I hope this has convinced even one or two of you to pick this game up. It was such a wonderful time, and I'll miss my friends in the Dump now that it's over.

Seriously, the ONLY issue is bugs. The writing is ingenious and clever, the music boppin', the graphics amazing. Some monster designs are by the guy who did Look Outside, and you can tell.

Maybe in the next few months they'll release a 2.0 to fix it all up. I hope they do, but its still good now.

These errors range from things like "mild typo" to "an entire town is acting like it was 20 hours ago" or "I spent resources to rebuild the inn and it says I can use it, but I can't" or "entire areas on the world map are grayed out and cannot be entered".

No deal breakers, but it was noticeable.

There's also a handful of typos and bugs I found, including two sequence breaks. But by the end of the game, when it opens up for a full exploring style ending, the bugs become eeeeven more. I wrote down every error I found in the last 5 hours and found over 20.

Alright, so this is all good, but what's the negatives? Well, there is one. One issue that means I won't IMMEDIATELY give this GOTY. It's jank as fuck.

There were jank problems ALL game. The game is isometric and built in a unique engine, so graphical and sprite clipping/errors are common.

You can do some very silly tactics, too. I found a strategy that allowed Ratavia, the thief/rogue-like character, to take extra turns at like a 70% chance every single attack. Here's a picture by Rumrusher in my chat of Ratavia menacing the big bad of the game by just existing.

The RPG gameplay is simple, but kept me entertained the whole 30 hours. It's Mario RPG on a grid. Press A at the right time to reduce damage and deal more. Move closer to deal more but take more damage, and set up ground hazards to trap enemies and increase damage.

So yes, obviously the game goes above and beyond. I was cracking smiles all over the place. It was apparently made by a team of janitors, and it has that tongue in cheek energy of someone who knows their job is VERY important but also wow they have to put up with a LOT of stupid shit.

The Cardboard Knights are called the Guardboard.

The Hydromancers are sentient clothing mages that use Cleaning magic. At one point you collect Tidepods to make potions for them.

The country of Booksend has the Librarians, an ancient order who try and keep peace and spread knowledge.

If names like Dustin Binsley don't clue you in, the game is a humongous punfest. It's filled with inspired worldbuilding that feels like it'd fit in a classic JRPG but just... so fucking out there. Here's a few worldbuilding quirks to make it stand out:

The story, like the art, music, and gameplay, is heavily inspired by those classic RPGs that many of us know and love. But it's not any kind of knockoff or retread of those classic games. This game is EXTREMELY inspired. I've never met a game that's so silly, yet so serious at the same time.

In KotD you play as Dustin Binsley, a little trashknight of the Kingdom of Garbagia. He's a massive fuckup. He's assigned as the King's royal guard for a convention, and he sleeps through it, only being woken up by his best friend Ratavia. The king is kidnapped, Dustin is blamed, he must go save him

Kingdoms of the Dump is an RPG heavily inspired by classic SNES-era RPGs. It's filled with the same sound fonts, art styles, and combat systems. I'd describe it most as a mix of Chrono Trigger and Super Mario RPG, but I saw a lot of love letters to the genre as a whole in there.

If you want to play the game just on a recommendation alone, my very simple review is: A little buggy, but if it didn't have those bugs, it'd be literally perfect. 9.5/10.

Read on for a more indepth review!

There's one thing stopping it from being my easy slam dunk for the GOTY this year, and honestly it's a pretty minor thing that I might just ignore for GOTY anyway.

But if the file size is too large, everyone's gonna just install it on their backup disc-spinner HDD anyway, exacerbating the problem D:

Holy HELL, that is NUTS.

One of my pet peeves in games these days is they're all unoptimized and too large. Games don't need to be 100+ gigs. Case in point. I know on DVDs and Bluray, you need some redundancies, but how was there 131 gigs of duplicate data on the PC port???

Christ on the cross, no

And the CIA will get off on this scott fuckin' free :/