Trash Panic (PSN)

Without every really admitting it to myself it turns out I am a sucker for puzzle games, and the recent Playstation Network game, Trash Panic does much to fuel my closet addiction. The developers JetRayLogic, choose to remove the abstraction typical to the genre and instead place the game in comparatively real world settings. Arbitrary backdrops that used to typify puzzlers of old have been replaced by a rubbish bin (sorry, trash can) of various sizes.

Each stages sees an increase in bin size and also alters the type of junk you are required to deposited inside, from erasers to trucks. These items carry with them the properties of their real world counterparts (such as weight and combustibility) and it is this that differs the game from its peers. These are not the fantastical blocks of Tetris or the indefinable blobs of Puyo Puyo. These are pencils, motorbikes and bowling balls, and the only way to remove them is to use physics based solutions, such as burning them into dust or smash them to pieces.

It is this system that adds a different level of strategy to the experience. If you top the heap with hard or unbreakable items you will soon find the pile impossible to reduce, leading to rapid spillage followed by game over. Equally, if you are not careful with how you stack flammable items you soon find that the flames will not spread efficiently due to incombustible objects in the pile.

This use of ‘real world’ physics makes the game a fairly intuitive experience, especially in conjunction with the familiar puzzle controls of simply dropping things into the playing field. But it doesn’t stop it being tough and I don’t mean in an easy to learn, slow to master way. While you may quickly grasp the concept of the game even clearing the first stage can prove a challenge. Each stage’s objective is to simply dispose of a set amount of trash, and destroy a ‘boss’ item that has to be smashed within a set time limit. It sounds easy, but the volume trash usually exceeds the size of your bin by several orders of magnitude.

To further impede you in your quest for a high score the game also monitors your Ego (egotistical) and Eco (ecological) behavior. The more ecological you are the higher your final rank. But while Eco may well be the ideal it is far harder to achieve than you may imagine. Burning items is an effective away to reduce waste, but it raises your Ego. The more you burn, the more the balance tips against your Eco rating. Furthermore using explosives (which blow things out of you bin), spilling trash and destroying ‘mottainai’ objects (wasting/wasteful) all server to lower your overall rank. Fortunately you can gain back some Eco by degrading your heap with decomposition balls, but these are far trickier to apply effectively than all of the Ego boosting alternatives. On the plus side rank has no effect on your progress through the stages but this is a puzzle game, one of the few genres where score still matters so it is hard to ignore.

The difficulty of the main game combined with the Eco/Ego mechanic creates an arcade feel to the whole experience. Later levels feel more like an exercise in trial and error than skill. The lack of save function on the main stage progression further reinforces the feeling that the game is trying wring another pound/quarter/hundred yen out of you. This makes idea of having a ‘quick game’ somewhat masochistic as time quickly disappears with little to show for it. Simply clearing levels is fun and taxing, but for me the idea of trying for a high score is wholly unappealing.

Aesthetically Trash Panic has a lot in common with Katamari Demacy. The general humor and sensibilities, combined with the Japanese characters, gradually increasing world size, and the manner in which “real world” rules play into the puzzles all come together to inject that same levity into the proceedings. But this is a far more punishing experience than Katamari Demacy. Indeed I suspect this lightness is all that has stopped me ‘Trash Panicking’ my PS3 in to tiny pieces. Fortunately it seems to have struck a good balance. For the most part I can attempt a stage three or four times (one try usually lasts around five minutes) before finally surrendering out of frustration and annoyance.

As an offshoot of the puzzle genre it is fantastic. Applying so many extra rule sets to the familiar puzzle formula it proves a more varied experience than its brethren while remaining intuitive. It is unfortunate that the variety it offers also makes the game less predictable. The primary attraction the puzzle genre is to bring order to the chaos, but in Trash Panic, the chaos always seems to win. Thus while progression does bring a measure of satisfaction I never feel quite the same sense of achievement or compulsion to come back to it as I do with Tetris or Drop 7.