You're a goblin. You have a little shop where you clean up and resell random items of junk bestowed upon you by a generous patron who has an apparently unlimited supply of random items of junk. Eccentric characters come to your shop in search of random items of junk, and if you happen to have the particular random item of junk they want, they give you gold and take it away with them. There's no time pressure, no threat of mortal danger. You just do your job, get paid, improve your tools and/or shop, rinse (literally), repeat.

I played the demo, which gives you 15 in-game days to get a feel for the gameplay loop. The slide at the end claims that the full version has an actual story, which is pretty cool. The worldbuilding is intriguing, and you can see a surprising amount of it considering that you never leave your shop. It's a nice twist on the "you have a job, and it is cleaning stuff" style. Sometime when I have 20 bucks, I'll most likely buy it and see how the story is.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

If you have ten bucks, it's on sale until March 19, 2026.

Peter Eng
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Insert humorous comment here.

I picked up the full game. Without the demo time limit, the gameplay loop is very moreish. As promised by said demo, the game does indeed have a story, and it's surprisingly involved given that the character you play only leaves his shop on rare occasions, and then (so far) only to take a portable market stall to one of the city's commercial districts on market days. You're experiencing the whole thing through your shop window, more or less vicariously, through the network of contacts, customers, and city officials who appear therein. I'm enjoying it a lot. Maybe slightly too much; it does melt the hours if I'm not careful.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Oh hey, a paid DLC just dropped. Seems to involve a main story extension that has something to do with painting, although the specific bit about painting things has also been dropped into the main game to avoid breaking some things.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Also as a courtesy notice, Trash Goblin is one of the Epic Games Store free games of the week right now.

Okay, I tried it out for about 3 hours. I'll give it a little more time in one more session but it might be a little -too- chill for me. I caught myself nodding off a couple times in the middle of chipping so I think I need a little more spice or thought in my gameplay right now...

>Okay, I tried it out for about 3 hours. I'll give it a little more
>time in one more session but it might be a little -too- chill for me.
>I caught myself nodding off a couple times in the middle of chipping
>so I think I need a little more spice or thought in my gameplay right
>now...

Yeah, there aren't really any stats to optimize in Trash Goblin. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I don't entirely understand why they have it in a day format or the push-pull of making money and spending it for upgrades or small fees. It feels like they may originally have had a design for where you have to pay weekly rent or are in debt like a game like Potionomics but then stripped all that stuff out?

It's not necessarily bad to be this casual but it feels lacking sometimes to keep the game loop tight.

Tapping out at 14 hours. I -think- I saw the end of the first main story with getting the achievement for <resolving the armoire>. I played a bit more past that to see some bits of what could be epilogue and maybe hooks to go further (and there clearly is based on achievements) but that felt good enough. It just wasn't quite For Me and the designs were only so cute and the story barely interesting enough to keep me going. Once the characters kinda stopped trickling in aside from feeling like I'm waiting for only down to 1 or 2 people to cycle through, that was it for me.