When it comes to a game’s aesthetic, most developers aim to have an appealing environment and grab player’s interest through story and gameplay. This wasn’t the case for Crafting Legends when they decided to create their upcoming title, Death Trash. From a name to the environment, they have kept their sights on creating a grotesque world full of mystery and hostility. But even with this focus, they managed to create some intriguing lore and challenging gameplay that is displayed in their free demo alone.
Gameplay
Simultaneously throwing players into the dystopian world and a training facility to provide a quick tutorial of the game, you start out with a quick summary of your situation and guided through the basic mechanics of the game. This includes movement, stealth, melee combat, ranged combat, enemies, and interaction options. After going through a short bit of facility-based training, you will find yourself out in the open world.
From here you can pretty much do whatever you want. You gain access to quests by talking to others, so make sure they are your enemy before attacking. Anybody can be attacked and killed, but this could hinder you from completing a quest. It all starts with the giant “flesh kraken” that you can meet right after the training section.
When you end up leaving a section of the game, like a city, you are taken to an overview map of the world. It seems that this is a safe section of the game because I was never attacked during the use of this and you uncover other locations by moving around on this map. It was limited during the demo, but you will end up in four different sections of the game while playing through what is available.
Some sections are just full of enemies and goodies to find, but others are cities with people to interact with. It is much more beneficial to work with others than to just attack them; besides, you can very quickly be overwhelmed. Usually, as long as you have some meat and ammo in your inventory, you can get yourself out of most situations. Especially if you know where the exit to the section is, given all else fails.
Combat plays a huge role in this game, so be ready to get good at dodging, maneuvering, and attacking enemies. Death comes with only a handful of attacks and you will end up back at your last checkpoint. The good news is, once you kill an enemy they don’t come back. I verified this with the bunker section because you clear it for a quest, but I went back once it was completed and the enemies were not there.
As you kill more enemies, the more experience you earn. As you earn experience and level up your character, you will get more stat points to put towards your character. There is a wide range of options when it comes to your stats, so you can personalize your character how you see fits best. From the time I spent in the demo, it seemed that focusing on health, combat, and mech points are going to be most beneficial - at least at first.
Expectations
I’m not sure what will happen if you kill a character that you need for a quest, but I imagine that you will have a way around this issue. With the free-roam ability in the game, there may only be the main quest line and everything else is just extra content to explore. I didn’t try attacking any of my main quest line people, but I would imagine they aren’t killable. If they are, I hope they have plans to get players out of the soft lock this would cause.
The mixture of weapon options and stats is a huge aid in making your character more personalized to your playstyle. It is already pretty diverse, but I am hoping to see the game either make it a bit more rewarding to use or just a bit more generous with how many points it gives for each level you earn. Right now, it took a long time just to reach level four and I feel like my character barely got any better with their stat point boosts.
As for the quests, the ones you get to do in the demo had you doing a lot of back-and-forth to the same places. I hope this isn’t a reoccurring them and more of a troll-type start to the game because backtracking is never a great indicator of a solid quest line setup.
Conclusion
Death Trash is definitely a challenging game with a solid setup, as far as gameplay goes. The unique environment style mixed with pretty well-done pixel art makes really brings you into this grotesque dystopia without actually being overtly creepy nor gross. They certainly thought a lot of the aspects of this game through. I look forward to the completed game after going through such an entertaining demo!
