The premise of Trash Goblin is incredibly simple. You are a Goblin, you get given trash, you turn that into treasure (well, trinkets as the game calls them) and sell them in your shop.
Trash Goblin, brought to life by Spilt Milk Studios, is one of the untold games that sit firmly into the “cosy” genre. Nobody is screaming at you to meet certain profit margins. Your very kind mentor gently guides you through the process of extracting and cleaning your first few trinkets, as well as selling them.
Excavation involves you destroying different blocks with a chisel to reveal an item (the item is hidden in blocks that get marked when you hit them, and is only revealed when all extra blocks are demolished). The blocks have a variety of unexplained properties, though context clues are relatively obvious. Some have to be hit from a certain angle, some are so strong they can’t be destroyed directly, only dropped off by removing any connecting blocks, etc. Cleaning is done by rubbing a sponge over the revealed trinket, and when the dirt blends in with the surface, you can hold a button to highlight what you need to clean (plus there’s a handy dandy percentage at the side so you know how close you are to being done).
This is where I hit my big sticking point. The controls. Trash Goblin is very much designed to be played with a keyboard and mouse. Almost no effort appears to have been made to port over to the console, with a cute hand cursor being your selector (which you move with the left joystick, with no sensitivity control), clumsy fumbling during the above actions, and critically, a completely useless D-pad. In games like this where the majority of action is controlled on the joystick, I like the option to be able to use the joysticks for “action”, and then the D-pad for navigating menus. This is not an option here at all.
At the very start of the game you have four available spaces. A customer counter, a workbench, a space to talk to your mentor, and a bed to sleep in. Doing an action on the workbench consumes time (talking to customers does not) and once your time for the day is up, you must go to sleep. I have slept with a customer waiting at the counter and low and behold, they were still standing there when I woke up. When Spilt Milk says there’s no pressure and no risk, they really aren’t kidding.
A comprehensive game guide is available from the start, explaining how to do everything in easy to understand instructions. There’s a quest system on top of the standard customers, and eventually you unlock more tools, travel to other places, and more. I cannot fault the amount of love that has gone into this game and its mission. It set out with a clear goal, and (controls aside) I think it achieves it.
However, for me, I don’t really want to play a game with no pressure or risk? The description claims this is not a simulator, but that is exactly what it feels like. A stripped down fantasy Etsy store simulator, just without any risk (and sadly, to me, without any reward either). Everybody is different though, and if slapping some headphones on and unwinding by role playing a little goblin cleaning tat sounds appealing, I cannot recommend this enough… just maybe get the PC version?
Trash Gobin was reviewed on Xbox Series X but is also available on PlayStation, Switch and Steam.
