There is no better feeling in this world than completing little tasks. I swear I could've been a worker ant in a previous life with how much I enjoy ferrying something from point A to point B. I wouldn't say it's the trait that I have the most pride in, but I know myself well enough to acknowledge that there's no changing what I like at this point, so I might as well lean into it.
With this in mind, I'm always looking out for the next game where I can turn my brain off and quietly get on with tasks, which is where Goblin Cleanup's early access comes in. At first, I went about completing tasks by myself. The whole point is to tidy up a dungeon, cleaning the blood from unlucky adventurers, placing tables and chairs back in their proper place, and feeding any leftover chunks of meat to the lively bin that is a mimic chest.
There are already several locations for you to play through in early access, with each one having around 15 levels to check out and play individually. All of this can take a while if you're playing by yourself, but I didn't mind; it was just nice sorting the dungeon out in my own time. Although all this peace and tranquillity came to an abrupt end when I decided to check out what the co-op was like.
Inviting one of my friends into play, we quickly jumped into a match with absolutely no explanations or plans shared between the two of us; a great start. We soon got to work tidying the Library in the Dark Tower.
You'd think that more hands make light work, and while increasing the workforce did come in handy for getting tasks done faster, it also presented new problems, most of which were deadly.
As the Dark Tower is a dungeon, designed to outsmart even the keenest-eyed adventurers, there are tons of booby traps lying around the place. In one corner, there's a sleeping necromancer who gets super angry if you wake him up, meaning there's no jumping or running around him; although I did drop a table on his head, and it didn't stir him too much, so maybe he's a deep sleeper.
Then there's an evil laser eye which will lock onto you and blow you up with just one shot, which makes cleaning the room it's in almost impossible without unplugging the trap. All it took was for one of us to trigger the eye, and it would send both of us to an ashy grave as we tried and failed to hide behind the same pillar.
This is where the friendslop hijinks come in. Goblin Cleanup is full of ways you can accidentally or knowingly kill your friends, or the more likely version: your friends to kill you. Whether that be accidentally stepping on a booby trapped tile that shoots a bunch of spikes up from the ground and turns your friends into shish kebabs, or running around with a mimic chest in your arms threatening anyone that comes close with a gruesome chomped-up death, there are a multitude of ways for things to go wrong (or right, as the case may be).
At one point, my friend unwittingly created a new death trap by placing the mimic chest between two swinging axes, so to follow them to the next area, I had to somehow avoid getting sliced up while dodging around the mimic. Needless to say, I couldn't complete the obstacle course and ended up as a desert for the mimic.
It may make ticking off little tasks from the checklist slightly harder, but playing through Goblin Cleanup with friends is still great fun, thanks in no small part to all that can go wrong when playing co-op.
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