Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a title long enough to be worthy of an anime? My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection (So I Bought a Dump to Find Them All) doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but sure is fun to say.
With that being said, my enjoyment of the demo for My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection unfortunately stops there. This game is buggy, even for demo status and has a long road ahead of it before it’ll be ready for customer consumption.
I could be wrong, but I think this game uses the same asset for the house you work out of that A Game About Digging a Hole used. I think it’s fair to say that there was heavy inspiration taken in the way the game is set up, the way it plays, and even going with a silly title.
The premise is in the title, but to be more specific, you will be presented with a pile of trash in your backyard to sift through in order to find cards. I played for thirty minutes before bugs forced me to stop and I did not find a card in that time. To get your money back, you’ll sift through the trash and find collectables to sell.
Luckily, filling a bag of trash will also net you a return by dumping it into the anthropomorphized dumpsters. These things will skeeve you out with their hooded eyes and lascivious tongue that lolls out waiting for the goods to be dropped inside. Honestly, that part is fairly funny, as is the blow-up dolls labeled “someone’s shame” scattered amongst the trash.
That being said, this is obviously not recommended for your children if you don’t want to explain the doll, complete with a set of knockers, to your small humans.
At first, I was pretty hyped about the process of sorting trash and carrying treasures to the storage shelf to sell, but I’ll be honest that the shine goes away fairly quickly. There are ways to help your process with a dog who will root out treasures and upgrades, but those things don’t help very much.
You can upgrade your trash bag, your storage — all of that good nonsense, but you still kind of drown under the weight of clunky controls and exacting items. There’s a shopping cart that you can trundle around with, but you have to be on the path exactly, or it will just disconnect from you and stop moving.
The cart is great to toss smaller collectables into, but bigger ones reject the confinement and fall to the ground uselessly. When the cart works, it’s great, but there was a point in my gameplay where God told me to go fuck myself. Not only was I heaved up into the sky, but my cart was too. At that point, I fell back to Earth like the fallen guardian angel of trash, but my cart remained in the heavens, never to be useful again.
It was around this time that my dog decided that it wouldn’t be helpful either. When you first unlock the dog, you pay 30 bucks to activate him and away he goes. He became glitched at some point and I’m not quite sure which way was correct. At first, he stayed active and helped me find about 20 collectables before returning to his doghouse. After that, he would only find one item and I was constantly dropping 30 bucks and having to re-engage him at his dog house.
Obviously, that’s not really helpful if I’ve now got to go from A to B constantly. Shortly after the gaming gods decided I didn’t deserve a shopping cart, my storage stopped letting me engage with it. I could no longer put items onto my storage shelf or sell what was in it.
At this point, there was no way forward and I got bricked 30 minutes into gameplay. Obviously, I’m sure the allure of Steam Next Fest was what inspired this rush out, but unfortunately, I have to caution you to be very critical of the launch of this game when it does land. It needs a lot of work as it is and likely an overhaul of systems to be enjoyable.
If I were to suggest anything, I’d say that being able to bank things in storage as you grab them would fix a lot of the clunkiness and it wouldn’t disrupt the flow since the storage only holds so many items. So, you’d be required to head back to the house to sell.
I love the idea and I think there could be a great game buried at the bottom of the trash heap; the devs just have to do some digging of their own to find it.
My Wife Threw Out My Card Collection (So I Bought a Dump to Find Them All), and all I got was God’s disappointment in me
