Previews
[Early Access Impressions] Classic ‘Fallout’ Meets Flesh n’ Puke Gross Out in Indie RPG ‘Death Trash’
When Fallout 3 was announced, I was one of the many people who were hesitant about the change in perspective for the series. There was something about the look and feel of those old isometric games that captured the grimy, icky apocalypse they were going for that wasn’t quite as appealing when rendered in crisper graphics that you could explore in first person. While I have grown to enjoy the later Fallout games, I’m always hoping something out there can recapture the feeling of the originals. Enter Death Trash.
Much like Fallout, Death Trash begins with a brief tutorial before exiling you from an underground bunker and letting you loose in a flesh-covered wasteland. Skinless mutants wander alongside your standard complement of raiders and weirdos, and all the “normal” people you find feed on the strange meat that mysteriously grows from the earth. It’s a decidedly gross world, where you’re likely to run into a wayward nudist or a place called “Puke Bar,” but the pixelated art style keeps it from being disgustingly off putting.
Death Trash ostensibly lets you build your character’s stats to fit your playstyle, allowing you to put points in skills like animalism, cybertech and occultism. These options seem to be padded out by an unnecessary granularity in the combat stats (such as blunt vs bladed melee weapons), and the social stats seem underutilized at the moment. This seems to stem from an unfortunate case of trying to mimic the minutiae of Fallout without consideration if the game needs it or not. Since combat is so skill-based, the effect of the combat stats isn’t quite as immediately evident, aside from preventing you from using certain weapons. It’s not quite as robust as it appears to be at first glance, but the game is in Early Access, so that part of the game could be developed further as the project progresses.
The real-time combat is fast and desperate, giving you options to fight either with melee or ranged weapons. Timing is everything as you try to dance around your enemy’s reload window and sneak in your strikes before you have to dodge roll away from theirs. Ammo is scarce, especially before you can purchase the crafting recipes for bullets and shells, so you’ll find yourself leaning more on swords and clubs instead of shotguns and rifles. A basic stealth system helps you start off encounters on the right foot, but you’ll still need good reflexes and smart resource management to make it through fights. It’s a fun bit of mental math you have to do when confronted with an encounter; is this group worth using some of my limited bullets on, or should I try to carefully pick them off with my sword? Cyberware can also give you skills to help out in encounters, but those too are limited in their usage.
Dungeons in Death Trash can be pretty challenging, especially in the early stages before you’ve found or purchased better equipment. These dungeons feel a lot like the Fallout formula, running you through mazes that are peppered with lore notes to find between enemy encounters. Liberal use of quicksave keeps it from being too frustrating, but expect to die a lot in the early going when fighting bigger groups of marauders.
For a game that’s trying to be aggressively unpleasant, the world draws you in with intriguing and bizarre details that give Death Trash its own unique identity, even when compared to its influences. One of the skills you start off with is “puke,” which you can, oddly enough, use to reactivate cyborgs and machines on a couple occasions. The strange flesh throughout the landscape not only gives a good visual flair, but creates an interesting mystery. No one knows where it comes from, but everyone seems super comfortable eating it (it’s even used as your primary method of healing yourself). As you progress, you learn that you have the ability to communicate with the meat and the network of beings connected to it. Proper nouns like “Worm Shaman” and “Flesh Nexus” drew me into its mythology and left me wanting more.
In addition to investigating that overall mystery, you’re also given extra sidequests that let you learn more about the characters that inhabit the various towns and locations throughout the world. Most of them so far have been pretty easy fetch quests, but they give you good reasons to move around the map and fully investigate the areas. As you are travelling the overworld map, you can run into random encounters, but those are generally just simple combat encounters or quick character interactions. They make the world feel a bit more alive and dynamic, though ultimately don’t add too much.
While there’s a lot to love about Death Trash right now, it’s definitely a game that’s early in its Early Access run. After only about three or four hours of playing, I already ran into a message saying “WIP Quest – Come Back Later.” The core loop of exploring and combat is satisfying, and the world is already, excuse the pun, fleshed out, but the lack of content may be a reason to hold off on purchasing. For me, I was glad to jump into Early Access to help this small project out, but I might put it down until the full release so I can experience it in its full glory when it’s ready.
Death Trash is out now in Early Access on PC.
The gaming world owes so much to David Lynch. “Twin Peaks” alone has inspired the premise and setting of so many games, from Deadly Premonition to Alan Wake, and its dreamlike tone is one that’s perfect for an interactive medium.
Silver Pines, the upcoming title from Swedish-based indie developer Wych Elm, is the latest in the lineage of Lynchian games, this time presenting survival-horror-style gameplay from a 2D perspective. While I’m not traditionally as hot on 2D games, after spending time with the demo, available now on Steam, I can’t wait to see more of this intriguing new world.
It starts out simple. After a brief, narrated dream sequence, you wake up in an empty diner in the small American town of Silver Pines. There’s a quick tutorial sequence that teaches you the game’s mechanics as you escape from the diner, followed by a phone call that sets up the premise of the game. You play Red Walker, a private investigator on the hunt for a missing musician named Eddie Velvet. It’s an elegant bit of exposition that’s delivered with a slightly dreamlike vibe, setting the tone for what’s to come.
As you begin to explore the titular town, you find it eerily abandoned, thanks to an evacuation order that’s caused the majority of the residents to take the ferry out of here. Empty streets and vacant buildings bring to mind Silent Hill, which is a great start in my book. There’s something really unique and special about small town horror like this, and Silver Pines is able to capture it immediately without feeling too much like a tribute act.
Navigating the Unique 2D World of Silver Pines
One of the things that impressed me immediately was how easy I found it to navigate the 2D space. Much like the indie classic Lone Survivor, you have a map that represents the space, and you turn down streets and hallways by pressing up or down at certain openings in the background to “turn” on the map. It seems like it should be incredibly difficult to follow directional shifts like this, but it becomes immediately intuitive, especially with the addition of diegetic signage that guides you without feeling out of place and handholdy.
I usually associate 2D games with more dynamic jumping and movement mechanics, but Silver Pines keeps things grounded, managing to find ways of creating navigation challenges without resorting to platforming tests that would feel out of place in a narrative like this. The map is particularly excellent in this game, as you can use a camera to add photos to it to help remind you what’s there. I love it when main characters mark up maps with locations of puzzles or items, and putting that power in the player’s hands was an interesting mechanical wrinkle that felt helpful and unique.
The other thing that gripped me from the start was the art style, which uses a slight cel-shading technique for the character models that makes them look hand-drawn. They really pop when compared to the backgrounds, which have a slightly different, but complementary, style to them. Wych Elm also shows off a masterful understanding of lighting, creating a shadowy look that’s never too dark to understand what’s going on.
The way the various layers of background and foreground give a parallax effect as you walk adds so much depth to every moment, making the imagery feel more dynamic. This game is treading familiar ground, with abandoned hotels and empty small town streets, but the unique look sets it apart enough to justify it among its peers.
Puzzles Balance Logic and Surrealism
Aside from just navigating the spaces, you’ll need to solve a variety of puzzles in order to progress. Many of them are just finding keys to open doors or figuring out which item is helpful in which situation, like an adventure game, but there were a few in the hour-long demo that gave me a level of satisfaction in actually figuring something out. Like the best survival horror games, the puzzles are an equal bit grounded in reality and slightly surreal, adding to the tone of the game. One of them gave me a Silent Hill vibe with its logic, asking me to win a BB gun shooting range mini game to get a pool key (which also teaches you how to use weapons).
While the game isn’t crawling with enemies, there are more threats scattered throughout the levels than I expected. Early on, you get a blade to defend yourself, which also acts as a key to cut through doorways blocked by cloth, and it’s just the right balance of effective and clumsy. There’s a surprisingly useful dodge that lets you slip past enemies. With the right timing, it’s not too difficult to survive one-on-one encounters, but it’s also not so easy that you can go on autopilot. Once multiple enemies get into the mix, it starts feeling more desperate, forcing you to make smart use of your stamina and weapon durability to survive.
A pistol gets introduced late in the demo, and that also felt surprisingly punchy, but its power was balanced smartly by limited ammo. One of my favorite gameplay elements of survival horror is ammo management, and it seems like Silver Pines is going to make that a core part of its combat experience, asking you to think carefully about which enemies are worth your precious bullets. This is further complicated by the fact that your gun can also be used to shoot padlocks to access previously locked areas, making it an even more valuable resource.
Enemy Design is the Demo’s Biggest Question Mark
Ammo and tape will be crucial to the continued use of your gun and knife, respectively, and there’s a quick little minigame for reloading and repairing that adds some tension to encounters. In addition to scavenging for resources, there was a vending machine I ran across where I could spend money to buy ammo or health kits. Be careful, though, the money is what you use to save at the payphone save points, so you don’t want to spend it all. It’s a clever variant on the classic Resident Evil-style ink ribbon system that makes your resource for saving a more abundant currency, but one that is used for more than just saving.
There were a couple of mementos that I ran across while exploring, and these can be equipped to provide specific character modifiers. I’m not entirely sold on the system yet, as there weren’t enough in the demo to really be able to craft a meaningful build, but with the surprisingly fun combat I’ve seen so far, I’m hoping that they will allow you to shape your playstyle in a way that’s tuned to how you like it. Any new wrinkles on combat are welcome, as it will need to find ways to keep fresh if it wants to stay compelling throughout.
As much as I think the combat is responsive and interesting, I think the enemies might be the weakest part of the game’s identity. This could also be a symptom of just seeing the early game, but so far, they are a bit more indistinct than I’d like, consisting mostly of shadowy people and bugs that didn’t have much going on. There was a boss fight that had a bit more of a menacing design, but I don’t know enough about the full shape of the narrative yet to see if the enemy design is in sync with the tone it’s trying to achieve. Right now, they just feel a bit generic, but I’m hoping things improve as it goes on, because they are pretty fun to fight for a survival horror game.
A Strong First Impression
Back to the opening thoughts about Lynch, the part that has me most interested in this game is the narrative. It’s simple so far, but there have been some surprisingly effective surrealist sequences that make me think this story is going to be something that will sink its hooks into me. One of the coolest moments of the demo involved turning off a light switch and being transported into an entirely different space, one dripping with dreamlike vibes. Even the choice to have the person you’re searching for be a musician adds a nice bit of texture to the narrative, putting a thematic focus on the game’s music in an important sequence involving a performance.
The cutscenes shift to a distinct painterly style, making them stand out without having to animate them, and it’s all brought to life with great voice acting. There’s even a little show you can watch in bits on TVs you pass, feeling a bit like a nod to Alan Wake II’s “Night Springs”.
I’m going to be honest, watching the initial trailer for Silver Pines had me feeling a bit sceptical. Not everyone can nail that Lynchian vibe, and when you try for that tone and miss, it can leave you with a narrative that’s either confusing or pretentious. Based on my hour with Silver Pines, I’d say they are on the right track, ready to deliver a surrealist narrative that draws from its inspirations while still carving out its own identity.
No word on the release date yet, outside of a vague 2026 timeframe, but I’ll be there day one to check it out.
Silver Pines is scheduled to release on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.
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