Trash Day: six raccoons push a wagon full of rubbish towards paradise

Every raccoon dreams of Raccoon Paradise.

Unfortunately, you and your friends are currently locked up in Animal Control.

That is the first line of the store page, and I did not need a second one to know I would be writing this article.

The game is out late this afternoon. No score today.

The plan

It is simple. Break out. Steal a wagon. Load it with the finest trash you can find. And haul it across six areas to paradise.

Which means the entire game is a problem of moving a bulky object with creatures too small for it.

That is a genre in its own right, and it always produces the same evenings: shouting, mutual accusations, and somebody eventually saying it would have been better to leave the wheel behind.

What you actually do

Up to six players online push and steer the wagon together, clearing the path ahead.

And the studio lists the incidents with a frankness that sets the tone.

Lose a wheel? Put it back on. Flip it? Flip it back. Those are literally the first two lines of the instructions, and they tell you everything about the kind of evening waiting for you.

You have bungee cords, planks and other things to propel your wagon over, under and through obstacles. On the programme: traffic, bear traps, rockslides and a river.

The studio closes the section with a line I find admirably honest: good plan, terrible execution.

And through all of it, you have to scavenge. Knock over bins, search dumpsters, comb through everything from Animal Control, through the wilderness, on the way to the junkyard, for useful items and valuable trash.

The line about solo play

The studio writes: you technically can play solo, but the wagon is a lot for one raccoon.

That is the clearest warning a studio can give, and it should be taken seriously.

I say so because you regularly see people buy physics co-op games hoping they will work alone, and leave disappointed. This one warns you in its own description, humorously but unambiguously.

If you have nobody, walk on. If you have five friends and an hour to waste, this is exactly what you are looking for.

What the demo hinted at

The studio notes that the demo contained only one of the six areas, and that the full game adds the other five, new obstacles and a full soundtrack.

That is useful information, because it answers the main question about this kind of game: variety.

A co-op hauling game holds up as long as the obstacles surprise you. A bridge, then a rockslide, then a river: as long as the problem changes in nature, the group stays alert. When it becomes the same stretch six times, people leave the voice channel.

Six areas is a promise of variety. Whether each genuinely invents a new problem, or merely repaints the same one, remains to be seen.

What I am watching

The physics. That is the whole game. A wagon that behaves predictably is not funny, a wagon that behaves at random is unfair. The balance point between the two is very narrow, and that is where good games in this genre separate from the rest.

Length. Six areas is how many hours? Nobody says, and for a game whose pleasure depends on five friends being simultaneously available, knowing whether it is one evening or four changes the purchase decision.

And failure tolerance. In a game about pushing an object, the worst possible flaw is losing thirty minutes of progress to one fall. The best in the genre make you redo a stretch, not an area.

There is something very apt about choosing the raccoon as a co-op game character. It is an animal with a bad reputation, that goes through bins, works at night, and has hands.

Above all, it is an animal nobody pictures alone. You always picture a gang.

Got five friends ready to push a wagon? Crew assembly happens on the InsertCoins Discord.