This trash digging game has me convinced I was a raccoon in a past life

I don’t know what my fiancé would do if he accidentally threw out a cherished collection and then came home from work one day to discover that, in an effort to get it back, I’d bought out the contents of the local landfill and situated them in the backyard. He’d probably think I’d lost my mind, and I’d likely agree, but that’s the concept behind My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection (So I Bought A Dump To Find Them All). 

This game, with an incredibly long name, is a thing that exists thanks to the efforts of Dos Ivánes, and the demo is now available as part of October’s Steam Next Fest. If you’ve played games like One Man’s Trash or A Game About Digging a Hole, this is in the same vein, but you spend all of your time above the ground in piles of literal trash. 

I think I was a raccoon in a past life

There’s no other reason, at least that I can think of, that I would have such a good time virtually rolling around in mountains of expired food, empty takeout cartons, and empty bottles. The idea of doing that in real life is enough to make my skin crawl, but something about doing it in a virtual world is endlessly appealing. 

In My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection, your garden is filled with mountains of rancid trash that you need to dig through to find small trading cards. Armed with a trash bag for the actual rubbish, you start picking up the trash one item at a time, occasionally causing a trash avalanche in the process. It’s weirdly cathartic to see the mountain getting gradually smaller, and you can sell the trash for cash, but the real joy comes from finding valuable items in the pile. 

Inside the piles of festering rubbish, there are a variety of items that can be sold via the warehouse inside the garage. There’s everything from Switch-like consoles to Bitcoin USB sticks, and a staggering number of discarded and still fully inflated blow-up dolls. I’m not sure who is throwing away all of these blow-up dolls, but apparently, this particular model was a quick-lived fad among those who partake. 

Beer is the fuel of choice

Not in real life; I’m much more of a whisky or wine drinker, but in My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection, you gain energy solely by drinking beer that’s purchased from a vending machine next to the garage. You’ll only be able to pick up trash if you have energy, so you’ll end up drinking a lot of beer. In any other situation, this might seem like a problem, but considering this guy has just filled his garden with trash to find cards, it would seem he has bigger problems than potential alcoholism. 

Beer isn’t the only thing you can purchase, though. Inside the garage, the computer is your gateway to making life easier in every sense. Here, you can purchase upgrades to everything from the size of your trash bags (letting you pick up more trash before having to use a new bag) to the amount of energy you get from the beer each time you drink. The effects of these upgrades are pretty subtle to begin with, but as is usually the case, you’ll soon find yourself wondering how you coped before you bought them, and you can finally get down to the real grit of the work. 

The only upgrade that left me confused was the dog. Of course, I’m an animal lover, so I upgraded the dog as a matter of priority and purchased the doghouse for $300 as soon as I could. However, even after buying the house and getting the dog, I still have no idea what it’s meant to do. I interacted with it, and it went up to the top of my pile, then barked relentlessly at me for no apparent reason. I mean, it’s in line with normal single-brain-cell dog behavior, but an explanation would have been nice. 

Not trash, but needs some polish

It’s important to remember that My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection is currently in its demo state, and therefore is likely not exactly as it will be when it gets a full release. As demos generally are, this one is designed to give some insight into the main mechanics and to get a feel for the gameplay loop, and it does that incredibly well. 

With that said, there are some issues with the demo that will need to be addressed before the final release date, when that time comes. Most obviously, I faced an issue with framerate and movement sensitivity that more or less put an early end to my gameplay experience. After picking up the second card that I found, my framerate tanked, and I found that I couldn’t move or continue. 

I tried closing the game and opening it again to see if that would help, but then I discovered that I no longer had the card and couldn’t find it again. A similar thing happened inside the garage while transferring items from the cart to the warehouse to sell. It wasn’t as bad as the card-triggered bug, but it did make playing less joyful and more frustrating. 

Still, I can’t hold bugs against developers in a demo, because they are by definition incomplete glimpses into the game. I’d also been playing for two hours by that point, and I’m not sure they intended for anyone to get that far, so maybe I’d just discovered something new in my OCD-driven determination to clean up the garden in its entirety.