcast and drive across Europe or do a job without the demoralizing reality of the service industry’s sub-minimum wage standards. That’s what Cash Cleaner Simulator does.

I will say though, there are art pieces in-game that the Steam page notes (due to developer admission) are generated through generative AI. The sad reality is, some small developers (of 2 or so people) will feel like that’s the best choice for their game, and I understand their desire to get the game they want to make out. Nonetheless, generative AI in game development and other artistic endeavors will never not feel “icky,” and I felt a bit off once I found that out. That said, what I will say for Mind Control Games, is that it is wall art and character profiles, which have minimal effect on the gameplay of Cash Cleaner Simulator.

The gameplay is what I would say is “meditative.” As I’ve already said, through the apps on your phone, you are given bags of money to money launder, and that’s where Cash Cleaner Simulator is quite tongue-in-cheek. Some will ask you simply to check that the money isn’t marked or counterfeit. Others will ask you to actually wash, dry, and sort their cash into bricks like you were the idiot in a 90s comedy-heist film. All with the cash itself being a physics object. There are lots and lots of physics objects.

Here is where I think Cash Cleaner Simulator might run into a couple of “problems.” In the late-game stage, where you have multiple pallets of each denomination in the three currencies of ¥en, Dollars, and €uros, the boot-up time might get longer and longer and longer. I won’t say the performance is perfect, especially when you are spending so much time moving around physical objects (in-world) and filtering them through money-counting machines. If you’re not running around with lots of cash fluttering into growing piles on the floor, you can stick around 60 frames per second.

There will be the occasional dip here or there, the most common is when auto-saves take place. However, moving cash around generally can cause some “minor” drops to the mid-50s or high 40s. The performance on a 40 Series RTX, 12th Gen i7, with 32GB of RAM is comfortable most of the time, but I won’t lie and say that it is smooth the entire time. Even with DLSS and Frame Generation, the performance doesn’t drop to sub-30, but a perfect constant 60 frames per second is a target you’ll have fun (sarcasm implied) trying to hit reasonably.

Piles and piles of cash don’t actually amount to much, though, as you can’t really use it outside of fulfilling orders. Instead of upgrading, organizing, and sometimes even fulfilling orders, you use another controversial topic. To buy bigger money counters or tools, you get small amounts of cryptocurrency (just in-game cryptocurrency), which I’ve said my piece on before in terms of the controversy. If a game is going to use it as a sort of fake currency in-game, fill your boots, is my perspective. It’s when games try to make it about earning it for real uses that I’d be kicking up a stink.

There is enough style and personality in Cash Cleaner Simulator that makes me want to keep returning to it, even after 25+ hours, even though I’d have personally preferred no generative AI images being used. It keeps things light enough even for a sort of dark and horrible circumstance you find yourself in. Sure, it’s repetitive, but in that “I can put on a 10-hour-long podcast and waste a Saturday away” vein. There is enough side stuff to do that keeps it fun when you’re not focused on the story, but some of them could be a bit less, I won’t say difficult, but take less than a lifetime to complete.

Ultimately, Cash Cleaner Simulator is fantastic at being one of those weird comedic, repetitive, but enjoyable games you can play for hours and binge a TV show or podcast. Anyone who hears me talk about games knows that is my Boutros Boutros-Ghali is a game where you can drown out and wake up three months later, and Mind Control Games nails it both gameplay-wise, but also in that tongue-in-cheek sort of way.

A PC review copy of Cash Cleaner Simulator was provided by Forklift Interactive for this review.

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Cash Cleaner Simulator

$14.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Repetitive, but fun gameplay.
• A fine balance of tone, not too light or too dark.
• Quite tongue-in-cheek in places.

Cons

• Generative AI for art assets.
• Performance can be a bit iffy.