The wonderful thing about video games is that they can take something that is, quite frankly, terrible, and turn it into an experience where you can’t help but think “just five more minutes.” Incremental games often have that effect, and Selkie’s Salvage&Co. is no different in that regard, it’s just the funny thing is that it is essentially a game about taking your rubbish out.

That is bastardising it. The setting for the world is one where the entire planet is flooded, and you, a robot created by an anthropomorphic rat girl (the titular Selkie) who I can already predict salacious fan art of, have to clean up a whole bunch of trash from it by fishing it out. This starts slow of course, all you have is you, your fishing rod, and a magnetic arm that can’t carry all that much. The more trash you collect and feed into a grinder, the more you can steadily increase your capabilities.

You increase your fishing and carrying loads, you add a net to the back of your boat that automatically catches trash for you, you get a gun component that gives you extra points if you manage to shoot the trash you’ve caught in the air. It is all about maximising your efforts until certain elements of it are automated, of course, all in the name of collecting that sweet, sweet garbage as efficiently as possible. Along the way you may come across some artifacts from the past, things like a basketball or one of those “For Dummies” books about recycling. It’s a cute touch, and apparently they provide some mechanical bonuses too, though I didn’t manage to grab one in my time with the demo.

Still, Selkie’s Salvage&Co. has that satisfying juice all good incremental games do, where your desire to maximise Number Go Up outweighs any semblance of having a good night’s sleep. I said it was satisfying, not healthy. In any case, if you too want to hang out with the rat girl while she forces you to collect rubbish, then you can have a go at the demo or at least throw it a wishlist yourself on Steam ahead of its release on October 27th.