It’s garbage day, and you know what that means: it’s time to take out the trash. Kingdoms of the Dump is an indie Japanese-style turn-based RPG by developer Roach Games, set in a world full of rubbish, vermin, slime, and other nastiness. Six years after a successful Kickstarter campaign, this quirkily-themed title has finally been released in 2025. It’s been on my radar for quite some time, so I was eager to peer into this dumpster to see if this trash might really be a treasure.
Big Dumper
The story begins in Garbagia, one of the many titular Kingdoms of the Dump. One day our protagonist, the anthropomorphic garbage can Dustin Binsley, oversleeps and ends up late for his duty as a squire. The king ends up kidnapped before he can arrive, and the young and naive Dustin is scolded severely for his negligence. Dustin seeks to set things right by venturing off to rescue him and defeat the evil bug who captured him, Rutilius. Little does Dustin, or anyone in the kingdom for that matter, know what awaits them as a much grander plot brews below the ugly surface of the Land of Fill.
Kingdoms of the Dump is a game literally oozing with charm. Almost everything you see in this game fits its delightfully weird motif. The main party alone consists of a walking trash bin, a rat, sentient clothing, a stinkbug, and several more guests along the way. There are slimy monsters, loads of bugs and critters, and even goofy-looking species consisting of living barrels, doors, tables, you name it. The spritework for the majority of this game’s characters, enemies, and NPCs is fantastic and distinct, and the whole game feels consistently committed to the bit. Some of these sprites are just hilarious and adorable, like a fire ant with a giant cowboy hat or a knight literally made out of traffic cones and signs. There are also a great many fun animations, such as how Dustin will pull items out of himself to use them.
The look and description of this game probably make you think it bears a resemblance to Earthbound, but in practice it presents itself and its story a lot more like a fantasy RPG than an urban one. There’s a lot more of the slaying of dragons (albeit trash-themed ones) and becoming a hero of the kingdom fare. The music also bears a similar throwback flair to fantasy RPGs. The main composers for this game are BobblyGhostly and William Kage, the latter of whom particularly specializes in 16-bit soundscapes and soundfonts that sound eerily close to those of SNES games like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. There is also a guest appearance by famed Mana composer Hiroki Kikuta.
While I quite enjoyed the weird world of Kingdoms of the Dump, I can’t say the story or cast does a lot for me. The cast of characters have their moments, but rarely anything special. Dustin himself fits the mould of naive young protagonist, and he’s not a particularly interesting character. Outside of maybe his friend Ratavia, most of the other party members and major cast members are generally uninteresting, overly predictable, or otherwise pretty flat and unremarkable characters.
The tone of the game also ends up maintaining a pretty serious face for most of its run. While I appreciate that it plays things fairly straight and avoids most of the winking and nudging that can come with being a serious story about an ostensibly unserious concept, the narrative writing and dialogue were rather questionable if not outright poor at several parts as the game ramps up. It also gets a bit repetitious with certain twists, particularly the frequency of betrayals. The game has some interesting worldbuilding, but as it went on it just became harder and harder for me to care about the world given the generally lackluster story and characters. Its pacing also slows pretty considerably and becomes very jagged in the back half.
Oblique Exercise
Like many indie JRPGs, Kingdoms of the Dump wears many of its inspirations on its sleeve, and as such I will not hesitate to draw comparisons to games it resembles or takes after. While it shares the oblique visual perspective of games like Earthbound, it has quasi-3D platforming mechanics similar to Super Mario RPG’s, the game I would most readily compare it to. It even has coins (or paperclips in this case) sitting around for you to collect. It has a similar share of silliness, even if it ends up being more serious as it goes on.
You visit plenty of different locales in this game, but they usually feel conceptually on point rather than just being obligatory and feeling like it’s there for the sake of it. Dungeons make plenty of use of the game’s platforming mechanics as well as the unique mechanics of each party member (although a couple of members have a wildly more broad array of use-cases).
A unique mechanic of this game is that your MP resource (Metal Points) does not replenish through staying at an inn or via conventional recovery methods; items that replenish it are rather scarce, and your max total only increases via special statues scattered across the land. Typically, you need to collect scrap on the overworld to replenish it, often by using Dustin’s unique ability on metal objects sitting around. This encourages you to really spend time surveying your surroundings. You can also steal it from enemies with one of Dustin’s abilities. Like the Flowers/FP of Super Mario RPG, all party members share the same pool of the resource. It’s a pretty scarce resource that requires a calculated approach to managing, which I like in theory… although my thoughts in practice are more conflicted for reasons I’ll get into later.
Put a Lid On It
Your combat party in Kingdom of the Dumps goes up to three characters (with occasionally a fourth AI-controlled guest). In battle, each party member occupies a panel on a 3×3 grid, as does each enemy on their own 3×3 grid opposite yours. The panels in battle matter quite a bit, as you can set traps or elements on tiles that have unique interactions; you can push an enemy onto a bear trap to deal damage to them every few turns, you can light oil tiles on fire, or you can zap water tiles for additional damage. Characters that are closer to the enemy’s side of the field both dish out and take more damage, offering a sense of risk-reward to how you position your characters (though thankfully you can move one tile per character per turn for free). It’s a cool system, one which feels like a solid evolution of the ideas found in a personal favorite RPG of mine on Nintendo DS called Radiant Historia.
Further giving this game a resemblance to Super Mario RPG is the use of timed hits in combat (or action commands if you prefer Paper Mario terminology). A well-timed action button press adds bonus damage to your attacks, and you can reduce incoming damage with a well-timed press versus most attacks. Also like Super Mario RPG, the timing is not always super obvious, so it takes some practice and learning enemy attacks to really get down.
Every time your character takes damage, their “boil” meter fills up, and when they hit the boiling point, they can do a super attack that takes the place of their regular attack command, much like a Limit Break in Final Fantasy VII. This game’s take on various old ideas combine to emerge as something that can be pretty fun.
Alas, Kingdoms of the Dump feels somewhat frontloaded. Your characters do learn new skills as they level up, and you often have the choice between which ones you want them to have in battle, which does give you some new toys to work with. Apart from this, however, the game starts to feel somewhat monotonous after probably 40% of the way through the campaign. This isn’t helped by the fact that, while the use of scrap metal as a resource is fairly novel at first, it really starts to limit combat later in the game, putting major constraints on which party members you can really use. All three party members share the pool and a lot of skills use a ton of MP, so I often had to spend Dustin’s turns just recharging MP to keep fights going (especially during surprise multi-stage fights), usually just to end up used by another ally for healing given this was the most sustainable way to survive late game.
Speaking of late game…ooooh, boy.
Maintenance Needed, Badly
Let it be known that I sometimes quite like indie throwback RPGs. I really enjoyed Undertale and Bug Fables in particular for their attention to detail, attention to detail which I unfortunately just did not feel with Kingdoms of the Dump.
This game was released in a very messy, unfinished state. By far the biggest problem was the amount of times I softlocked the game or had it crash outright. While Roach Games have been pretty active in patching it and hotfixing it (and some of these issues were thankfully patched after I reported them), this simply happened much too often even after its release date for me to give the game a pass.
I ran into just about every other kind of smaller issue, both before and after release. The pixel art of the game’s various buildings and landforms are all kinds of scuffed and not laid out properly, causing visual issues with both elevation and appearing in front of or atop structures I was not on. There are places you can get trapped in and be unable to escape. The game’s script is in bad need of another editing pass as it’s littered with unintentional typos, sometimes several per conversation, especially later in the game. There are all kinds of other visual and navigation glitches, from areas not loading correctly, areas that have icons on the overworld but which cannot be entered, wrong characters talking during cutscenes, fights missing music, attacks missing animations and sound effects, invisible NPCs, just a whole gamut of problems.
There’s also a share of design flaws. The game does not offer rebindable controls, only a couple of control styles. It is utterly littered with treasure boxes that have already been opened, something which can have narrative purpose when done well but honestly is just plain annoying with how frequent it is here, especially because some of these are only partially visible until you get close. Loading zones are often hard to tell at a glance, and there are many open doors you just can’t walk through, with no clear indicator of what can be entered and what can’t. I rarely had a problem with figuring out how to progress, but the one time I did was in an area with a really badly made stealth section that suffered from several of the above issues in addition to the guards having some of the most ridiculous sight radii I’ve ever seen. The thought crossed my head whether this section was even completable at all given the state the game released in with all of its bugs and issues, and I ended up somehow finding an unintended sequence break to end up skipping a small section completely (after softlocking myself twice in the process of trying to figure out what exactly to do).
I remain unconvinced that the game’s late game was playtested much if at all. The difficulty is wildly out of tune. One area would have fairly beefy enemies that shredded my health, the next would have enemies I could one tap, and EXP yields never seemed to line up. Late game bosses are health sponges that take way too long for a combat system with very limited ways to replenish MP. The last boss before the final dungeon is legitimately one of the worst and most tedious I have ever seen in a turn based RPG, one I expect will lead a lot of players to ragequit the game if it’s left as is. It’s a multi-phase fight where I legitimately felt, without an iota of hyperbole, that an extra 0 was added to its health total by accident.
I’m sure that with some time, many of these issues will be addressed in future updates, and players down the line will experience fewer problems than I have. But they became too omnipresent for me to overlook or even try to keep up with. I have a lot of experience in speedrunning RPGs, but I am not a QA tester or debugger by any means, and I found most issues through simply trying to play the game normally.
Verdict
Purely off the charm of its setting, commitment to its motif, and a relatively fun combat system at its core, I can almost recommend Kingdoms of the Dump. Unfortunately, it just feels incredibly unpolished and undercooked. It’s littered (no pun intended) with incomplete sections, massive swaths of graphical issues, major design problems, and many bugs of the bad variety. The farther in I got, the less polished the game felt, such that by the final act I began to doubt if even the non-buggy parts were properly playtested. The story and characters also just don’t elevate the game past these issues.
I had a share of fun despite navigating around these issues. There are plenty of cool ideas here. This game is an obvious love letter to the great JRPGs of old. Sadly, the handwriting of that love letter is very messy in a few too many places.
WAIT FOR SALE ON KINGDOMS OF THE DUMP
Enjoy indie games? You might be interested to read this review of No Case Should Remain Unsolved.
Many thanks to Roach Games for providing a PC review key for Kingdoms of the Dump.
Been playing games since my papa gave me an NES controller in the early 90’s. I play games of almost all genres, but especially focus role-playing, action, and puzzle-platform games. Also an enjoyer of many niche things ranging from speedrunning to obscure music from all over the world.
