Clean a Whole Planet With a Toothbrush in Moon Sweepers, the PowerWash Genre’s Latest Crime Against Perfectists

Fine, you can use a hoover if you MUST

I don’t much go for PowerWash Simulator-likes, but there is something appealingly unwholesome about a game in which you have to wipe the dust off an entire moon. Using a toothbrush. True, you can upgrade to beefier hoovering equipment in Moon Sweepers by cashing in shipments of lunar dirt, but that strikes me as a dangerous concession to brute mass production thinking – it risks consigning centuries of artisanal knowledge to, well, the dustbin.

Take pride in your craft, colleagues! If we become over-reliant on hoover-me-dos, we’ll lose the skill of cleansing celestial objects by hand, and sooner or later, they’ll give our jobs to the bots. You can keep your new-fangled vacuum mops. If anybody needs me, I’ll be over here in the Sea of Tranquility, collecting individual motes with a pair of tweezers.

Moon Sweepers is the work of DragDrop Giochi, a two-person team who are now busting their chops patching the game after a surprisingly popular launch on Friday. To expand a little on the self-explanatory title, the game sees you placing depots near cleaning sites and tracking your overall progress by way of a big holographic globe back at base.

I’m not sure I have the patience to polish an entire moon, but I am certainly salivating over the delicious grey, chunky-edged plateaus left behind by the sweepers in the trailer. In general, Moon Sweepers has me thinking anew about a possible subgenre of game dedicated to cleaning up the messes left behind by players of other games. What, you really think they just “de-spawn” the corpses in Counter-Strike? Nonsense! Somebody has to come in and tidy all that shit up, surely.

Moon Sweepers has multigiocatore support for up to 16, and you can seemingly spend a whole session doing low-G flips in a curiously municipal Apollo buggy… if you’re an absolute disgrace to the profession. Mind you, even your starry-eyed Evil Knievel impressions will scrape away moonpowder. There is ultimately no escape from your role as lunar janitor.