I’ve been following Trash Goblin for a while now, and I was immediately excited about it when I began to see trailers popping up. Now that Trash Goblin is in Early Access, I can say that it is shaping up to be everything I hoped it would be. However, as with any Early Access release, Trash Goblin has room to improve, and there are a few issues I hope the developers focus on first. Let’s get into it!

You play as the titular Goblin, running a resale and repair shop out of the bottom floor of your friend Aimon’s home. Aimon serves as your benefactor and mentor in building up your shop. He teaches you to tinker, repair, and sell all manner of things to a colorful cast of characters. In between doing things for the characters that are your customers, you will also do jobs for unnamed NPCs who have things they want.

Each customer asks for something specific. Sometimes they will give you a piece you need to graft onto another item, or they’ll provide parameters such as “please polish/clean the item with [insert attachment] on it”. Clean items sell for more than dirty items, and items with multiple parts sell for more than single-piece items.

The big problem is that to get the items and pieces you need, you have to chip away at trash, which gives you a (seemingly) random item. This wasn’t much of an issue for me at first, as I was getting items I needed, and I had plenty of time to put things together. However, on about day 25, a customer asked for a “Mechanical Mask” in any condition. I am now on day 35 and I have not seen a single Mechanical Mask, nor have I been able to serve any other customers because I haven’t satisfied this one yet.

Now, I have a feeling that this is a bug, and I’ve noticed that there have been relatively frequent updates to tackle bugs. Spilt Milk is also working hard to implement quality-of-life features such as inventory upgrades for your stash so you can hold more finished pieces without having them scattered on every table and shelf. In fact, the Trash Goblin Steam Page has a content roadmap available, which aims to add a variety of content before the end of the year.

As far as the gameplay goes, while it is relatively repetitive at this stage in development, I do find Trash Goblin to be a lot of fun. The story content that is available is filled with colorful, interesting characters, each offering personality and humor to their dialogue. The mini-games for cleaning and chiseling are fun, but also add a sort of relaxing and meditative quality to the game.

Trash Goblin is not a high-stakes sort of game. This is definitely something you sit down with after a long afternoon just to take your mind off the hellish state of the world right now. I would wager that Trash Goblin probably has 10-15 hours of pre-built content (story stuff broken up by nameless NPCs) but there is a lot on the horizon.

If you’ve had your eye on Trash Goblin so far, I’d recommend it. Especially if you played the demo and enjoyed what you saw there. It is still the beginning of its Early Access period, but it shows a lot of promise so far.

An Early Access preview copy of Trash Goblin was provided by Spilt Milk for the purposes of this preview.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!