(heartbeat) (baby crying) Bethesda's Fallouts are
pretty polarizing games. There's a huge chunk of players who feel
betrayed by them being just shallow husks of what Fallout used
to be in Interplay days, but also a good many people
who love them with a passion. - [Liam Neeson] A boy! A beautiful,
healthy baby boy! - So, if you say stuff like “Fallout 3 is Rubbish”
or something like that somewhere online it’s not unlikely for stans to jump straight in the
line of fire and rebuttal you with something like "well bppfpp make your
own game then mnmnmn". Well, that's exactly what Stephan Hövelbrinks did
after he tweeted a Fallout fan-art drawing in 2015: - [Bender] Waaahhhi'm gonna go build
my own 𝓕𝓪𝓵𝓵𝓸𝓾𝓽... With Blackjack and hookers! - Although I'm pretty sure that this was not in response
to a discrepancy of the quality of Bethesda's Fallouts. Anyway, so what started out
as a silly little fanart joke-tweet pretty quickly took
on a life of its own. He shared more artwork in
the same style over time and an increasing number of people kept coming
back and Futurama-appropriately screaming - [Fry] Shut up and take my money!! - And so he said to himself, "Okay I can do that." And then spent over half a decade
turning this "what if" into an actual game, 5 years as a solo dev and increasing the studio
Crafting Legends to a 2-person team in 2020, got John Romero's and Josh
Sawyer’s blessing along the way. And now, after long years
of blood, sweat, and tears, we're finally getting to play
the first versions of the game. (smacking and gurgling) I have been following Death Trash's development
for pretty much the entire 6 years now and have been looking
forward to it ever since, always eager for new updates, blog
posts, snippets and gifs of game footage like the magpies in my garden
for their daily peanut-ration. Which makes me all the more happy that I got
the opportunity to play the game super early. Therefore, this video will be a good bit
more stream-of-consciousness than usual, since I want to share my immediate
thoughts and feelings on it, after playing through
it multiple times. So, to clarify: The devs approached me with the
offer to check out an early version of the game, I was neither sponsored nor obligated
to make content on it in any way, but I’m doing this because I find the game really
fucking cool and want people to take note of it. I am also not in any way
restricted in my opinions. I'd not consider reporting on a game
under any other circumstances. So if I would have ended up thinking
that the whole thing is pure vomit, (vomiting and splashing) I'd be totally free to do so. Which.. well, if it was shit, I wouldn’t
have made a video on it in the first place. The demo I've played consists of the
first larger area of the story campaign. I've played through it three times, of which
each playthrough took me about 2-3 hours, and I gotta say that it was almost
surreal how closely my expectations, built up over years, were
met by what I got to play. And that is honestly a rarity. I had a damn good time with this surprisingly
feature-rich and polished cake-slice of the full game. It already showcased
a lot of the strengths, its intuitive and snappy but
multifaceted and seamless gameplay, its minimalistic, efficient
and well-thought-out UI, plus the one of a kind atmosphere of gorgeous
retro-inspired pseudo-isometric pixel-art and a truly unique, gross, and
organic Junk-Punk aesthetic. I'm not the kind of player who finishes a game and
then immediately jumps back into it right away to experiment with new
builds and ways to play it, but Death Trash really,
really incentivizes this, like in the good old prelapsarian days
when games were still fun, y’know? The relatively short duration of the
demo also helped there, of course. So, let's start at the top: What's this game about? How does it play? What are the
central story beats? And what... can I expect?-
can you expect-can we expect? What can we expect? (smacking and splattering) Death Trash is one of those beautiful
examples of a title that unabashedly wears its post-apocalyptic inspirations on its sleeve,
but doesn’t become a cheap knockoff. It has a really strong
distinguishable (and fun) identity, style and narrative design of its
own that screams "instant classic." The game is played,
as you can see, from a pseudo-isometric perspective
but unlike the classic Fallout-games, it’s not turn based strategy, but directly
controlled instant action gameplay, akin to something
like Nuclear Throne but with an added stealth component,
and quite a few more features on top. Like, this comparison is
exclusively about the combat. I was surprised by how
versatile the controls are. You can either use the mouse to
click on the floor like in classic cRPGs, which you’ll probably only do
outside of combat encounters, but also seamlessly switch to WASD and Mouse to
steer your character's movements directly at any time. Which is the way you'll likely
operate during combat. So whenever you're exploring, talking to
people, or doing other non-violent stuff, you can just sit back and play it
like a point and click adventure, but the moment the action starts you jump
straight over to Hotline Miami controls, and the whole thing works just as smoothly
and seamlessly with gamepads. Big plus there for people with carpal tunnel
who can’t play frenetic clickety click games. One thing I find really fricking cool is that the game
even features different LOCAL Co-Op Modes- -either on a single screen where 2 people
can play 2 characters at the same time- -or it even gives you the option of playing it on
2 monitors at the same time, one for each player. As an aging videosgame gamer
who grew up in the times of hot-seat multiplayer on my old Amiga
and co., this is an absolute BLAST from the PAST. Also finally gives me a reason to look forward
to being fully vaccinated and having friends over. Yeah look at that: Death Trash
makes me wanna socialize again. So when we start a new game,
we spend a few minutes (or multiple hours, depending on how much
you love to obsess over character creation) to assemble our protagonist, both their look and their stats and skills,
for which we get a few points to allocate. You don't have enough available to fully
deck out and specialize a character so this is more like a general pointer as to
what rough build you're leaning towards. Even this 2-3 hour long demo gave me enough level
ups to easily switch specializations along the way. So, it's not super restrictive. Do you focus on brawn
and melee power? On stealth? I used a combination of both, which turned
out to be really efficient and also fun to play. – Occultism, which allows
you to talk with the flesh (more on that later) – Cybertech, which makes you
good with machines and tech – or empathy which
makes you better at, well, empathizingwith others,
putting yourself in their shoes, etc Many of these offer you more
conversation options and can, for instance, create moments that become memories
that stick with your character. It's a really cool mechanic. Certain key experiences leave
a lasting impression on your character and you can
then equip them in your mind, which activates certain traits that can
influence situations later down the line. It's similar to the genius
Thoughts system in Disco Elysium, only that you don't have to equip,
ponder and develop them first. Anyway, I’m putting the cart
in front of the horse here: Once we get into the game, itself, we wake
up in dilapidated underground corridors. We're soon greeted by a group of conditionally
friendly androids who inform us that we're now former citizen of the UNIVERSAL SOCIETY and that
we're supposed to leave their citadel and that they -whoever they are- wish us well, unless we attempt
to re-enter the universal society, in which case we'll
be TERMINATED. (lasers shooting, explosions, splattering) We can also read more about that
in a little pamphlet they hand out. And after reading it we
can then MEMORIZE it, so the note is always accessible but the note itself
becomes a craftable resource and leaves your inventory. Absolutely love this feature. Keeps it nice and tidy. This opening is super indicative of the
overall style and tone of Death Trash. The writing is short,
compact and quippy. You'll rarely find an undergraduate-
essay-length monologue of a character contemplating the
nature of existence and whatnot. The game makes interaction
feel very direct and organic. There are a couple of notes
and texts, here and there, that are a few paragraphs long and
brush on deeper topics and ideas. But for the most part, they are
condensed and to the point. It's fantastic at establishing and
teasing themes rather than bludgeoning you over the
head with lengthy exposition. I love this kind
of storytelling. It reminds me of the famous William
Gibson quote about the inspiration he took from John Carpenter's
Escape from New York. When writing Neuromancer, he remembered the
enormous narrative power of small passing remarks to contribute massively to world building, by
making the audience do all the leg-work in their minds: Right from the opening slideshow, Death Trash establishes its setting
with this stylistic method on steroids. "Planet Nexus.
Centuries after the Bleeding." What’s the Bleeding? We don't know (yet), but it's
a fantastic narrative hook. It immediately puts a thousand potential
images in the back of the player's mind, [flub] making the subconscious
mind fill in the gaps, so that’s so often vastly
more efficient at creating mood, tone, and suspension of disbelief than thousands of
words of meticulously spelled out purple prose. Right now, we're greeted by a caste of
apparently quite powerful humanoid robots who are excluding us from
their UNIVERSAL SOCIETY, and we are to leave
the underground vault... and soon after we find some
other poor sob dead in a ditch who’s carrying the same
letter of expulsion as us. Ominous... We get the choice to either
leave straight away, or partake in a little outside-
world-prep-training course, basically a tutorial of the most important
mechanics we're gonna need outside. Opening things, manage inventory, sneak, fight with
melee and distance weapons, and special abilities. Like puke on command. And then picking it up and
using it as organic lubricant for a malfunctioning machine
that opens a door. Yeah, Death Trash is a ... gross game, a fleshy
game, a putridly, squishily organic game. There is pulsating flesh lying
and crawling around everywhere. See, I'm a tree hugger; so I naturally put some skill
points into Animalism, which enables you to befriend animals
according to the pat-description. But it turns out what counts as Animals in
Death Trash are animate blobs of flesh that you can pick up if
you pass the taming-check or that scratch and
bite you if you fail. Flesh, brains, and organs are the major
source of health restoration in this game, and it becomes pretty clear that the unnaturally
proliferating masses of flesh cropping up everywhere are a central focus for the narrative mystery
we get to uncover across the campaign. Yeah it gets pretty grotesque, even
within the scope of this demo already. (clapping)
- [Hannibal] Before we begin, you must all be warned: Nothing here... is vegetarian. Bon appétit! - When we leave the vault, the first... thing
we're greeted by is this gigantic... Flesh kraken. (deep eldritch grumble) A humongous Cephalopod
made of jiggling meat, and it turns out we can
even communicate with it. It tells us that it wants.... friends. Welp, there's our first
quest for the game: find company for the
humongous flesh kraken... What a lovely absurdist
twist to start with. Sam Beckett would be
hungry for entrecote by now. You should, by now, already have gotten a
good feel for the overall tone of the game. It's smart but never diluting into a
pretentious first semester philosophy lecture but extremely self-aware, managing this wonderful split
of being intriguing and genuinely thought-provoking, while absolutely not
taking itself seriously at all. Seasoned with a generous pinch
of pubescent feces humor to boot. If finding out that your character can vomit on
command doesn't make you at least internally cackle, the game's humor is
probably not for you. It feels very inspired from the
video game age of Monkey Island meets Douglas Adams literature,
just ten times grosser. I love how often it uses not just
its writing and presentation, but also its game mechanics and systems
to create funny moments and jokes. For instance, after we leave the cathedral of
the Kraken and enter the world out there, the first character we meet is... a naked
dude carelessly wandering around, dancing to celebrate the sun
and having a grand old day. Well, you remember
the memory feature? Yeah this is definitely an
IMAGE THAT'S FOREVER YOURS. And you can now
equip it in your mind. (It made me cackle) I also noticed that the game does not fall into
the fangame trap of too much referential humor, like it would have been so easy to pepper it with
constant Fallout and other pop culture references to get some cheap
fan service laughs (like: “ha ha this character said Shady
Sands, that’s a location in Fallout. Isn't that funny?”
or something like that) Death Trash completely
omits this type of writing, and, in my opinion, it greatly adds to the
world feeling homogenous and believable. Adding greatly increases
suspension of disbelief. Exploring the world out there, we encounter various
flesh-mutated adversaries and Post-Punk Stalkers, whose off-screen presence is excellently, acoustically
telegraphed by the grunting noises they emit, similar how you can tell that there's
a Cacodemon around the next corner by its signature
sound profile in Doom. (cacodemon sound) And once you get
into the skirmishes, you’ll immediately find that the way this game
handles combat is just really, really fun. I'd seen a ton of gifs and little gameplay
snippets in development out there, and it always gave me the impression that
Death Trash would feel super satisfying to play, and I'm really glad it turned out exactly as fast,
responsive and satisfying as I had hoped it would. We can charge in not giving a fuck if we're spotted
and take on enemies head-first in melee combat, slicing and dicing and dodge-rolling their
counters in good old Souslike style. Or we can activate our stealth unit which
makes the enemies’ view-cones visible (beautifully raytraced around sight-
obstructing objects like in Commandos) and sneak up and backstab them
for a super high damage first strike. It’s all very
intuitive and fluid. Dealing and receiving blows get satisfyingly
amplified with particles flying around, blood decals coating the floor and the screen
shaking in sync with juicy sound effects. And it’s no different for distance combat, with bolt
action long rifles that take a second to reload, pistols, double barreled shotguns or
even fast-repeating energy rifles. We also have psi-abilities,
the first one of which- -aside from puking everywhere and
making enemies slip on our vomit- -is shooting electrical sparks from
our fingertips, Palpatine style. Even this first slice of the full game had a
surprising variety of weapons, abilities, utilities, topped up with a well-thought-out,
easily approachable crafting system that integrates just as seamlessly
as all the other systems. And a lot of this comes from the game’s
smoothly streamlined UI and control scheme, allowing you to always easily switch between your
melee weapons, distance weapons and PSI ability to quickly change tactics on the
fly during combat encounters. So, a hybrid between stealth,
melee, distance and "magic" is absolutely viable and incredibly
intuitively executable. And I also appreciate how there's no
weapon or item durabilities (thank god). I really only know a small amount of games
where degrading weapons and items actually *add* something
redeemable to the experience, when it's like really simulation
heavy and it makes sense. Otherwise, it always feels
like a pain in the ass to me. Maybe that’s just me. So, I was glad to see that Death
Trash doesn’t futz around with that. The inventory itself also doesn't
have an encumbrance per se; you're only limited to the amount of slots
you have available before you're full. So, that incentivizes
returning to the vendors to sell some loot and upgrade
your loadout from time to time. Similar to Diablo, only that the intervals in
which your inventory is full are much bigger because you also have more space, and
you can also “stack” items of the same type. So, that gives you some leeway before
having to return to town all the time. Oh right, I haven't even
mentioned the town yet. So in the demo area there are 4 major locations,
each split into multiple sub-locations. The central hub of which is the town
of Tauris, where we don’t fight, (unless we really want to. yeah this is a game that doesn’t
restrict you from attacking anyone if you should desire
to be a homicidal maniac) but we largely interact with townspeople, vendors and
all the other punks with Shotguns loitering here. The town map is split into the
overworld and the subterranean layer, accessible via ladders
in several dwellings. Down there we meet Mortus, a... Fleshologist I'm
gonna call him. He researches the Flesh Nexus, the unnatural growth that seems
to share a common hive-mind. It turns out we are in some
form infected by The Flesh, which is pretty much the
“main quest” if you will. So, he'll be the quest giver that sends us on
an errand to fetch a couple of items for him, so he can examine our
unknown affliction closer. In the town we have multiple
of the game’s signature short and quippy conversations
with various dwellers and, as I said before it's astounding how much the
game gets across with very little "blabla." Now, there's no character that I've grown super
fond of in this short timespan, of course, but the people we meet here feel
like a genuine part of this world. It’s a dilapidated, flesh-overgrown
post-apocalyptic landscape. So, the tone fits, which doesn’t mean that characters are
always stoic and free of human emotions. There's a lot to discover: androids patrolling the
streets keeping up the "Order," Flesh Vendors capitalizing on the uncontrollable
growth everywhere by turning it into steak, weapon and armor
vending machines, a disgruntled town doctor
giving me Darkwood flashbacks, multiple shotgun wielding punks, and a nest of spiders that trap you with
ghastly cobwebs and then tear you apart. And in a rocky crevice we stumble
upon the defunct Android, Fleshface, who we can re-activate with our
homemade organic lubricant. When we talk to them, we find that they always felt
that they were different from the other androids, feeling a kinship
to The Humans. So he made his face look all
fleshy, like humans look to him, so they would potentially
warm up to him more. Okay I take it back, I already have met a character I immediately
grew super fond of in this short timespan. And no, it’s not the naked
man dancing in the sun. So, Fleshface asks us
to tear his head off and carry them with us in our inventory
in good Monkey Island style, and we now have a companion we can chat to at any
point on our quest to find companionship for him. Wait, wasn't there some other fleshy
entity that was looking for a friend? Yep, the FleshKraken. And its so excited about
this new companion, when we bring him over, that it
outright swallows Fleshface up whole. Quest Complete. What a wholesome adventure! When it comes to the Kraken’s
Quest for Friends, by the way, we can also talk to the elder
woman in town about it and SHE suggests we visit the witch who lives
by the Great Trees further to the east, an area that's yet restricted
by the early deom boundaries. This is a nice teaser to demonstrate how in the
final game quests will offer multiple solutions, as you would expect from
a Fallout-inspired RPG. Like, another thing I’ve
noticed is how the overworld map took beautiful inspiration
from the first 2 Fallouts. Making traversal across the map take place over
time from this gorgeous distant bird’s eye view; I’m not sure if the final game will also
feature random encounters like Fallout; I haven’t had any
during the demo. But I’ve noticed this cool game design
lesson it took directly from the first Fallout, where you’ll get the recommendation to travel eastwards
for your first objective from the starting area, and when you do that, you stumble
across another region along the way that introduces you to more
encounters and story incentives, or you could totally venture off
in any direction from the get-go. This is the only type of
reference you’ll find in the game: good take-aways from a legendarily
designed non-linear open world RPG. So, I'm not gonna go
through the whole thing and brush on everything I’ve done
in the demo in this video, but I believe that this little stream-of-consciousness
foray should probably have given you a solid idea of what to
expect from this game. There's something really fascinating to me
about Death Trash as a video game production. I've met many overly excited people
gushing about game ideas in my time. A thing that’s easy to overlook with that is when
you think up a game in your mind, you always- -no matter how much
experience you bring- -tend to drastically underestimate
its scope in one way or another. And a lot of passionate
game ideas sound like "Yeah I mean the
game is basically done. "I've drawn two mockups in MS Paint and even
already downloaded and INSTALLED Unity, "so my grandiose, revolutionary MMORPG
Stealth Social Sim hybrid concept is "practically 95% done already." I exaggerate, but so many hecking cool, groundbreaking
game ideas never see the light of day because of that. In the rare cases that they
actually do make it to release, they usually end up with a
lot of necessarily cut corners. So heavily in fact that the final result
could be considered charming for the ambition and the grit to
see it through to the end, but as a playable gaming product
in competition it's often neglectable. Finishing any game is still
commendable no matter what. Just to be clear. Rarely though, do I see someone gush about
a great game idea in its earliest stages, then actually develop
it for over half a decade- -not cutting away, but
constantly adding cool features- -without the project exploding like a
house of cards lined with semtex. Somehow, Stephan Hövelbrinks and
his team managed to make it feel *exactly* like what I had
envisioned in a best case scenario. Like in many ways it's- -swear to god- -a personal dream game
come true for me. Back in the days when I played
Fallout 2, I was also really into Diablo. And I distinctly remember thinking: "Man, imagine how cool a real-time action
RPG in a Fallout-like post apocalypse would feel. Still with the character overworld traversal,
adventure, character building, dialogue and a branching narrative and all that and in the
same junk-punk setting but played in real-time." (slashing and splashing) And yeah, Death Trash is as close to this
game I was envisioning back then as it gets. Here-here it is. I say pretty often how much I love janky
games because "le jank" is often an indicator of the ambition and the readiness to abandon
the beaten path when making this game. Failing at some of these ambitions
is not always a bad thing. Cool ideas can be worthwhile
without having to be shinily polished. But Death Trash, or at least the
part that I've gotten to play, ended up being a refreshingly smooth,
jank-free, and polished as fuck exprience. You can totally sense the big amount of QA
work that has gone into it in every fiber, and it pays off big time. Finally playing it felt both
staggering and intoxicating. I am in awe and brutally teased
for everything that’s to come. Now, the full game is, at the moment,
estimated to be released in 2022, not just for PC but also for Switch,
PlayStation and Xbox systems. The demo you’re seeing here is going
to be available on Steam from Junte 16th through 22nd as part of
the Steam Next Fest event. And Death Trash will enter Early Access
in late summer this year, that is 2021, for PC in a version that contains
a larger area of the game for about 5+ hours of
playtime according to the devs. Then again, this demo was supposed
to be 1 to 2 hours of play time, and it took me easily 3
hours to play through. So, take from
this what you will. Considering how long
it's been in development, I fully understand that the self-published developer is
looking to show some of the results to the public now, hopefully fueling the production
with an initial source of revenue, as well as opening another avenue of
extensive testing to smooth out any kinks that will be discovered
in the coming months. What I've played so far felt butter-smooth and, as
you could hear, I found it tremendously enjoyable. It shows that even though it was a limited first
area of the game, it already hooked me hard. It’s one of the few games I'm definitely gonna break
my no-early-access prerogative for, in a heartbeat. And here's a big fat recommendation for anyone
who wants to support indie games in development: Until the game is released, if you really want to
help the devs out and make a palpable difference. If what you’ve seen looks like something for you,
then visit the Steam page and WISHLIST it. Wishlisting really helps put games from small
creators on the map within Steam's algorithm, which is usually completely crowded out
by the massive AAA fish in the pond. Aside from that, the game
will also come out on itch.io. Anyone who follows my channel
knows that I loudly advocate itch as the far superior platform to buy
games from if they’re available there. No DRM, incredibly indie-supportive and
they give a far better cut to the developers. I'll put links in
the description. Now, with that said, a big thanks to Crafting Legends
for giving me the chance to play Death Trash so early. I've had a great time with it, and I am
looking forward to what's yet to come. And I wish you good luck for the
rest of the development phase!
