The city is the level

Eleven districts, from a back alley to the docks and the sea. One city, built once and buried under 118,000 individually placed pieces of rubbish — every bag, fridge, mattress and burnt-out van put somewhere on purpose, not spawned around you. You can walk to any of it from the first minute.

Start with your hands

You begin holding one thing at a time. That is the whole game for about six minutes, and then you can afford the cart, and the job changes. Eight rungs, and each one changes what the work is, not how fast you do it:

hands → cart → pickup → skid steer → garbage truck → roll-off → twin-box → the recycling plant.

The plant costs more than the entire campaign earns. It is not a reward for finishing. It is the reason to keep going after you have.

Sort it or lose money

Seven streams — general, plastic, metal, electronics, bulky, hazardous, and whatever's worth real money. Every skip pays for what belongs in it. Tip a mixed load and you still get paid, just less. Nobody stops you. The pay slip does the teaching.

The rubbish is the wall

Roads all over the city are blocked by rubbish piled so thick you cannot walk through it, and there is no gate, no dialogue and no "come back later". A wall of bin bags you can dig by hand. A wall with three fridges and a van in it, you cannot — not until you own something that eats it. The barricade tells you what to go and buy just by standing there.

Finish a street, watch it change

When the last piece on a street goes, a wave of light rolls down it. The buildings get their windows back, planters and trees grow in along the pavement, the pigeons come back, and the smog over the whole city thins a little more. Clear the old town and the fountain in the market square runs again.

It stays clean

Ordinary rubbish never respawns. A street you cleared on your first morning is still clear eight hours later. Come back to where you started with a street sweeper and erase an hour of hand-work in ninety seconds — that's the payoff, not an exploit.

And when it's done

Drag the handle across the ending screen and wipe the city you found into the city you made, with the numbers underneath.

Features

• One persistent city, eleven districts, 118,000 pieces, all reachable from minute one
  
• Eight machines, each one a different job — hands to a recycling plant
  
• Seven sorting streams; mixed loads pay less, nothing is locked
  
• Rubbish barricades you can't pass until you own the machine to eat them
  
• Nothing you clean ever comes back
  
• Paint your fleet; a radio; day, night and weather
  
• Colour-blind palette