Review: WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter feels like a staple for the cozy gamer library

WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter puts you in the role of a goblin who is offered a temporary job cleaning artifacts. The game takes place over a series of seven days and each day brings you new characters and different items to clean. It’s a very chill experience that I adored.

WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter – Finally, a game that lets me live up to my true potential – a goblin

WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter takes place in – you guessed it – Wyrmhall. It’s filled to the brim with different types of characters – even Daleks. Whovian fans will be as excited as I was to see a Dalek variant trundling by the kiosk. (Sadly, they are not a customer.)

You take over the duties of the current employee who wants to go on vacation. They’ve graciously allowed you to keep all the earnings, you just have to run the cleaning kiosk for a week. You’ll deal with a few customers a day, cleaning their objects, and then head home. 

You start with three tools: a cloth to wipe away vines, a brush to sweep away dirt, and a bag to put mites in. You’ll gain two more objects from customers: pliers to pull magma slugs, and a dagger to knock away growths.

Personally, the writing is what held my attention. While some characters are serious, a lot of them are just plain funny. Also, the dialogue options you can choose from are amusing. You play a quintessentially unbothered goblin. So, I had a few good laughs at the options I could respond with.

WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter may not be for everyone. At its core, it’s a glorified item-cleaning game. You’ll use the same tools to get rid of the same grime covering the objects. What keeps the game fresh is the ever-revolving host of characters and artifacts.

Across the 7 days of in-game play, you only see a few characters more than once. You certainly never clean the same object twice – except for one, very specific time. The objects come in all shapes, sizes, and dimensions. There are objects that will get smaller or fall apart as you clean so you have to be very specific with your movements. There are items that seem like they belong on the shelf of Dr. Strange where flipping it over shows a completely different layout of that object.

I cleaned something invisible and they paid me in invisible coins…

Oh, and some of the items are cursed. This isn’t really something you have to worry about, it just adds another element to cleaning. Some objects are dangerous in that if you hover over or look at something too long, warning bells will start to go off. I’m not sure what happens if you continue to do the thing you’re not supposed to, but the game says it’s death.

You’ll meet characters who are fleeting, ones who want to kill you, and customers who will later give you the option to join them if you wish to do so. There’s a mild overarching story that has more to do with your kiosk’s location in the local parade coming at the end of your work week than it does with you. It’s a wrong place, wrong time situation, but it’s so mild that it might as well be mayonnaise. You get blips of this story in cutscenes and then one final scene at the end.

The real journey is the customers you deal with day to day and the cleaning.

All in all, it’s about a 3-hour game and it’s the perfect distraction to relax with for a few hours. There’s very little in the way of timed elements and even those don’t have penalties.

Take your time and be the best goblin cleaner – or the worst. You don’t have to make anything spotless when you hand it back if you don’t want to.

If you want to try out WYRMHALL: Brush and Banter for yourself, you can get it for $9.99 over on Steam. If you want something a bit more involved and perhaps a little scary, you can check out the review we did of Finnish Cottage 8. It’s an anomaly-spotting horror game that requires eight successful rotations to win.