Prfsnl was going around in the Switch eShop sale a few days back giving recommendations for all of the games under $2. I still had a fair bit of eShop money that I received as a Christmas gift, so I looked into his recommendations, and this was one I ended up grabbing. A 2D metroidvania, even if short, is absolutely worth my time for $2! It took me about 50 minutes (short indeed!) to play through the English version of the game getting 94% completion.
The story for Trash Quest is practically non-existent. You're a raccoon with a jetpack and a blaster, and you've broken into some kind of sci-fi facility (spaceship?) to complete some kind of quest (likely for trash!). It does as much as it needs to and doesn't get in the way~.
The gameplay of Trash Quest is a quite heavily platforming-focused metroidvania with a big emphasis on speedrunning. The short playtime seems geared around making it easier to keep track of successive playthroughs and how much better you've done compared to last time. There are a handful of bosses to fight and enemies to fight along your way, but managing your energy to get past the platforms is the real challenge most of the time. You don't have "jumps" so much as you have energy that your jetpack consumes when you use it, so doing a jump or using a moment of hover with it will consume a pip of energy and using jumps and hovers when you need them (as well as getting more max energy) is how you'll get past the game's many platforming and boss battle hurdles.
The map is quite small, and you always go back to the start when you die, but the game's map is laid out in a radial fashion. Instead of unlocking new checkpoints you unlock new shortcuts. This means that even if you've died, you can use a shortcut to get back to where you were faster, and you'll get used to using those shortcuts, as you do not have much health and there are no health pickups. Getting hit with an enemy bullet hurts and knocks you back a bit, but hitting spikes makes you reset the room you're in. Thankfully, dying at a boss only puts you outside the boss's room, which is very kind of the game. The bosses are pretty darn good fun and the platforming is well put together too, but this is definitely a game for action platforming veterans, especially if you wanna do optional platforming challenges to get more health, damage, and fire rate.
The presentation of the game is relatively simple pixel-art but with a lot of shadows. You're in a dark facility, so there's a light around you that illuminates the walls and platforms more as you get closer, and they get more dark and less detailed as you get farther away. This is actually a pretty clever platform helper as well as being a neat aesthetic choice, as what's illuminated by your light are details, while (mostly) only platforms are visible in the dark. This isn't a hard and fast rule, leading me to several surprises upon learning that marks on the wall were in fact not platforms and just decoration, but it's usually a safe way to go through the environment x3. The music is also really fun, and it makes for a really great fit to the high paced and fast platforming.
Verdict: Recommended. It's a quite short game, but it's a very well polished one and was a really fun way to spend an hour! If you're not so into tougher platformers, you very well might have a bit more trouble enjoying this one, but if that's your thing, then this is definitely a metroidvania worth seeking out.