Fresh Start - Great, Good, or Garbage? A Video Game Review (Playstation 5 Version)

Published by Merge Games, Fresh Start is a Casual Indie “Cleaning Sim” that released December 20th, 2022 for MS Windows and on September 13th, 2023 for Playstation, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox. For this review video, I played the Playstation 5 version.

Before you get discouraged by Fresh Start’s “cleaning sim” descrption, let me say this – it plays a lot like Slime Rancher – so if you’ve played that particular enjoyable experience, you’re already primed for what Fresh Start is going to feel like – except rather than farming slimes and certain types of food for them, you’re putting out fires, watering trees and plants, and saving different locales by cleaning them up, removing the trash, and accomplishing certain objectives that are largely unique to each level.

As you navigate each level, you utilize a water cannon to dissolve mud piles of varying sizes, and each of these will have “debris” in it that you must initially deposit in a garbage-compactor-type device, although later on there is a skill you can unlock in the skill tree where any garbage you collect will automatically be deposited in this device without you having to traverse across the map every single time you need to drop trash off – which is helpful.

The skill tree has three sections to it, and each section has a large skill at the top you can unlock – but this requires you to collect a lot of garbage, as some of these skills have a hefty “price tag”. The “trash tornado” skill that you can unlock, for example, costs 4,000 in-game currency after you’ve unlocked all the skills underneath, but puts you at the center of a whirlwind that gathers all the trash within a close proximity of you rather than requiring you to pick it up each time.

Disclosure: I received a free review copy of Fresh Start from the Publisher through Lurkit.com – thanks so much, I really appreciate it!

Thanks for watching this video, I greatly appreciate it! If you enjoy it, smash that like button, don't forget to subscribe to my channel, and to hit that bell icon so you can be notified whenever new content hits my channel!

Follow me on Twitter:   / ssgsentinel  
Check out my TikTok videos:   / ssgsentinel  
Catch me on XPN Network Weekly Podcasts:    / @xpnnetwork  
If you're a fan of thrillers, check out my premiere novel "The Hunt For Jenx Vargough" here: https://www.amazon.com/Hunt-Jenx-Varg...

Check out the regular content on my channel: Xbox and Playstation news, reviews, and livestreams; YouTube Shorts.

This is SSG, aka Sergeant Sentinel...take it easy, gamers.