Some games just speak to you.
I am a 40 year old Dad of 2 and with that comes some things, some DLC if you will Whilst my condition hasn’t yet progressed to white converse sneakers and starting a lawnmower at 6AM on Sunday morning I do enjoy a good old bit of DIY. Our house and it surrounds bears the scars of my many projects not least of which is a workshop, greenhouse and a garden shed built on top of a deck (since it was going to be the same cost as a concrete slab, so I figured why not waste multiple weekends building one). I have, at times, fantasised about how much fun it’d be to just start digging a big old hole in the ground. One part of this is just for the sheer fun of it, heck I’ve done that with mates at the beach for hours, but it could also provide more storage space! It got so bad at one point I was looking into how to shore up the walls so they wouldn’t cave in and even had an upper bound on just how big of a hole I could dig.
You can imagine then see a game about doing exactly that was of interest to me.
You’ve done it; you’ve saved up enough to buy a house and you’re in the market trying to track down a bargain. Then something that sounds too good to be true comes up, a house that not only has everything you want but it’s guaranteed, guaranteed to have treasure buried in the backyard. All you have to do is get digging to find it. How deep do you need to go? Who knows but one thing is for sure the more you dig the more things of value you’re going to find. So what are you waiting for champ? Get on in there and DIG.
This game does what it says on the box: you’re going to be digging a hole. You start out with a trusty trowel, something that’ll let you dig down a little bit but at such a slow pace that it’s barely worth attempting. As you dig though you’ll uncover stones, iron and all sorts of other minerals that you can pawn off for cash. That cash can then be spent on upgrades which make your life easier including such fantastical things as a jetpack. The core loop then becomes something like this: jump in the hole, dig until you can’t, sell your horde, repeat. It’s simple and straight to the point.
I have to commend the devs for getting the pacing of this game absolutely spot on. When I first started playing it I started to get echoes of some of the other digging focused games I’d played in the past, ones I’d dropped early on as the repetitive process of digging just wasn’t hitting the dopamine centers like I needed it to. This game though knows just how long you can go with the early tasks before that level of boredom starts to kick in because it’s at that point you’ll be at the point where you’ll be able to afford the next upgrade. Whilst most of them are simply things that allow you to do what you just did quicker for some reason that was enough to lock me fully into a flow state for a good 2 hours, something that hasn’t happened for a long time.
My initial idea was to forego jetpack upgrades and instead make my hole easily traversable. So initially I was just digging down as a ramp for as long as I could. After that I started digging down a spiral staircase, ala Silo. This worked for a good long while too until I felt like my progress was getting hampered by the continuous running back and forth I was doing. It was at that point I decided that I’d take a very different strategy.
Dig straight the fuck down.
Now I hear you in the back row there, screaming “That’s what you should do at the start!” and sure, I could have, but the issue there is that the early tools don’t make that particular easy. The small dig radius you have means that clearing enough room for you to get down takes quite a while and you have far less opportunity to stumble across minerals you need to fuel your upgrades. Past a certain point though you can churn through sections quickly enough that clearing out an area big enough for you to go down and around you to get cash isn’t too hard. Indeed the last drill upgrade can pretty much have you go straight down if you want. I kinda did that, although I did take a few detours when I found interesting things.
I won’t spoil exactly what’s going on but effectively the game’s procedural generation is done in a way to guide you towards the various objectives it wants you to see. Reading over some other reviews its clear that there were a few things I missed when I started on my “MUST GO DOWN” journey, but it likely wouldn’t take too much time to ferret around in the backyard to find those missed pieces. That being said though, even when you finish the game the first time there is an achievement mode afterwards. So even if you don’t catch everything the first time around there’s every reason to go back again.
A Game About Digging a Hole is the perfect representation of what this genre of games can be. It’s simple, straight to the point and doesn’t attempt to a bunch of extraneous stuff outside its core mechanics. The core loop has been done in such a way that by the time you’re starting to get bored, the next upgrade is there, triggering that dopamine rush and keeping you locked in place. It doesn’t overstay its welcome and, should you want to play more, there’s more on offer. Honestly if I got a game like this every week in my Steam feed I wouldn’t be mad. Hint hint devs.
Rating: 8.75/10
A Game About Digging a Hole is available on PC right now for $7.50. Total playtime was 2.1 hours with 10% of the achievements unlocked.
