One Man’s Trash Review (PC)

They say One Man’s Trash is another man’s treasure, and that, even if said treasure lacks historical value or sentimental meaning to one person, another would happily venture to the ends of the earth to find it to serve their own purpose. Someone, somewhere, is out there right now, in the dunes of dump water, wading into bottomless piles of junk and actively searching for a treasure. Rumor has it, that treasure houses an entire Swiss bank account within its shell, and is the diamond in the rough of a junkyard archipelago. That person, sadly, is me. For the next several hours, I am the sucker who will skinny dip into dung and debris, for come hell or high water, I will take matters into my own hands and find that silver lining. There be gold in these trash bags, and I’m not slipping out until I find it.

One Man’s Trash asks a simple question: what would you do to recover something dear to you? In this case, it isn’t a loved one, nor is it a family heirloom that’s been rotating in your ancestral home for generations. No, what we have here, beneath these grubby walls and trash-riddled biomes, is a hard drive—a pocket-sized bit of hardware that just so happens to house a life-changing sum of PitCoins. The caveat here is that you don’t have it on your person, for it idles deep within the underbelly of a derelict junkyard. So, what can you do to rectify this situation? Why, buy the darn junkyard and get digging, of course. If you supply the false optimism, I’ll bring the shovel. Let’s dig.

Mining for Gold

It all begins with a shoddy vacuum, an ocean of trash, and a simple objective: dig. Like A Game About Digging a Hole, One Man’s Trash doesn’t exactly beat around the bush in its prelude. In fact, it makes the purpose of the experience so abundantly apparent, that you don’t necessarily need to learn any tutorials or master any intricate mechanics before getting your hands dirty. Aside from the occasional need to unlock better tools and means of carving deeper into the junk and orbital debris, the journey doesn’t really deviate much from a simple, almost numskull experience — which is shoveling copious amounts of garbage aside in order to gain access to certain treasures and, above all, the Holy Grail of junkyard leftovers—the hard drive with upwards of a million dollars stashed away on it.

Of course, if the hard drive in question was the only thing that you had to acquire here, then it wouldn’t be much of an experience. Thankfully, where the game does fall short of an original goal, it does make enough room to host vast quantities of miniature incentives—pocket-sized trash balls with which you can sell to elevate your vacuum’s base stats, for example. Herein lies a rather simple progression loop, and one that, quite frankly, has been digested and regurgitated more times than I’d like to imagine. Simply put, you dig, you sell, and you make small but effective adjustments to your tools to aid your future descents into the junkyard. The more you unlock, the deeper you travel. The higher the value the trash, the better the upgrade you can install, and so on and so forth.

To Profit From Trash

There isn’t a storyline to uncover here. Not that this comes as a major surprise, though. What I mean to say is that, despite the carrot-on-a-stick setup that the game initially brings to the table, the plot doesn’t contain any extra meat on the bone, so to speak. Without any twists, turns, or secondary objectives to unpack, One Man’s Trash really does become a one-track ordeal at the first hurdle—a game that makes no effort to cloud your mind with cascading plot points and hidden secrets. It’s you, a junkyard, and a rabbit hole of salvageable trash and tool upgrades. If that’s the sort of gig that gives you that special get-up-and-go mentality, then congratulations — you’ve just inherited the keys to a trashy Shangri-La, basically.

One Man’s Trash adheres to a simple rule: lay enough breadcrumbs out to disguise an otherwise painfully monotonous experience. Without the tool upgrades and microscopic incentives for you to chase, there wouldn’t be a huge amount to uncover here. And yet, even with such a dull process fleshing out the bulk of the journey, One Man’s Trash does, in all fairness, find various ways to keep you on your toes. Take the tunnels, for example. As it turns out, the deeper you travel into the junkyard, the more likely you are of encountering other threats. It isn’t a combat-focused game, so don’t let this fool you into thinking that it’s Deep Rock Galactic with a vacuum. Still, it does generate some extracurricular activities for you to plug away at — and that’s great. At least, it is for a short while.

Verdict

As if to illustrate the fact that people will chase a carrot on a stick without thinking twice, One Man’s Trash takes it upon itself to produce a generic dig-and-discover dirt trap that, while still annoyingly fun to carve through, relies on its player’s imagination to stay afloat. Without a huge amount of gameplay to onboard, you could quite easily sift through a solid portion of the journey in a handful of hours and struggle to unearth anything else of slight importance. But that isn’t a deal-breaking thing, because at the end of the day, there’s a smidgen of satisfaction that comes with the lull of an endless graft. Sure, it’s a little on the light side compared to your average RPG, but after witnessing its inner workings, I can confidently say that the simple-minded concept of a junkyard employee relentlessly digging for loot is surprisingly palatable. Go figure.

If you managed to catch A Game About Digging a Hole a couple of months back, then you might be glad to know that One Man’s Trash isn’t astronomically different. It’s a simple game, so it’s best not to get your hopes set on finding a full-fledged world-building simulator with all of the same trimmings as a bottomless sandbox. Still, if you enjoy stepping stone procedures and have a few hours to spare, then you should consider hovering your trusty vacuum over this gaping hole of hand-me-downs and sunken treasures. It won’t make you a millionaire, but it’ll certainly make you appreciate the value of unlikely keepsakes.