Garbage Country seems like it's just about lo-fi beats to off-road to, but it's sneakily a tower defense game against post-apocalyptic trash bots

Let me free associate a series of words to see if, combined, they conjure a perfect picture of Garbage Country in your mind.

Wall-E trash piles. Micro Machine Land Rover. Wobbly PlayStation polygons. Dithered dust. Tower… defense?

I thought I had Garbage Country pegged partway through its trailer in today's PC Gaming Show 2025: it's a cute game about driving your cute blocky truck around a quiet lo-fi world, the aesthetics of which you'll almost certainly recognize from other indies of the past few years. But towards the end it threw out a real curveball, switching to a grid-based combat encounter with tower defense-style turret building as robots try to attack your parked truck.

I guess as in Wall-E the damn robots really are running amok. But it's exciting to see a game that looks the way Garbage Country does aspire to more than just chill exploration. A decade ago developer Noio made indie hit Kingdom, so I wouldn't be surprised to find a decent bit of depth lurking in its strategy combat interludes.

But even if there's ultimately not much there but a light distraction, the vehicle customization and driving in Garbage Country look like they could be good fun on their own. That truck is just begging to have some big, bouncy tires put on it for bopping over garbage piles. We'll see how the balance shakes out sometime later this year.

Garbage Country doesn't have a set release date, but on Steam it's listed for 2025.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show 2025