Have you ever wanted to play as a goblin maid tasked with cleaning up various dungeons? You haven’t? Well, the good news is that it’s now an option! Goblin Cleanup has just entered Early Access, bringing with it hours of dungeon-tidying for up to four players. The game is set to remain in Early Access for at least a couple of years, so there’s a pretty hefty wait for anyone that wants to experience everything it has to offer. That being said, there’s already a solid chunk of content here, and the somewhat bizarre concept and gameplay loop are pretty interesting.
To start with, you can customise the look of your character to ensure that yours is markedly different from that of your friends. If you’ve ever played Viscera Cleanup Detail, it’s pretty similar to that, only this game is about a lot more than cleaning up remains, which is actually just a fraction of what you’ll be doing. Granted, you will be doing a fair amount of that. Dungeons have plenty of meat and bloodstains lying around that you’ll need to contend with, although the manner by which you’ll do so is pretty out there. The game doesn’t just give you mops and trash cans, after all, but the tools are more in line with its fantasy-theme.
Instead, you have a pitchfork that you use to stab slimes, which makes a slimop. You then use the slimop to clean up blood. However, after cleaning up a certain amount of blood, the slime will become poisoned and die, at which point you need to dispose of them in mimic chests. Yes, the treasure chest traps that eat people. You’ll also be disposing of any remains in mimic chests, either by carrying it over to them or just picking the mimic up and using it to eat everything. The mimic can also eat you, by the way, so you’ll need to be wary when walking close to them.
You’ll probably die quite a bit in Goblin Cleanup, as everything kills you in a single hit, which includes death from traps and monsters. Dying creates more remains and bloodstains, so even though you can revive as much as you want, you’ll need to do more work afterward. Hey, dungeons are dangerous. Each dungeon is divided into several sections, each with their own checklist. You’ll need to clean up blood and remains, sure, but you’ll even be placing furniture where it needs to go, replacing mana in magic objects (such as magic torches, which kill you if you fill them with too much mana,) repairing traps, and more. There’s quite a lot to do in each dungeon and, if you decide to play the game solo, each one can easily take an hour or more.
As this is a predominately multiplayer game, you can’t save your progress, so if you’re playing solo and you need to stop, you’ll need to start over. Although the game is absolutely playable solo, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, as these dungeons are clearly designed to be worked on by multiple players simultaneously. Playing the game solo can be more than a little tedious, too. Item desync is prevalent in multiplayer sessions and even in solo sessions I’ve had bloodstains and remains end up in positions inside walls or above the ceiling, making it impossible to 100% the map.
Progression is handled mostly by completing challenges in each dungeon. Completing it 100% will grant you a slime in each map, but the other objectives vary. These can often be failed by dying or taking damage a single time from a particular enemy, and there’s a lot of variety to these. For instance, the first level has an evil tree that you need to feed meat to via the roots it attacks you with. The second has a sleeping necromancer that will shoot at you if you wake him up, and so on. Some of these challenges are actually challenging. Considering how many traps you’ll find around the place, Goblin Cleanup is significantly more difficult than most of these types of games usually are.
Goblin Cleanup definitely has a lot going for it, but due to the desync issues and how it can become impossible to really finish a map that you and your friends have already put a considerable amount of effort into, I don’t think this one is quite worth it yet. Once these issues are ironed out I can absolutely see it being a lot of fun, so hopefully there will be some patches soon that fix the issues.
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