Trash Goblin (2024) [PC] review

“Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I’d like to add a third certainty: trash.”

– Ruth Ann Minner

There’s been a strange surge lately in the popularity of goblins. I get it. People love a good underdog. Waddledee picked up a spear and bandana and joined Kirby on his adventures. A goomba led the good fight to rescue Bowser. Henchmen have been slowly developing personalities in media for the last decade or so, and despite not really being henchmen, goblins have gotten caught up in the changing times. There have been several goblin-themed games released this year, and today, Trash Goblin is joining the club.

They say one man’s trash is another’s treasure, and that’s the theory behind Trash Goblin. You are a goblin (or so people say, you don’t actually see yourself at any point) who has opened a trinket store. You have a sponge, a chisel, and an endless supply of goodie bags filled with stuff. What kind of stuff? A bit of everything, really. Could be a bottle, a bedpan, or someone’s lost dentures. Could be a lich’s crown or an ivory comb. Now all you need are paying customers looking for dentures and lost lich artifacts. And they will come. Even for the bedpans.

Chisel It Out and Clean it Up

Did you ever have those toys where you had a slab of rock and had to carefully excavate a dinosaur “fossil”? That’s pretty much the method you’ll use to uncover your trinkets. Each trinket is surrounded by stone blocks, and it’s up to you to chisel the treasure out. Don’t worry about damaging the goods, though; you can’t. If you hit part of the trinket, that stone is marked white and will not be damaged. All other stones take different amounts of chiseling to break them. Some drop with three hits, some with five or six, while others will pop on the first strike, but only from a certain direction. Each bag is a little puzzle to solve.

Once you’ve excavated your trinket, it’s up to you what you do with it. They all come out dirty, so you could clean them. Clean ones always sell better. You could attach parts that obviously go together or combine them into mishmashes. It’s entirely up to you. While you tinker, clean, and excavate, time will pass, and there’s enough time for six actions per day. Luckily, selling a trinket doesn’t take any time at all. Also luckily, if you don’t have what someone is looking for, they’ll hang around until you find it. For random buyers, you can choose to let them stay until you have their trinket or send them away and see what the next buyer wants.

Lucky Break

With at least fifty items to uncover, it may feel daunting to find the random object the person at the window wants. For random passersby, luck may not be on your side. For named characters, though, the folks feeding you the world’s story, you’ll likely find what they need within the next few bags. It’s not entirely RNG.

So what is there to spend all your hard-earned money on? Well, you can improve your shop by buying furniture and shelving to store extra trinkets. You can also upgrade your tools, though there aren’t many options yet. The prices seem generally fair. After all, you’re selling mostly refurbished junk. That bottle you cleaned up and stuck a cork in isn’t going to sell for hundreds. More add-ons means more money, but you’re not going to be a millionaire anytime soon.

Early Access Just Means More to Come

As it stands now, I’ve played a month’s worth of in-game days, and there doesn’t seem to be much story. And that’s okay, many crafting simulators often don’t have them at all. You get the order, you build it, you move to the next job. However, there’s a world outside your shop window, and Trash Goblin gives you tastes of it. Several vibrant characters show up with problems in their life that you can solve. A clumsy blacksmith needs someone who can do patch jobs. A lizardman is addicted to bedpans for sources of heat. A mushroom man Casanova needs help wooing his high-class paramours. Thirty days in and I’m still meeting new faces, often from some adventuring guild.

All that said, Trash Goblin is only out in early access for the time being, so it’s not completely done yet. It’s fully playable now with around 50 trinkets to discover and plenty of content to enjoy in a fairly well-polished state. It’s just not all the way done. According to the roadmap, the devs plan to add more characters, narrative and sidequests, quality of life and accessibility systems, and, of course, more trinkets. As much as I continue to “one more day” it as it is now, I fear for my free time as the game gets more to do.

Special thanks to Spilt Milk Studios for supplying us with a copy of Trash Goblin for this review.

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