A Game About Digging A Hole reader review – Reader’s Feature

With the game now available on consoles, a reader gives their verdict on indie hit A Game About Digging A Hole, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

You’re on a sunny, suburban street. A van draws up. An unidentified someone jumps out of the van and nails a notice to a public noticeboard. The van and the unidentified someone drive off. Close in on the noticeboard and the newly attached notice. It’s a brightly coloured advert. The advert reads:

House For Sale. Only 10,000 $. With Gold Treasure In the Garden! Buy Now & Get Rich!

This is how A Game About Digging A Hole begins. Played in first person view, what you see first is the back garden of the house that you’ve bought and a box containing a Super Mega Digger 3000 Ultimate 2.0 Detector Set. This battery powered tool is the primary component of a game that’s played out in two locations. Your back garden and your garage. Unfortunately, you can’t enter the main part of the house that’s now yours, or at least I never managed to.

Go into the garage and you’ll find a workbench and a computer. The computer allows you to sell the ore/items that you obtain and by selling ore you accumulate funds. The workbench is where you spend the funds that you’ve accumulated. The workbench offers upgrades for your shovel, the aforementioned Super Mega Digger 3000.

Upgrades are also available for your inventory, battery and you can buy a jetpack which will become an essential item later on. Charge can be bought for your battery on the workbench screen and you can replenish your personal health there too. Dynamite and lamps are useful extras for when you want to take your digging to new depths.

Exit the garage, stroll into your sunlit back garden and you’ll see an X on the grass. X marks the spot, or so they say. In actuality you can begin your treasure hunt anywhere, so long as it’s on the back lawn.

On the PlayStation 5, digging involves pulling the right trigger of the joypad. Do this and your battery powered shovel takes a single bite out of the ground. While your back lawn steadily gets taken away chunk by chunk, various ores are uncovered. At first, you’ll find stones and coal. When you uncover these items they’re sucked straight into your inventory, which quickly fills up because at the start of the game your inventory is small.

Once your inventory is full you can keep digging but any ores that you uncover will be destroyed, so it’s best to turn those unearthed items into money so that you can buy upgrades and recharge your shovel battery. Without an upgrade the shovel battery’s charge soon runs out.

Initially this game seems repetitive. Do a bit of digging. Fill up your small inventory with stones, coal, iron, etc. Nip back into the garage. Sell what you’ve extracted from the ground on the computer. Spend your earnings on upgrading your equipment if you’ve earnt enough, then go back outside and carry on digging.

However, the steps that I’ve just described become compulsive, or at least they did for me, due to pressing questions inside my head. How deep can I actually go? How powerful are those $100 sticks of dynamite? Where did the previous owners of this house put that buried treasure?

Your current depth is shown on the left side of the screen. Anticipation serves as a magnet, drawing you downwards. What will you uncover next and how much cash are you going to receive for selling it?

When I earned $100 I bought some dynamite and put it to good use. The ground dropped further. I dug, and I dug, and then I dug some more. I got so involved with digging, with the race to earn money and to reach new depths, that I virtually ignored changes around me. That cheery birdsong had gone, replaced by eerie low notes that unsettled and brought no comfort at all. Before I knew what I’d done I’d placed myself in…darkness.

Turning around I saw only more darkness. I tried looking up. Darkness. Where was that nice blue sky? Who stole away the heavens when I wasn’t looking? Sensible miners stock up on $25 lamps before they get trigger-happy with their battery powered shovels. When you’re disorientated and many metres below the ground a light source can really alleviate attacks of panic and claustrophobia.

I won’t spoil what happens when you keep on digging. I will say that at depth minerals become more precious. Your Super Mega Digger 3000 has extra sensors that appear when you’re close to certain objects of interest. Subterranean structures wait to be discovered, and near the end of the game you realise that you’re not alone in the pit of your own making. A bestial grunt sent a shiver of fear through me. Time to make use of that jetpack and escape back up to the surface.

A Game About Digging a Hole is short and probably doesn’t have much replay value once you’ve learnt its secrets. But for the money, about the same price as a film rental, A Game About Digging A Hole is well worth a few hours of your time. Just remember, however deep you dig your hole, make sure you can get out of it again.

By reader Michael Veal (@msv858)

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