#the burnable garbage day

I played The Burnable Garbage Day a couple days ago and was pleasantly surprised by it!! So here's my attempt at fanart~

As stated in the credits, the background is a Paint 3D default model, with some brushes by Devin Elle Kurtz thrown in. The robots were sculpted by myself in Paint 3D:>

(in this review, i use “you” and “Mr. C/CR-999″ pretty much interchangeably. sorry if this causes any confusion.)

so, this game made me cry. twice! i admit that up front, without shame.

i will also admit that the english translation is not perfect, and it’s actually kinda sloppy in places.

with that out of the way, i still have to say that i LOVED this game.

you play as a cleaning robot, named CR-999 (or Mr. C, later in the game), with a voice assistant named Biri, who acts as your companion, and gives you advice, and you pass through 12 different areas, clearing trash, and discovering cities and ruins, all in hopes of restoring earth after an apocalypse event. 

the gameplay mechanics are simple enough. you tap to clear trash. you have an energy bar that fills over time, and if it’s empty, you can’t clear trash. you never really need to wait for it to refill, though, as battery packs which will instantly refill it practically grow on trees. bigger trash piles take more energy, and the more complex functions such as cooling lava, purifying waste, and melting ice, all take specialized part upgrades, and each require 5 energy. you upgrade your drill and battery with blueprints that you find in treasure chests, which lets you drill bigger pieces, regain energy faster, and have more energy at once. you complete requests to level up the cities and get new items, and you dig in the ruins to level those up, which also gets you new items.

when you complete enough requests for a city, there’s a “development quest”, where you have to give a specific item, and then the city levels up! this happens three times for each city, bringing you to a max level of four.

ruins level up just by digging enough times, also to a max of four, and when you get to the max level, you have a chance of digging up battery packs.

in the first area, you briefly talk with a robot named Mothercom, who gives you the task of renewing this world, before shutting down.

as the game progresses, you discover more details about what caused this apocalypse. you also find another robot, named Pandora. she’s broken, though, and you have to find all her parts scattered through the different areas, and search for a suitable place to repair her. along the way, you find out more about her, and about CR-999, through the buildings of the company that created CR-999 and Pandora. every time you find a piece of Pandora, you return to the base to talk to her, telling her that you’ll fix her, and she’ll get to see the colors of the world again, and see the yellow flowers that she loved.

towards the end of the game, you find out the true cause of the apocalypse was actually a cleaning robot that was equipped with military strength functions, and became uncontrollable, due to lack of testing. the identity of the robot is implied (and pretty obvious), but isn’t confirmed until the end.

one area after that reveal, you reach an area so contaminated that it poses a risk to robots as well as humans. Mr. C manages to survive clearing this area. but biri does not. it’s revealed that biri had lied, telling Mr. C that they would be okay so he wouldn’t worry. they shut down due to the contamination, however, and you are left to progress to the final area without them. the developer’s attention to detail shines through here, as when you open Biri’s menu, the screen that would usually show their advice and snarky comments is covered by a note, thanking you for your adventure, and telling you to be nice to Pandora, and their heartrate monitor flatlines. 

in the final area you find the building where Pandora was originally built, and the machinery to repair her is contained within. the final request from a city in this area is a super computer, to repair Mothercom. 

when you begin the cutscene that comprises the first ending, you find a video email, which tells you the true identity of the uncontrollable cleaning robot who destroyed the earth, and humanity with it. It’s Pandora. Due to the lack of testing done on her, her recognition system was flawed from the ground up, and she saw EVERYTHING as garbage to be disposed of. because of this, she destroyed everything and everyone, leading to the collapse of the world. after this revelation, Pandora, who was unconscious for most of the process of repairing her body, awakens, and begs Mr. C to destroy her. When Mr. C hesitates, there is a brief blackout, and Mothercom awakens, showing that she was successfully repaired. she forces you to make a choice.

Pandora, or Earth. it’s up to you to decide.

i can only speak for what happens when you choose Earth. Mr. C presses the emergency destruction button, which deactivates Pandora, and destroys her body. this saves the planet, but at a cost. the credits roll, and a post ending scene plays, where many years have passed, and Mr. C talks about the cleaning he has continued to do. he has other cleaning robots at his side, but the grief of losing Pandora and Biri eventually causes him to shut down, alone.

the ending screen rolls, and for a moment, it seems like that's going to be the end of it. but then a line of text saying “find a way to save Pandora!” flashes across the bottom, and the player is given a second chance. you’re sent back to before you start the final cutscene, only this time, you meet a researcher, who warns you of Pandora’s flawed recognition system. thankfully, he is able to recreate the part, but he needs a few pieces first. and you have to work for them.

the pieces he needs come from 100% clearing the game. all trash needs to be cleared, and all the cities and ruins need to be at max level. this is done through excavating the ruins, and completing requests in the cities. the final piece is a random drop from the traveling battery pack vendor, and that one takes a bit of luck, as well as only being obtainable after achieving one of the first two endings.

once you obtain the four pieces, the researcher assembles them together into Pandora’s Heart, which you can then place into Pandora. You then go through the final cutscene again, but when presented with the choice, you can safely choose Pandora. the Heart gives her the ability to recognize you as a friend, and the world as something to be restored. Biri ends up reactivating in this ending, and invites everyone to see you again. You and Pandora spend many years cleaning and restoring the world. she gets to see the world’s original colors, and she gets to plant the yellow flowers that she loved. she plants so many that the world itself turns golden.

personally, i think making the player work so hard for the golden ending was incredible. it feels almost like the opposite of undertale, in that regard. where undertale punishes the player for 100% completion by locking them OUT of the golden ending, the burnable garbage day rewards the player for 100% completion, and, in fact, requires it to earn the golden ending.

you truly have to earn the happiness that the ending gives, but the game truly makes it worth it. at the end of the game, you get to look at everyone. you get to look at their survival, their happiness. and you get to say “i did that. i saved them. i gave them that happiness”.

and you did. you worked for it, and so it was.

This week Jax talks about a cute story about a robot who just wants to clean the post-apocalyptic world!

Game discussed: The Burnable Garbage Day: App Store, Google Play

Music and editing by Domi Domi's Soundcloud Domi's Ko-Fi Website Bluesky Ko-fi Discord

THE BURNABLE GARBAGE DAY SPOILERS