One Man's Trash by developer and publisher Jony Pazu Games—PC(Steam) review written by Richard with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
One Man’s
Trash is Another Man’s Treasure, sometimes quite literally. In One Man’s Trash
you will turn other people’s junk into cash while digging down a big trash pit.
Weirdly addicting and a little cathartic, will you be cleaning out the junk, or
will you fall victim to the abyss of trash?
In One Man’s
Trash you play as a miner who has spent the last of his savings to purchase a
junkyard where someone accidentally threw out a hard drive with 8,000 PitCoins
on it. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s based on a Bit Coin story
that actually happened. Our miner however has a superpowered vacuum that can
hoover up both dirt and objects.
One Man’s Trash is pretty basic in how it plays: suck up dirt and objects, fill up the vacuum,
return to your computer to sell what you’ve got. You can purchase upgrades or
gamble with your cash, and then back into the pit you go. Rinse and repeat
until you manage to find the wallet with the Pit Coins in it! Don’t neglect
your upgrades though, as they can be really helpful.
You can
upgrade your vacuum capacity, range, width, suction power, and item capacity
(different than dirt capacity) to increase your vacuum capabilities, but you
can also buy rope that you can ascend/descend from, lights to place around the
pit when it starts getting too dark to see, and a scanner to tell you if there
are any items nearby. Make sure to suck up all the garbage bags, toilets, or
electric guitars you find in order to bring in more cash for the upgrades!
As you
progress down the pit, there will be different layers which requires more
powerful vacuum to breach through. Normally this is locked behind shop level,
which can be increased by purchasing a certain amount of upgrades worth of
cash, and then shelling out to upgrade the store, unlocking further upgrades.
Also as you progress down more and more layers, the value of the items you can
find and the dirt you suck up increases. There’s a big difference between deep
layer ores and the garbage bags on the surface.
Something
to note is that you can actually die. If you fall too far you take damage, and
if you die you lose everything in your vacuum and get returned to the surface.
Not too troubling, but could be annoying. I suppose you could probably soft
lock the game as well, but it would require so much effort that it’s pretty
much on you if that happens. If you don’t have access to the rope, whether you’re
playing in a game mode that doesn’t have it or you didn’t purchase any, and you
get stuck in a hole? But you can also expel the dirt in your vacuum to create
footholds, so you would essentially need to engineer the situation. Also, you
could always just continue using your vacuum on nothing, as it will overheat
and kill you eventually.
The game
does not take long on normal mode to finish, as I clocked in just under four
hours after I was done, and that’s after exploring around trying to unearth
some of the interesting and mysterious objects you can find buried in the pit. There is the option for both an easier mode and a normal mode, as well as a harder Abyss mode where there is no rope.
There’s a little radio next to the computer you sell/purchase/gamble from that will play tunes for you while you are playing, which you can turn off if you want to listen to something else. Honestly, the point here isn’t the soundtrack, or the graphics for that matter, but a sort of easy-going game about cleaning out a huge pit and stuffing your pockets with cash.
The good
news is that there’s a low price point for the game, and currently three game
modes to choose from. It seems like the developer is really looking to improve,
so by the time you read this there may be even more content to One Man’s Trash. For a solo developer project, I think the game is quite well done.
Overall, I
have to say that One Man’s Trash is quite enjoyable. While not visually or
audially outstanding, it has a draw to it’s simpleness. A fairly relaxing delve
into a junk pit in the name of money, if you’re looking for a title to unwind a
little, maybe think about picking this up
Score: 8.5 / 10
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