About This Game

Clear the landfill, one piece at a time

Recycled is a calm first-person game about cleaning up a landfill. There is no timer, no enemy and no way to fail. You pick up trash, take apart what needs taking apart, sort every piece into the bin where it belongs and press the full bins into bales. Play alone or with up to three friends.

Four towers of trash

In the middle of the yard stand four towers built from 34,027 pieces of trash, each with its own theme: the Packaging Tower, the Kitchen Tower, the Bulky Junk Tower and the Electronics Tower. Garbage bags, pizza boxes, bottles, jars, microwaves, toasters, old televisions and phones, office chairs, bicycles, jackets, teddy bears and much more. Every piece was dropped and left to settle with physics, so each one lies where it landed.

Everything you can see can be picked up. Pull something from the bottom and whatever rested on it slides and tumbles down. Every tower has a foot, a slope and a summit: clear one and a bell rings, clear the whole tower and it earns a star.

Collect and sort

• Your bag holds 20 items. Bigger things are carried in your hands, or thrown.
  
• Each row of bins has eight: Plastic & Rubber, Metal, Glass, Paper & Cardboard, Textile, Hazardous, Organic and General Waste.
  
• Stand at a bin to empty the matching items from your bag, or throw them in from a distance.
  
• Something in the wrong bin bounces back out with a hint about where it belongs. Nothing is ever lost.
  
• The bins fill up visibly as you work.

Take it apart

A lot of trash is made of more than one material. A PET bottle has a cap and a paper label, a garbage bag is full of cans, newspapers and rags, a microwave has screws, a metal cover and a circuit board.

Small things come apart in your hands. Bigger ones go on a workbench: clamp them on and work through the parts with a screwdriver, a saw and a hammer, in a sensible order: the screws before the cover, the cover before the board. Every part, and finally the empty body, goes straight into your bag. Two players can work on the same item at the same time.

The press, bales and forklifts

A full bin goes to the baling press. The press lifts and tips the bin, crushes the load and pushes out a bale, ready to be stacked. A half-full bin makes a smaller bale.

Every workbench has a forklift beside it. Drive it to carry bins and bales around the yard, or scoop trash straight off a tower with its forks.

The tower crane

Climb up into the cab of the tower crane by the Bulky Junk Tower. Swing the jib, run the trolley out and lower the hook while a camera on the hook block shows you what is below. Change attachments on the rack beside the bins:

• the grab bites a load of trash out of a tower and drops it into a bin,
  
• the magnet picks up only the metal,
  
• the hook lifts a whole bin and sets it down on the press.

Together or alone

Up to four players can clear the same landfill online through Steam, in a public, friends-only or invite-only session. Everyone works on the same towers and sees the same counters. Throw things to each other (miss the catch and it bonks you), ping what you have found and see how the shift went in the shift report. The world is saved on the host's computer in one of three save slots, together with every player's bag.

Little things to find

The Tab board keeps track of every tower and every material, and an encyclopedia of 66 kinds of trash fills in as you find them. Rubber ducks squeak, old radios play a tune through the static, gulls circle overhead, and the music picks up when you are on a sorting streak. Somewhere in the Electronics Tower, they say, a single cold wallet got lost…

Features

• Four themed towers of 34,027 physically settled items, every one of them collectable
  
• About twenty kinds of items to take apart, from jam jars to bicycles, with three tools
  
• Eight bins, with hints instead of penalties
  
• A baling press, four forklifts and a tower crane with a grab, a magnet and a hook
  
• Solo play or online co-op for up to 4 players
  
• Three save slots and autosave
  
• 12 Steam Achievements
  
• Interface in 20 languages: English, Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Indonesian

Early Access

Recycled is in Early Access. The core of the game is complete: the landfill can be cleared from start to finish, alone or together. We plan to add more areas, more items and more ways to play, guided by player feedback. The Early Access section on this page explains the plans in detail.