Trash Goblin, a cozy, no-fail shopkeeping sim game where you play as a Goblin who specializes in cleaning, recycling, and selling items that delvers find in the Chasm. As with typical games of this nature, you have your humble beginnings as your guardian and business partner Aimon teaches you the ropes of running their shop. 

This game released last year on Steam with mediocre critic reviews on Metacritic. Since then, it received 4 major content and quality of life updates and boasts n 85% user rating on Steam. Now that it’s releasing on consoles, we get to visit how this play-at-your-own pace shopkeeping sim translates to controllers.

Your everyday life as a Trash Goblin

The gameplay loop in Trash Goblin is a simple one. Your day starts and you control what you want to do for the day. Your choices are to chisel and discover new trinkets, clean the trinkets you have in your workshop, combine your trinkets you have through upcycling to create unique items, or tend to customers in your shop. Everything is done at your leisure. There is no failure. Your only real restriction is in-game time.

Each action, such as chiseling, cleaning, and upcycling takes up a predetermined amount of time, while performing customer service, does not. It’s your goal to plan out what you want to accomplish in your limited time. However, it doesn’t really matter, even if a customer requests an item from you and you don’t want to deal with it and would rather just tinker away in your workshop, you can totally ignore them or tell them to go away without any repercussions. If a named NPC asks you for a specific item, you can tell them to come back later once you have the item they desire. No rush. 

As you progress through the story, you’ll eventually have the ability to travel to different parts of the town allowing you to sell whatever you have in your stash to the townsfolks. Initially it starts with 2 visits per week, but will eventually increase to everyday.

Your shop

In your shop, you cycle between 4 main windows: The customer window, your resting area, your tool upgrade table and where Aimon hangs out, and your workshop. Controlling between them is simple, utilizing L1 and R1 (on PlayStation), or you can bring your cursor to the icons that represents them at the bottom middle of your screen. The purpose of each window is quite self-explanatory.

The shop’s window is where you’ll be interacting with your customers. You take requests, fulfill them, and get paid. Overtime, your relationship will improve with each species allowing for tips. Later on, you’ll also be able to expand on your window allowing you to display items on it, enticing folks to purchase your coolest (?) trash.

One of the most important windows will be your Workshop, this is where you’ll spend most of your real time and in-game time as well as the bulk of the gameplay. You have three tools, the chisel, sponge, and upcycler. Each tools uses up a segment of your day as well as provide a small mini-game. 

The experience in each one is simple to understand and to do. It’s the sort of relaxing and cozy tediousness that you’d expect with repetitive type activity. It has a satisfying tactile and auditory feel that really makes you just sit back and zone out. Perfect for controller and couch play. Depending on how much you enjoy pressing the same button over and over again, I would recommend checking the settings menu to choose if you want the tools to activate through button press, hover, or hold. 

The Tools of the Trade

In your workshop, you’ll always have a brown sack on your table. This is because the game (or Aunty) will always provide you with new trash to repurpose. As soon as you use one, a new one will populate. Using the chisel will start a sort of Minecraft mining experience. You will have to uncover the treasure within by getting rid of the unnecessary debris surrounding it. Different coloured blocks denotes how much digging you’ll to do in order for it to break. Some you can’t break at all, and some you’ll have to hit at specific areas to hit its weak spot. You can slowly chip away each individual block, taking your time, or you can choose to target specific blocks that are closely connected to the artifact rewarding you with a satisfying animation as you watch them all disintegrate. 

The next step is cleaning the trash. You do this by using the sponge. This starts a sort of powerwash simulator minigame where you’ll need to completely wash away the gunk with sponge and water. This is a simple minigame which is made even simpler by turning on the option for the sponge to work through hover.  You don’t run out of soap or water, and all dirt is made equally. Sponge upgrades just increases the space your sponge can clean at a time. 

Your last tool is the upcycler. This is perhaps the coolest part of the game and truly exudes the idea of “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. Often times, you’ll find some trash that you’ll be able to attach other trash to it. You’ll get different pieces of themed items that you can put together, if you want. Or you can totally attach a Goblin Plush Right Arm to a Beer Stein to create a handle for it. Most of the time, you’ll be using the upcycler to fulfill specific NPC or customer requests, letting you know exactly what to attach together, but you’ll also get requests that just asks you to have an upcycled version, meaning you can be more creative.

Fail safe gameplay has its limits 

As I’ve mentioned, you cannot fail. This is the game Split Milk Studios wanted to make, and I commend them for sticking with it. However, I personally would’ve loved a game that rewarded careful tinkering. Perhaps with an optional subtle challenge like; having artifact durability making it so that careful chiseling can reward you with a better quality item or perhaps one that isn’t so dirty, or an item that customers willing to pay more money for. In my opinion, cozy and relaxing games can also thrive in situations with optional challenges. This can also help with keeping the gamer engaged if they want to. 

Maybe have a relaxed time limit to the cleaning process, to simulate water running out or running out of soap, making it so that the items are not always fully clean, deducting customer’s satisfaction. Or, carelessly dismissing customers can result to lower reputation over time or maybe that particular species of townsfolk may think twice before coming back to seek your services. 

Again, I understand the easy going game that they want to make out of Trash Goblin, however, besides wanting to see some of the cool named NPCs again, I had a difficult time staying engaged in the game. 

The Colourful Cast of Characters

Colourful is an understatement. There are 5 distinct species in Trash Goblin along with a wonderful cast of named NPCs. Each one with a hand drawn style, beautiful, and perfectly suits the game’s atmosphere. While most of your interactions with the species are with “strangers”, the named NPCs have interesting stories and reasons why they want the trash you have to offer. You may find yourself truly excited to see some NPCs like Donovan appear on your window asking for his third bedpan to complete his nest. 

There is a story in Trash Goblin. However, it’s focused more on the stories of those around you, with you as its facilitator. Your guardian and business partner is an antique expert and she ends up getting tangled into uncovering the secrets behind a cursèd armoire. This story beat also progresses how deep your Aunty delves into the Chasm, where all the trash comes from, giving you more items to discover, tinker with, and sell. 

The dialogue in Trash Goblin is fun to read. Waiting to meet or continue the story of an NPC is what made coming back for more. Fulfilling their requests is also fun because it made me look forward to discovering the particular item they need through chiseling, cleaning, and putting them all together. The NPCs definitely played a big role in the enjoyment of Trash Goblin’s gameplay loop. Because of this, it makes me wish that they included the character portrait of each named NPCs in the Goblin’s list of valued customers. One that has within it that updates each character’s evolving wholesome storyline.

From Mouse to Controller: Mission Unsuccessful 

This is my only main gripe about Trash Goblin and it isn’t even horrible. It’s something that you can adapt to, eventually. However, knowing that this is a 1-year old Steam game ported to consoles, I would like for the game to have controller optimization and user experience in mind. There is a heavy focus on using cursors with the analog stick. There is minimal usage of the many buttons available on a controller. Besides the simple usage of L1 and R1 to toggle between the 4 different windows of your shop, and R2, X, and O pretty much doing the exact same thing, there is also Triangle for Quest Log, and Square for Stash. 

They provide shortcut buttons (up and down directionals) for Expansion and Customization, but don’t make use of contextual buttons, potentially allowing for L1/R1 to shuffle between tabs, instead again using cursors. Nearly everything is through you moving the cursor with the analog stick. This wouldn’t be so bad if there is an option to make the cursor go faster. It’s soooo slow. This isn’t much of an issue if the user can control the speed of a cursor by the speed of which they move their wrist. But on a controller, playing a game that relies heavily on the cursor, there needs to be a way to adjust it.

Is it Treasure or Trash?

You play Trash Goblin for the relaxing tedium of everyday shopkeeping as well as encountering interesting folks along the way. You don’t play this if you’re looking for a challenge or engaging gameplay. That isn’t a bad thing necessarily. It’s entirely up to you depending on the kind of game you want to play. 

However, if controller user experience is important to you, Trash Goblin may slightly sour your experience. It’s unfortunate when a port doesn’t fully execute their game their new demographic. Things like this ends up leaving a sour taste in my mouth. Luckily, throughout its year of release on Steam, Spilt Milk Studios supported the game well, providing 4 significant content updates. Therefore, it’s likely that this can easily be patched. 

Trash Goblin releases on 26 March 2026 for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. It launched on PC (Steam) on 28 May 2025.

The game was reviewed on PS5 Pro. Gamer Social Club would like to thank the publishers for the code.