Kingdoms of the Dump

Nine years, two janitors, and a kingdom built from garbage

Kingdoms of the Dump is the debut release of Roach Games, a studio formed by two real-life custodians working under the pseudonyms Roach and Everdredd, who began development in 2016 and self-funded the project out of pocket for three years before a successful 2019 Kickstarter campaign — raising over $76,000 against a $60,000 goal — let them continue the work full-time. Co-developed with Dream Sloth Games and self-published, it released 18 November 2025 after roughly nine years of total development. Players take on Dustin Binsley, the Trash Can Knight, journeying across the Five and a Half Kingdoms of the Dump — an SNES-styled fantasy world built entirely from garbage, discarded critters and janitorial tools — fighting the toxic grimelin army with grid-based tactical combat, timed-hit attacks and dodges, and character-swapping field abilities used to platform and puzzle-solve through a large Mode 7-style overworld.

Some of the year's warmest reception for an indie JRPG

The praise that dominates Kingdoms of the Dump's review corpus is genuinely effusive, and it centres specifically on imagination and presentation. Reviewers repeatedly invoke SNES-era landmarks — Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, Final Fantasy VI — not as loose stylistic comparisons but as direct measures the game is repeatedly said to earn, with more than one reviewer calling it the best indie homage to Super Mario RPG they've personally played. The trash-world premise draws specific, sustained credit for staying inventive rather than exhausting its central joke early, with reviewers highlighting species-specific pun styles, consistently surprising boss designs, and a tone that successfully balances whimsy against genuine emotional investment in its cast. The soundtrack draws some of the corpus's most unreserved praise, with multiple reviewers rating the music alone as worth the price of admission independent of every other system. Several long-time backers who followed the game's six-plus years of public Kickstarter development specifically credit Roach Games' consistent communication and visible work ethic as remarkable for a two-person team funding a project largely out of pocket, framing the eventual release less as a surprise and more as the payoff of years of visibly earnest labour.

A back half that arrives visibly incomplete

Set against that praise, the single most consistent, detailed and difficult-to-dismiss complaint in Kingdoms of the Dump's review base concerns the state of its final act. Multiple long, carefully documented reviews — several written by players with 28 or more hours invested, well past a casual first impression — describe entire questlines that lead nowhere, world-map zones that remain visibly present but permanently inaccessible, items with no functional purpose, and interactable tiles, like treasure chests, that can't actually be opened. One widely upvoted review frames the pattern bluntly: it's often unclear whether a given piece of content is bugged or was simply never finished before launch. Related reports describe severe bugs concentrated specifically in later acts, including softlocks and crashes that several reviewers say make extended late-game sessions genuinely frustrating regardless of how strong the opening hours were. That pattern recurs specifically and independently across a large number of detailed, high-playtime reviews rather than a handful of drive-by complaints, which is precisely what makes it credible: reviewers who clearly loved the first two-thirds of the game are the ones most frustrated by, and most detailed about, what happens once the story reaches its final stretch.

A combat system reviewers wanted to see grow

A second, more structural and separate complaint concerns the tactical combat system itself, independent of the completeness issues above. Several detailed reviews argue the grid-based combat, while functional and occasionally clever in its positioning and QTE-timing mechanics, doesn't meaningfully deepen across the game's full runtime — what a player has access to in the first act is, in broad strokes, close to what they'll still be using by the final one, with new character abilities frequently duplicating powers other party members already hold rather than expanding a character's own identity. Enemy tankiness draws a related, specific complaint: several reviewers describe basic attacks staying dominant even in late fights because most enemies simply survive long enough to always land a hit regardless of the player's actual strength, making sustained tactical depth feel less rewarding than the game's more ambitious systems promise. Platforming collision and hitbox consistency draw a smaller but recurring technical complaint, particularly in later, less-polished areas.

Value

At NZ$28.99, Kingdoms of the Dump asks a reasonable price for a game its own reviewers routinely describe as a genuinely special, deeply personal labour of love — provided buyers go in aware that its back half, by wide and specific consensus among its most detailed reviewers, needed more development time than it received before launch. The Very Positive score, 1,034 positive against 70 negative across 1,104 reviews, reflects a review base that largely still recommends the game despite that gap, crediting the strength of its world, writing, art and music as enough to carry a rougher final stretch, while a smaller but detailed and credible group feels the incompleteness is serious enough to withhold a recommendation until the developers finish what they started. For players drawn specifically to SNES-era JRPG nostalgia and comfortable accepting real, documented rough edges in a small team's first release, this is an easy recommendation for at least its first two acts; for players wanting a complete, fully realised experience from start to finish today, the review corpus makes a clear, detailed case for checking recent patch notes before committing. </content>