Trash Day Review (PC): A Short Wagon Ride of Trash Collection

It is Wednesday, which means, if you live in my area, it is time to take out the trash. Luckily, it is easy for me, but for a pack of raccoons, it can be rather difficult. Trash Day is one of the newest additions to the genre of “friend slop” that places you and your buddies in the bodies of raccoons who are ready to turn items found laying about into some cash. What do these trash pandas need the money for? Well, that’s a great question. This title is a fun, short, and sometimes annoying collect-a-thon to reach raccoon paradise.

Taking Back the Trash

The gameplay loop of Trash Day is fairly basic, with it requiring you and your friends to collect various items scattered about six different levels. These items are then loaded into a cart that you must take to the end of the level. There is no cash requirement to complete the level, but the cash earned helps you get replacement parts like tires and boards to fix up your wagon when it inevitably breaks.

The start of the game is rather confusing, with it requiring you and your friends to piece together what you are meant to do based on context clues, which was simple enough, given about five minutes of playing the game. From there, it is chaotic sailing as you navigate obstacles that get surprisingly difficult in the second level, but end up ultimately becoming easy later on, feeling more like the developer went in reverse when deciding how difficult to make the levels.

The overall gameplay is quite fun, with it managing to capture the attention for a few hours at a time, but nothing that feels continuously playable for long stretches. This is because the gameplay loop gets tiresome after beating two levels, feeling a bit more like a chore as you clean up the various items that have been left lying about.

A big part of the game’s difficulty came from battling the bugs that we discovered, with the wagon seemingly having a mind of its own at times, bouncing into the air or spontaneously going a different direction because we hit a small bump in the road. The biggest issue was the vehicles, as the wagon was hit by a car and sent flying into a tree. It took us about 10 minutes to knock the wagon out of the tree. Of course, we realized that we could ultimately have chosen to reset to the last checkpoint, but that would have sent us back to the beginning of the level since we were next to a checkpoint. This unintentionally spiked the game’s difficulty, but it is more circumstantial.

Final Verdict

Trash Day is a game that promises to take you on a roller coaster of chaotic adventures across different maps, but barely manages to generate a ton of hype. The standard gameplay loop is fun, offering a decent amount of dopamine-fueled amusement, but that quickly wears off after a few levels. This is coupled with weird swings in difficulty that make earlier levels feel much more difficult than later ones, and the ultimate payoff is nothing more than a basic completion rather than something worthy of the struggles. It is a game that is worth playing once through, but I couldn’t see myself and my friends playing through it multiple times.

Trash Day was reviewed on PC with a code provided by Off By One Games.

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