Gomi Bako Means Trash Can

The most pleasantly surprising game from TGS 2008 for me personally came in a pretty unexpected form: a little PlayStation Network title called Gomi Bako, which is Japanese for trash can. The game takes on the basic size and shape of a Tetris-style puzzle game, with a vertically oriented playing field and objects that fall slowly from the top that you can move and manipulate. Part of what makes Gomi Bako so unlike any Tetris-style puzzle game that you've played before, though, is that it doesn't adhere to any kind of neat-and-tidy grid, with the game throwing modern detritus of all shapes and sizes at you, from toilets to television sets.

Rather than matching colors or filling in horizontal lines, the way you keep the field from overflowing with all this stuff is to smash it down into smaller pieces. The game is heavy on the physics, with every object has a certain durability, and the key is to figure out which types of objects can be used to smash the stuff that's piling up. For example, you can smash wooden barrels by throwing toilets at them, though to smash a toilet you need something bigger and tougher, like a refrigerator.

A number of the objects are flammable as well, and there are some softer objects like teddy bears or burlap-looking sacks of stuff that can't be broken at all, requiring instead strategic use of flaming swords that will drop down at random. About halfway through the round, the screen started flashing red alerting me to the fact that a boss fight was coming up. Sure enough, the camera panned to the right to show a big panel truck coming down the pike. As a large, sturdy object, the truck wasn't something that I could break down in one fell swoop, instead requiring me to hammer on it repeatedly with multiple objects.

Part of the joy and the challenge of the Tokyo Game Show is having to do some serious inference thanks to the language barrier. There are a few things about Gomi Bako that I'm entirely clear on, such as the way it determines whether you get an “ECO” or an “EGO” rating at the end. That didn't stop me from feeling pretty proud of the “EGO A” rating I was able to pull off during my time with the game.

In an odd kind of way, Gomi Bako strikes me as sort of a Japanese counterpart to Pain. A fleshed-out physics system and wanton destruction are still fundamental to the experience, though the gameplay is quirkier and more focused. I had a lot of fun with the one round of the game that I played, though it seems to wider variety of trash, as well as some sequencing of objects that would require you to think more strategically about how you'll keep your trash can from overflowing, to keep Gomi Bako interesting over the long term.