Cash Cleaner Simulator

If laundering money was this difficult, crime really wouldn’t pay.

Cash Cleaner Simulator sets out to simulate the art of organizing illicit cash, but instead, it simulates frustration. With clunky controls, unclear objectives, and tools that create more chaos than they clean, the game stumbles before it ever gets going.

UX (Control Feel & User Experience)

From the moment you load in, Cash Cleaner Simulator seems determined to fight you at every step. The controls feel unintuitive and overly complex; even for basic actions like picking something up. A simple "grab item" action becomes a multi-step process of holding a key and clicking a mouse button while aiming at just the right area. But worse, the game pulls in nearby objects whether you want them or not, leaving you with a jumbled pile of bills, tools, and random junk that you now have to sort out manually. It's tedious, and it happens constantly. The only way I found to avoid this, was to place every non-cash item in a completely different area. Personally, if we are forced to use this mechanic, I would like to see an option to toggle picking up "cash only" or "all items". A simple fix like this could save hours of unnecessary tediousness in an already tedious game.

The in-game smartphone, which houses menus and quests, is equally confusing. Messages arrive in the form of awkwardly written text conversations from a character who refers to herself as “mother” and calls you “darling”; a bizarre tone that adds nothing helpful or charming. Worse, all key information about the game’s mechanics is buried behind these stylized messages, making it hard to parse what actually matters. Quests play out the same way; start a text conversation with a complete stranger and sift through all the poorly cultivated text messages and jokes to figure out what you really need to do. Simple fix? Send me an email. Lots of other games do, and it allows me to sift through the text for the most pertinent information rather than being stuck sitting, waiting for messages to load on my screen. I would much rather spend my time in-game playing the game rather than talking to NPC's I don't care about. This added nothing to the game for me, personally (maybe I was already too irritated by the controls).

Even the tools meant to help you get organized end up doing the opposite. Take the cash counter, for example: you’re told it “helps count your cash,” but there’s no explanation of how it works or when to use it. After trial and error (and eventually resorting to Steam discussions), I discovered it sorts one bill denomination at a time and spits everything else into a pile on the floor. So instead of sorting your cash, it creates an even bigger mess, one you have to get back on your hands and knees and clean up for the third or fourth time.

While the HUD is minimal, it doesn’t do much to improve the experience. The quest tracker is over-designed, using edgy fonts and clashing colors that prioritize visual flair over clarity. Style over substance feels like a running theme here.

Gameplay Progression

Progression? Never heard of her.

The first objective I received was to “put $5,000 into a suitcase.” Sounds simple, right? Except I had no suitcase. Just boxes and duffel bags; neither of which were accepted by the conveyor belt to turn the quest in. After spending 10 minutes manually counting cash by denomination, I still couldn’t complete the task. No prompts, no clarification, no alternate route forward. Just the repetitive glow of the red error light, a duffle bag of cash, and a quest I couldn’t complete.

If there's a gameplay loop beyond that moment, I wouldn’t know. The game never gave me a reason, or the tools, to find out.

Immersion

The fastest way to break immersion? Fight with the controls every five seconds.

Rather than drawing me into its shady-cash-cleaning fantasy, Cash Cleaner Simulator pushed me further away with every clunky interaction and vague instruction. After 30 minutes of fighting UI menus, awkward tools, and contradictory design decisions, I was more focused on quitting than continuing. I couldn’t imagine putting in more time, and more importantly, I had no desire to.

Stability & Performance

To be fair, I didn’t run into any bugs during my session, but I didn’t play long enough for them to surface. The game was just released on May 8, 2025; there was no demo to play at the time, so I waited for it to launch. When it launched riddled with bugs and gameplay issues, I let it sit on my wishlist a bit longer before finally pulling the trigger to try my hand at it. While some of those issues have reportedly been patched, the damage to first impressions clearly remains.

Value for Price

Zero.

The only value I got from this game was realizing how thankful I am that Steam has a refund policy. I didn’t get a single moment of satisfaction, immersion, or even curiosity from Cash Cleaner Simulator. If a game is work without the reward, it’s not worth your time, or your money.

Final Verdict

Cash Cleaner Simulator may have had potential buried beneath its premise, but it’s lost under a mountain of poor design decisions. Clunky controls, unclear tutorials, frustrating mechanics, and a lack of polish make this one of the most forgettable (and regrettable) sim experiences I’ve played in a long time.

And this isn’t just a case of the game being “unpolished” or not to my taste; in some cases, it’s quite literally unplayable. Missing Quality of Life features like grid placement for items, an empty gameplay loop, unintuitive mechanics, and frequent crashes have been widely reported by Steam users. I’ve stuck with rough games before when the concept was strong or the developers seemed engaged, but this wasn’t one of those cases.
Currently this game is $14.99 USD on Steam ($20.54 CAD, € 12.84).

Joystick Score: 1/5

The fact that Cash Cleaner Simulator somehow climbed back up to a “Very Positive” rating on Steam? Genuinely baffling.