Goblin Cleanup is a disgusting, filthy game, and I’m quite taken by it. The concept is absolutely brilliant: you play as a cleanup crew that has to go into a dungeon and clean up the mess after the heroes/wannabe adventurers. No, that’s not a simple case of recycling the beer kegs and ripping the toilet paper off the tiles, and instead it’s mopping up the blood, feeding limbs to enchanted chests, and putting everything back where it’s supposed to go.
So, it’s House Flipper, but from a fantasy perspective? No. Though you’re mopping things up and juggling furniture from a first-person viewpoint, you can also switch to a third-person camera and, get this: use magic! Ok, Fantasia it ain’t, so you physically have to lug wooden tables and chairs about, though you have the option to use mana to fuel torches. More fun than it sounds.
Unsurprisingly, your character in Goblin Cleanup is a goblin, and a beautiful one at that. Forget the days of Dungeon Keeper and Warcraft – these greenies are gorg with their luscious locks, fancy maid outfits, and customisable mops. Yes, there’s the ‘c-word’: customisation. As nice as it is to switch to a third-person view and peer at your character’s bottom (we know you do it), you can show off to friends, family, and frenemies, as this is predominantly a co-op experience.
For reviewing type shenanigans, this is predominantly from a solo perspective, but I’d highly recommend it as a good old game of Hot Potato in the corridors, while dodging traps is a godsend. What’s that, you say? Yes: traps. These are dungeons after all, and we need to ward off the do-gooders. Alas, this applies to the cleaners too, so you are at risk of being eaten, burned, crushed, and sold a gym membership via direct debit that you’ll never eventually cancel until 2033, having attended… once.
The risks of mortality are both good and bad in Goblin Cleanup. For one thing, it ensures that you are careful when cleaning up, but careless play or occasionally technical issues can be quite frustrating, as it adds to the duration of the mission. In short, you’re tasked with clearing an area of the dungeon, and once teleported, you have all the time in the world to do so.
Objectives will be set, such as putting all furniture back in its rightful place, mopping up blood, feeding those chests, or Mimics. Bonus objectives exist, too, like not dying or doing an action in limited moves. The bonuses slipped my clutches quite early on while I experimented with the controls, awkwardly getting too close to a Mimic when feeding it a body part, only to get eaten. What’s that on the counter? I have to clean up more limbs now? Ah… mine. Yes, additional objectives get added to Goblin Cleanup when you’re so near completion.
A good example of this was realising I had to backtrack through a corridor of traps to feed some limbs to the Mimic in another room. With another player, you can throw to them, but when on your own and you throw to speed up the process, blood will splat on impact, meaning you’ll have to mop it up. And a thing about the mops: they’re actually blobs fired from a dispenser, and when they’re all gunked up, repeated use of them will spread MORE blood. You then have to manually feed these to the Mimics to clean up.
AAAARRGGHH!!! What was supposed to be straightforward gets messier. It’s as if you were carpet cleaning and as you go back downstairs to get another brew, you realise you’ve spilt drips of coffee where you were working. Start again… As infuriating as this all sounds, it’s what makes Goblin Cleanup so damn appealing. I absolutely love the concept, and there was potential for it to be great. From what I’ve experienced thus far, it IS great, as all those little niggles are down to my sausage fingers and hand-eye coordination. Crisalu Games are onto a winner here, and with Team17 on publishing duties, maybe it’s time to bail on the quest to locate the treasure and instead get the gaff spick and span. The cleaners are the real heroes.
Coming to Early Access on Steam, you can give the Goblin Cleanup demo a trial now.
