Casual games have become a popular niche in indie games. Whether they take the simulation route like PowerWash Simulator or the conversational and storytelling route like Coffee Talk, they deliver some much-needed serenity and pause among the excitement and chaos of modern games.
Trash Goblin, developed and published by Split Milk Studios, is a cozy shopkeeping game in which you play as a goblin. You find and clean trash for valuables and sell them to a diverse cast of customers who visit you daily. The game offers some relaxing gameplay and mechanics and some interesting character designs and interactions, but it struggles to find its own identity in its Early Access state.
The concept of Trash Goblin is very endearing. We are a goblin obsessed with collecting things that some would call trash, but we search through them, find valuable items, clean and repair them, and sell them to customers. The game has a few minigames to make each stage of this process more interesting.
The first minigame is to uncover the items from piles of dirt. We have a chisel, and we can slowly chip away at blocks of dirt to see what’s inside. The different types of blocks, how each one can be broken, and how to do them faster make this process feel like a puzzle each time. The second minigame is to clean the items we have found, and it’s the simplest and the most satisfying one. We simply rotate the items and clean the dirt with a sponge. It’s not the smoothest cleaning gameplay I have seen, but it works well enough to keep the game going. Finally, repairing or upcycling items involves attaching multiple items we have found together to make a better or more functional object. The repairing minigame is just selecting the items to be attached, so it’s not that interesting.
The gameplay aspect of Trash Goblin can be interesting for a short time, but it gets stale and repetitive after a while. I was hoping that these minigames would be an enjoyable distraction from a more engaging story. After all, we are doing these tasks for our customers, so I expected interesting stories, dynamic dialogues, and drawn-out haggling with the various characters that showed up at our shop. But, none of my hopes were realized.
The characters’ art looked incredible, but I soon realized they were just there to tell us what they wanted. Some of the characters told a little backstory about why they needed such items, but there were not any dialogue options to explore more of these stories. When we found the item a customer was looking for, they would name a price, and we could either sell it or not agree to that price. But if we didn’t agree, they would just stay there, and no more customers would show up, so the game would get stuck. I’m hoping the mere existence of this option in the Early Access version of Trash Goblin hints at a more fleshed-out system in the future, but as it is, the dialogue choices are pointless.
There also aren’t any meaningful goals in the game as it is. We can spend the money we earn to decorate our shop, but except for a few shelves for extra storage, most of the upgrades we have access to seem cosmetic. I wanted to play more of Trash Goblin, as I really enjoyed the art style and character designs, but the lack of interesting gameplay, stories, or even motivations only kept me going for two hours.
The review version also had a few bugs that we were warned about beforehand, but I eventually encountered a bug not mentioned there that stopped me from playing. One customer wanted a mechanical mask, and it took me a few tries to find what he was looking for, but he wouldn’t accept it when presented with the item and there is no way currently to refuse customers, so they just stay there forever and halt the progress of the game. These technical issues are expected from an Early Access release, and hopefully they will be fixed in future updates.
The Early Access release of Trash Goblin is a great showcase of the artwork and the atmosphere of the game, and the visual experience is incredible. But when it comes to the gameplay, Trash Goblin doesn’t have a clear identity. It’s not as mechanically engaging to keep players interested, and it also doesn’t have as much narrative content to offer exciting stories and characters. It’s sitting somewhere in between these two approaches and it excels in neither of them.
Nima played Trash Goblin on PC in Early Access with a review code.
