Review: Laundry Store Simulator is taking the simulation genre for a spin

Laundry Store Simulator is a game where you run your own laundry empire. In the beginning, you’ll be juggling getting laundry done for customers with selling related items, keeping bad customers from ruining your store, and fixing machines as they break. Later, you’ll expand to coin laundry, hiring employees, and even screenprinting shirts in the back.

I’ve played a lot of simulator-type games, so I’m starting to feel a bit like the simulator guru. I’m pretty well-versed in what’s standard and what makes a game unique in this genre. While Laundry Store Simulator doesn’t break the mold with anything truly innovative, it’s still a pretty solid game that I had fun with.

Laundry Store Simulator: Why do real laundry when you can do fake laundry?

Laundry Store Simulator gave me something that most of these games haven’t: anxiety. Most simulator games are all about setting up for the day and then just manning the register. In this one, you have to run around juggling multiple tasks.

In and of itself, that’s a great way to keep your player busy, but it can be overwhelming as well. Luckily, you do have the ability to ease off manual laundry once the coin laundry and mini-mart are introduced because those will still generate income while giving you back some sanity.

So, let’s break down the tasks. You’ve got manual laundry, mini-mart, coin laundry, and screen printing. The game will expand into more areas later, but after sinking 9 hours into this game, you don’t have to worry about what comes next or may be implemented later because things open up as you level up.

Manual laundry has several steps to it and only two things are skippable. You must wash, dry, and fold all customer laundry brought in. However, if you want to up your tips, you can also iron laundry and remove lint when it’s applicable. Washing and drying is simple, you just have to move them from the washer to the dryer. However, when it comes to ironing and folding, you’ll have to deal with mini-games.

With ironing, you’re just running your mouse over bubbles for each piece of laundry until there are no more. For folding, you have to drag from bottom to top in the direction the arrow is facing which could be in any direction for each piece of clothing.

For laundry that needs the lint roller, you’ll have to click on it until the circle that appears is empty. At first, your roller is the worst it can be, but you can upgrade it at the computer to make it remove things faster.

Y’all got any more of those upgrades?

Later, your manual laundry will open up unique washers for suits, costumes, and sheets, but this only becomes available after store rank 3-4 of your store which takes a long time to open up. Washing these things works the same, but the laundry for these items nets a bigger payday.

While suits and costumes open up at rank 3 and the sheets at rank 4, something else unique opens up at the last rank: delivery. You’ll be able to employ a driver who will go fetch dirty laundry for cleaning and return the clean laundry back to the customer.

For this, you have to take the phone call that requests this service, remember the details of what the customer’s house looks like, inform the driver, and wait for him to come back with the dirty laundry. Once he’s back, you are responsible for putting it in the correct washer and waiting for your helpers to get it done. The basket will show that it’s meant for delivery, so you don’t have to worry about losing it. However, it likely will take all day. Once it’s done, you need to ferry the basket back out to the driver and wait for him to come back to get payment.

There are times when the driver may call and ask for what the house looked like, so you’ll have to remember what the customer said. Usually, it’s something odd and easy to remember like a brown house with a cow in front or a grey house with a sakura tree.

To rank up your store, you just have to serve customers. By serving them, you’ll get experience for each completed transaction (meaning at the end of the process) and once you hit the required experience, you’ll be given a challenge. This challenge is simply doing enough repetitions of a certain task. Once you have, your store will rank up all the way to level 4 where it caps until the next update.

Likewise, you, as a person, will rank up. When that happens, you’ll have greater access to some upgrades that affect you, the store, and the customers.

The last way to upgrade is through spending money. You’ll have the ability to upgrade laundry supplies, open up areas of the store, and upgrade your tools or machines. Doing so will either get you better tips from the customer or faster working equipment.

At store rank 2, the coin laundry and mini-mart become available. Now, you’ve added more tasks by opening these up. The coin laundry is pretty self-serving, but machines will break and you need to fix them before they cause a water leak you need to clean up. Also, people may leave behind clothes you have to pull out because customers won’t use that machine until you do.

For the mini-mart, you have to keep the items stocked and manually check out each customer.

As if washing, drying, ironing, folding, running cashier, stocking, and fixing weren’t enough, you also have to clean the floors of footprints and keep out naughty customers by bonking them with a wrench. Yes, a wrench.

Don’t worry, Ol’ Wrenchy’ll fix it for ya.

There are four main customers to look out for. The kid will graffiti over your shop to make it look closed so you’ll need to clean it or else customers won’t come in. A smoker will enter your bathroom and leave your store hazy affecting tips. A sickly woman will come to puke all over your bathroom leaving you a huge mess on the floor and walls to clean up. And, lastly, there’s a man that will arrive in his underwear, sneak into the back, and look at porn on your computer. I believe there is a mini-mart thief as well who will steal your products, but I’ll be honest, I never noticed since there’s so much to do and those shelves are positioned at the front of the store.

Once you get to rank 3, you’ll find some reprieve in getting to employ help. You can hire someone to do washing and drying, folding and ironing, and someone to man the front desk. Note that the person at the front will not process mini-mart purchases until you buy the upgrade for that nor will any of them deal with lint without the upgrade. However, to do that, you have to have the lint roller fully upgraded which requires a person level of at least 26 before you can buy that upgrade.

This rank is where you can open your screen printing business. They aren’t frequent, but you’ll have to run into the back every so often to make a shirt to the customer’s specifications. Here, you have a bit of creative freedom to doodle on shirts, but you can leave them blank with no punishment so long as you get the shirt color and shirt size right.

There are a few other things that you can do in Laundry Store Simulator if you want. Across the street is a secondhand store where you can sell things like lost clothing, but I wouldn’t expect to make a lot out of it doing so. What you can count on, at least for a little while, is finding codes that are a mix of words and numbers that can be redeemed for money.

Look under your chairs – you get a code, you get a code, everyone gets a code!

There are codes on posters, the side of a transformer, under your office desk, cash register desk, behind the toilet, and even on the back of a clown that walks up and down the streets. Also, you should check your daily newspaper for codes. You can expect a few new ones there, but once you use them, they can’t be reused.

For this, you can look up a guide for the codes, but most of these are random numbers, so while the word never changes, you have to seek out your personal numbers for anything to work.

The last thing worth mentioning is the weirdness. On the front of the secondhand store is a “missing” poster and it seems like the developers had a little fun with it. The poster will change every few days and the people on those posters will make one appearance by standing out front of the store staring in with a generally unsettling vibe.

Once you run them off, they don’t return. Also, out by the place you retrieve your orders for appliances and stock, I noticed a ghost hanging out by the tree. These things don’t seem to really do anything other than create a fun little moment.

All in all, there’s a ton to do and juggle, so while it’s pretty much the same visually as a lot of these simulator-type games, Laundry Store Simulator keeps it fresh with tasks. And, from what I understand, there’s more content being released in the future.

If you want to give it a go – and if you enjoy these simulator-type games, you’ll want to – you can get Laundry Store Simulator for $9.99. If this isn’t your cup of tea, you might be interested in going a different direction and checking out the coverage we did of a horror game, The Cabin Factory.