Goblin Cleanup Review (PC)

If you’ve ever wondered what happens after you leave a dungeon on a blazing trail of blood, loot, and rarities — here’s what you need to know: the goblins have to step in to rebuild everything you ruin, respawn all of the mischievous creatures that you slaughter, and replenish every last coin that you plunder. Because, as it turns out, there’s a lot of prep work involved in the pre-instance phase that we don’t often see—so much of it, in fact, that there’s an entire game based around it. Strange, that.

Aptly titled Goblin Cleanup, the House Flipper-like de-clutter sim invites you to peek beyond the veil that we, as players, don’t necessarily get to see, and engage in a series of pre-adventure restoration projects—jobs that take place between daring exploits waged by the pompous heroes who populate the outside world. Think Orcs Must Die! and the post-battle panorama of bullets, traps, and corpses, and then picture yourself sweeping in with a bucket and mop to clean it all up in anticipation of the next troupe of guests’ arrival. That, in short, is where Goblin Cleanup places you: in the immediate aftermath of a dungeon exploit, and at the foot of a bruised, bloodied, and bartered wasteland of ransacked spoils and rotting bodies. A lovely sight, mind you.

Goblin Cleanup offers you and up to three friends the chance to knuckle down and get your hands dirty in a sizable campaign that features a plethora of different dungeons and challenges, all of which accommodate a wide range of traps, creatures, and spillages to wade through. I’ll admit, there is a lot more to it than that, but then, we might as well set the juicer details aside for a few minutes. Till then, let’s go ahead and dial it back to the beginning.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes

It goes like this: an egotistical act of arrogance by a ragtag bunch of heroic tacticians has left one heck of a mess on the battlefield. The dungeon floors are filled with spring-loaded traps—some active, some not—, copious amounts of empty treasure chests, a litter of stained ceilings, and a ravenous bunch of murderous creatures who, for some reason, lack the ability to tell the difference between the real enemies and their local cleanup crews. Amidst all of this chaos, we have our loyal moppers—the ironclad troupe who serve as the beating heart of the dungeon’s most overlooked faction. It’s with these folk that Goblin Cleanup paints its portrait. The dungeon is in tatters, and only one unsung hero can grease the hinges, so to speak.

To point out the obvious, Goblin Cleanup is a little more unusual by comparison to other cleaning sims à la PowerWash Simulator. Here, you don’t necessarily have homes or generic buildings to restore; you have plunder-riddled labyrinths of varying sizes, with each one possessing a unique architectural design and set pieces to scrub, replace, and replenish. There are blood stains to mop, carcasses to scrap, chests to fill, traps to remove, and, true to the nature of dungeon-crawling affairs, monsters to eliminate. A real banquet of jobs, all things considered.

Thankfully, all of the above comes neatly packaged in a simple yet elegant mop-and-meander campaign, with its bottomless challenges and cleaning jobs providing plenty of bang for your buck, whether you’re running them as a lone goblin or a four-piece powerhouse clique. To that end, you have more than enough here to scratch “that” itch, especially if said itch has a natural fixation on the act of cleaning and indulging in chore core exercises. Turns out, Goblin Cleanup has all of that — and then some.

What Goblins Do Best

Goblin Cleanup presents you with access to a trove of tools, with a slime mop that allows you to scrub spills and blood splatters from most surfaces, and a nifty telekinetic hand that allows you to manipulate items, as well as restore or replenish stockpiles of loot or other fixed decor. With that, you have a simple job to deal with: use the tools at your disposal to recreate a dungeon in preparation for the next team to come knocking. After that, it’s merely the case of unlocking your equipment, and working through a collection of dungeons in exchange for various perks and passive rewards.

The cleaning process itself is a lot of fun. Scratch that, it’s incredibly fun. It’s fun, mainly due to the fact that Goblin Cleanup doesn’t just involve the usual tropes of a restoration sim; it also involves a bit of dungeon crawling, platforming, and obstacle solving. With each dungeon bearing its own cross, as well as a swathe of randomized encounters, unpredictable traps, and hostile creatures, the game more or less makes it so that you are constantly gazing over your shoulder as you carve through the checklist. In other words, it isn’t as dull or as predictable as your bog-standard cleaning gig — and I’m over the moon about that.

There are, of course, one or two major technical mishaps that need to be brought to the table here. Unfortunately, Goblin Cleanup does foster a few issues, one of them being a game-breaking bug that, frustratingly, results in the level that you’re working on grinding to a halt and forcing you to restart the process. Amongst the expected technical problems, Goblin Cleanup also falls short in its implementation of an ironclad visual interface, too, which often results in some relatively minor graphical errors, sadly.

Verdict

Goblin Cleanup takes the classic sweep-and-soak formula of a traditional flipping sim and douses it with a strikingly pungent substance that makes the ordinary act of cleaning bewilderingly entertaining. With thanks to its unique blend of mythical elements and dungeon crawling mechanics, it immediately becomes one of those sorts of gigs that you could quite easily lose yourself in for days — maybe even weeks, depending upon how you feel about overindulging in restoration conquests and the likes. And its inclusion of a four-player co-op mode? *chef’s kiss*

To help sway your decision, I’ll just leave you with this: If you are growing somewhat weary of the usual restoration fluff that consumes most of the modern market, then you should definitely consider dipping your mop into this bucket of slime-infested water. In addition to it being laden with sticky substances and curiosities to scrub, it also contains a jam-packed campaign that ought to keep you and your fledgling goblin maids busy for hours. If that’s the kind of graft that tugs on your heartstrings, then you certainly won’t find a shortage of spillages to cleanse in this gloopy dungeon.