Review: Death Trash (Early Access)
Since its Early Access debut trailer at E3 2021, Death Trash has been a frenzied hope of indie game enthusiasts looking to capture the nostalgia of old-school adventure cyberpunk classics like Fallout, Beneath a Steel Sky and Shadowrun (SNES). What it delivered is something reminiscent but fresh to the genre of nostalgic pixel-art RPGs that have cropped up in the past decade. In Death Trash, you are encouraged to blindly explore the desolated plains of an unknowable wasteland, every discovery leading to more questions, that left me craving for more after my ten-hour campaign in the early access release of this exciting game.
The wasteland of Death Trash is macabre and hysterical with a sick sense of humor that was a joy to uncover. You wake up with little to no memory of who or what you are or were, cast out of an ancient organization due to a contamination you have contracted somehow. Your mission once leaving the starting area is left unclear, with only scraps of notes to guide you. The only thing obvious is that wherever you are was once a technologically advanced civilization, but that time has long passed.
Humanity has devolved into factions of barbarians, drunken fools and zealots. Aimless wandering will inevitably lead you to a settlement called Tauris and a place known as the Kraken Temple where you discover that the planet you are on has been seeded and overtaken by a biological growth and entities called “Titans.” The meat of which is the lifeforce of most inhabitants of the wastes, who pass their time by salvaging old tech, drinking, making love, and having puking contests.
Death Trash also has some queer knods and sidestories. Similar to the game from my last review, Littlewood, Death Trash has continued the trend of defining your character with a name, clothes, hairstyle, but notably not a gender, leaving that particular distinction to your own imagination. There isn’t much romance in Death Trash but where it does show it, it’s clear there’s no moral objection to same-sex relationships. Also, while I didn’t run into it in my own adventures through the wastes, there is a screencap on the Death Trash website, at the time of publishing, showcasing a shack surrounded by a myriad of misfits, including one in his underwear on the roof. The shack is emblazoned with pink scrawl saying “Cuddly Beards!” Adding to the queer intonation, the name of the jpeg file is “boys_will_be_boys” a clear homage to a scene in the 1934 pre-code Hollywood era film Wonder Bar. A delightful easter egg for a queer-eyed investigator such as myself if I ever saw one.
The combat in Death Trash is simple but satisfying. You are equipped early with a club and a gun, and proceed with iterations of a melee and ranged weapon combo, along with a set of specialty skills either technological or occult as you see fit. There is a nice cloak-and-dagger, backstabbing gameplay style that is unlocked very early, allowing you to overtake even large crowds by taking out particularly troublesome enemies first, then clean up with area-of-effect skills or even disappear again in the later game. The skill tree had typical combat progression by weapon or skill and a set of ambiguous branches into which to drop points, like Animalism or Empathy, although some of these felt hollow in practical use. Fortunately, you can reskill at any time for a reasonable price. I found myself using this to experiment with a few playstyles before I landed on a poisonous rogue with a claw blade.
The soundtrack of Death Trash is reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II. It is dissonant and ominous, barely there until it hits you with a jarring metallic strike that adds to the enigmatic atmosphere of the game. Composer James Dean created a haunting landscape with minimalist industrial shades that never felt out of place in the game. What felt almost as powerful as the soundtrack in the game was the places where the developers left the gameplay devoid of musical commentary. Battles with mobs of rogue agents were often left without fanfare, with only the gentle coo of the winds of the wastes and the resonating blasts of gunfire to punctuate your stand. I am not entirely sure that this wasn’t a limitation of the early access, but I felt that it added to the overarching feeling of desolation in Death Trash and would not be disappointed in its carryover to the finished game.
Overall, my biggest complaint about Death Trash is that I want more! As with many early access games, playing is a catch-22: I want to get a taste of the game that is creating lots of buzz in the indie game community, but I knew even going in that things will evolve, and ultimately I’ll have to wait to get the full impact of what Death Trash has to offer. That being said, I cannot wait to see what the next chapter holds. It is clear to me that Death Trash is really something special and I’m confident that the developers at Crafting Legends are making something that belongs in the ranks of the best RPGs that the indie gaming community has to offer.