A Game About Digging a Hole is a good premise, half delivered. Part upgrade clicker and part digging simulator, the game is also designed with brevity in mind, there is an ending and it is shorter than what the framework of the mechanics are built for.

We’ve bought a home with the promise of treasure buried in the backyard. X marks the spot and we have a little shovel to dig up the whole backyard. As we retrieve miscellaneous bits of ore, we bring it back to the garage to sell it, and upgrade our toolkit. Our toolkit consists of our handy shovel which can be upgraded into a drill, and we also have a jetpack, an inventory, and a battery charger.

The gameplay loop goes like this: you’ll dig and dig into the yard but will consistently run out of battery and bag space, and have to come back to sell your treasures so that you can dig more, dig longer, and carry more treasures back up from your ever expanding hole in the ground.

At first, we’re just rooting around in small patches in the garden but eventually we’re terraforming the Earth and creating elaborate tunnels underground. The feedback loop is about how you can creatively make the most money while getting progressively deeper into the Earth, while finding some fun odds and ends along the way.

It’s not just sellable rocks down below the garden. Eventually you’ll break through and find some other things, small tunnels, items, and an ending to the story.

It’s not an especially well-balanced game. If you’re serious about the job of digging and resource gathering, you’re going to be fully upgraded before you’ve made much of a dent in the ground at all. Meanwhile, if you rush through, you can also really dig your way to the end without having any meaningful engagement with the upgrade loop.

As it’s a game about digging, the act of digging is the most important thing. It’s another place where the game is only partially in service of its potential. It feels good to dig, at first. Uncovering ores is satisfying. But for the kind of compulsive play it’s designed for, it’s abstractly hard to really clear a space, without it still being cluttered by dirt fragments and various other bits of cosmetic debris.

Think about Minecraft (2011) and why it’s satisfying: the voxel aesthetic is meaningful because each resource is a defined block within the space. This means that engaging with that space is inherently satisfying. You take away a resource, it goes away. Or, look towards PowerWash Simulator (2022), wherein each area you are washing has a meter showing how clean it is and has to be fully cleared before moving onto the next space. The assumption is the game will have some meaningful progression of some kind, but it has nothing, besides the upgrade path for your toolkit.

Eventually you end up with a deep hole but one that is not satisfying, because the mechanics are not intricate enough for the job and because before you even get down to the lower areas with more valuable resources, all your tools should be upgraded, and there’s nothing else to do but get to the end. There is no second, more complex garden or set of ever-expanding tools, it’s a one-and-done simulation experience.

The journey is the point, though, and the game space does allow you to progress how you want to. It’s not an elegant design and is half-cooked as a holistic series of engagements, but the process of digging does get progressively more fun, until you’ve extracted all that the game has to offer. The game was largely designed in just a matter of weeks and while it shows a blueprint for a more compelling and feature complete version, it doesn’t feel especially finished as a complete product.

5/10

Reviewed on Steam Deck