The old red barn I'm searching through has a number of valuable items: a taxidermied cat, a taxidermied wolf, and what at first I think might be a taxidermied human being. It actually turns out to be a filth-covered inflatable sex doll.
I suspect that finding a blow-up doll so slathered with grime you mistake it for a corpse wouldn't be cause for celebration, but this is a score! I can bring this beauty back home, spray the filth off her plastic body with a hose, and prop her up in my pawn shop. Surely one of my customers won't hesitate to buy a used sex doll to help pass the lonely nights.
I should also mention that while cleaning out the barn I saw a space alien, which quickly disappeared in a puff of smoke, and I also found a golden roll of toilet paper. I'm not exactly sure what the alien's deal is, but when I found the golden TP my reward was a long fart sound.
Aliens, farts, and sex dolls are just a few of the highlights in the free demo of Barn Finders, a game where you search old barns and storage units for useful junk you can clean, repair, and sell in a pawn-shop style store. Sometimes that alien even shows up in your store, wearing a flimsy disguise and buying some of the stuff you find. Again, I don't quite know what's up with that alien.
Picking up garbage in games is nothing new—I collect at least as much crap in an hour of Fallout 76 as I do in an hour of Barn Finders. But rarely can you be as thorough as Barn Finders allows you. After earning a bit of money by selling the sex doll—I had several interested customers, including one guy who tried to steal it—I can purchase an axe. I no longer need to be content with taking garbage off shelves: now I can smash the shelves, too, and collect the scrap material that falls. Nothing is safe from my scavenging fingers, and there's nothing so disgusting I won't wash it off and sell it to someone.
The axe is useful in the next location I pillage. It's an old storage unit, and after winning a heated bidding war I discover it's more like a trash bunker than a simple cargo container. It has several rooms. It has a basement. There are old car tires and rims down there, an ancient TV set, motorcycle parts, dozens of cans to recycle and crates to smash for scrap.
In fact, there's an entire old jeep down there I can tow home with my pickup truck and sell. I spend a solid half-hour scurrying around, pulling out any semi-valuable items I can find and loading them into my truck, then smashing everything that can be reduced to scrap. I even hunt through the alleyways outside, busting up barrels and boxes with my axe and finding another roll of golden toilet paper. I've earned another long fart sound.
Back at my shop, I build shelves to display all my finds and even begin to cobble together a complete motorcycle from the parts I've been finding. And once my shop is open I can begin haggling with the discriminating customers who have come to find a deal on a bunch of garbage.
Sorry, pal, you're not taking Shirley Love home for less than $16, no matter how much you grumble about it.
I'm actually a bit disappointed when the free demo ends—collecting crap, washing it off, arranging it in my store, and selling it for profit was definitely scratching the same sort of self-isolation itch that the demo of Train Station Renovation did. The need to stride into a mess and clean it up, to take something messy and get it organized, feels especially potent these days.
And it looks like there will be a lot more in the full Barn Finders game when it releases this year: some of the tools I acquired that didn't come into use in the demo included a lockpicking set and a shovel. Who knows what kind of junk you might find in a locked safe or deep underground? When it comes to valuable garbage, a used sex doll is just the tip of the iceberg.
