cashew | Just spent the weekend hardcore playing a casual game

Anomoe: The Burnable Garbage Day is a casual idle clicker game released by the indie group GameOn Co., Ltd. Despite the poor translation filled with typos, misspellings, awkward and incorrect grammar, etc., the game is still one of the best narrative-driven mobile games I've experienced in recent times. (Another Eden not included, of course, because Another Eden is an insanely polished Triple A game packaged in a mobile app.)

TL;DR — Go play it. It's fun. It's simple. The story is engaging.

If you'd like a more detailed description of the game:

Story

Anomoe is the story of a cleaning robot, CR-999, who wakes up in the post-apocalyptic world and finds itself buried in trash. Getting on with its job, CR-999 goes off and does what it was designed to do, which is to clean trash. In the process, it meets up with a population of human children in cryogenic suspension. Once defrosted, the children reveal that they are the "seeds" meant to repopulate the earth. So, they go on to establish towns while CR-999 continues its task of cleaning up trash. As the progression continues, CR-999 meets the other alien lifeforms that colonized the planet after the apocalypse and helps these lifeforms to establish their civilization.

Then, one day, CR-999 comes across the remains of another robot, Pandora. Pandora is broken into pieces and CR-999 takes on the additional mission of restoring Pandora. However, in the process, CR-999 uncovers the not-so-happy secret behind the cause of the apocalypse and has to make a difficult decision.

The rest I'll let you find out yourself.

Gameplay

The game is an idle clicker and starts off with you tapping on pieces of trash to clean it. Each time you clean trash, you expended battery charges to gain experience and trash cubes. The trash cubes are used as a form of currency to super speed production while the experience causes the robot to level up. At each level up, the battery is recharged and gains extra charges. The charges also regenerate at 1 charge per minute when the battery has not been upgraded. A fully upgraded battery regenerates 1 charge per 30 seconds.

If you do not want to wait for the battery to recharge, you can spend battery packs to immediately charge the battery to full. You get one of these per level up until level 10, at which point it becomes a bit more random. However, at level 10, you also unlock a moving vendor that will sell you battery packs in exchange for goods in your inventory. You'll also gain 1 battery pack for each town development quest you complete (more below). Meanwhile, if you're somehow still strapped for battery power (which you won't be, I ended the game with 300+ battery packs), you can watch a 30 second ad to get a battery pack in return.

In addition to cleaning up trash, you will also be tasked with uncovering and developing towns, excavating ruins, and collecting miscellaneous produce growing on the land that has been cleaned up. Each town produces up to three different goods of a same theme. For example, Meat Town produces Chicken, Pork, and Beef. Ruins excavation produces up to three different artifacts, also often of a similar theme. Finally, each land sector (called an Area) grows a local product (often fruits, although it's sometimes condensed energy) that can be harvested at ~5 minute intervals. While a town's production can be supercharged by expending trash cubes and a ruin can be excavated continuously by burning battery packs, there is no way to speed up the harvest interval of the local product. So you'll just have to wait for the plants to regrow.

Town development is done through quest completion. At fixed intervals (the longest no longer than 5 minutes), townies will generate quests that can be fulfilled by collecting the goods they ask for. Once you've completely enough townie quests, a development quest pops up. The developer of the town will give you clues for an item you need and it's up to you to figure out which item is the correct answer. To help ease frustration, wrong answers you picked will be crossed out from your inventory and you can try again when the quest re-pops.

Miscellaneous

The game has a very retro 16-bit aesthetic. The UI is simple and easy to navigate, which is critical given the poor translation. The lack of polished translation can be forgiven when considering the minuscule development team. Nonetheless, the game's story is still imminently understandable and it was still able to evoke genuine sympathy from me.

Overall the game takes a little less than a day of dedicated playtime to finish, but you can take it as slow as you want. The game doesn't inundate you with ads and you can choose to purchase the game to support the developers if you want to get rid of the level up ads (again, these ads are 5-seconds long and not much of an interruption).

In conclusion, the game is short, fun, very casual, and has an interesting story. The energy system is generous enough that you can play it in long sessions or short bursts without feeling strapped for resources. You can finish the game in a single sitting or spread the gameplay through multiple play sessions. Also, it's free, so why not give it a whirl?