Game 4: A Game about Digging a Hole

Maybe it's post-Steam-Next-Fest syndrome but I've felt inclined to play short games for the moment.

Steam Link

I very much like games that don't attempt to give you an 80 hour experience. It's ok to make a game that doesn't last very long - RPGs in particular seem to regard that notion with disdain.

We begin with the purchase of a very affordable house.

My man you don't even need to promote the treasure, a single-family house anywhere in the United States (or the U.K., given the decimal-comma?) for that price? Sold.

The game is not subtle. I have a trowel, X marks the spot.

But... I COULD dig anywhere... Maybe I'll keep the X!

I start to dig in a circle around it but my 'battery'? gets low and my inventory gets full of the rocks that I'm unearthing.

I guess when you score a 10K house you have the money to afford fancy things like a battery-powered trowel.

The game mentioned something about the shovel exploding if the battery runs out. Since I just started there's no time like the present to find out if this is fatal and what the consequences are.

Dig until you die!

That's reasonable, I lost a stone. A battery recharge now costs a whole dollar, so it's already worth recharging rather than running out - each stone sells for $1.

I also lost a bunch of health but this is my own backyard and there's nothing here that will hurt me, I don't need to refill health yet.

Behold, a perfect circle.

This is the garage where I can somehow sell stones on the internet and spend the money for battery / health refills and various upgrades.

I'm not very far down but I'm already starting to find coal. Money here we come!

I'm going to have to widen my hole-circle so that I can fit into it like a trench.

Come to think of it, if this gets too deep won't I be unable to climb out? Maybe I should dig it like a spiral staircase?

Ah, I see there's a technological solution to the problem.

This is nice, just you snipping away at the dirt, making progress in bite-size chunks. My idea for a spiral staircase is taking shape.

There's no physics for unsupported dirt so it won't collapse on me.

I assumed this brown mineral was copper but it's actually iron.

There's no putting dirt back so if I screw up my staircase or find an underground cavern or something I'll still need the jetpack to get out, but I don't plan to use it much - I'll save a fair bit of money if I don't need to burn energy getting into and out of a vertical hole.

You know you could have maybe put in an autosave but this is better than just losing your progress. Saving does take a second or two so I guess an autosave could have been annoying.

The spiral stairs / tunnel are taking shape. You can dig any sort of hole you want - I'm sure lots of folks just tunnel straight down and jetpack back up. Others probably strip-mine their yard and end every speck of dirt on their property - barbarians.

But you've gotta make room for art, and do what makes you happy.

Do what makes your yard happy.

This game has reminded me that when I was a kid, a friend and I actually did dig a hole deep enough to stand in, in my parent's backyard, I think it was deep enough to stand in up to our shoulders or so, that hole felt like a hell of an accomplishment.

8 meters deep I find my first copper, sells for $10.

The upgrades look like they're half done already. 

Found something interesting, there's an air pocket underground that I've dug into. It's pretty extensive!

It goes much deeper than I've already dug and it's getting very dark. I suddenly have this device that's beeping at me.

Good thing I did buy that jetpack or I wouldn't have gotten back out. The shiny metal on the walls turns out to be silver ($20, seems like the mineral values are growing exponentially). I see something unusual in the dark but can't make it out, so I grab the silver and go up to get a lantern.

The beeper is showing me I'm close... where is it? WHAT is it?

A mineshaft with an arrow sign! I put the light there, that's what you get with the 'lanterns' you can buy. Also the rock on the right can't be dug out with the shovel.

I got overly eager to explore this and ran low on energy, then I got lost on the way back (found a different way out of the air pocket that led to a dead end), ran out of energy, and lost the valuable ores I collected down here. Easy come, easy go.

Before descending again I buy some more laterns to leave a trail back to the spiral staircase. I hadn't even gotten the staircase to spiral entirely around the yard before finding this! Back at the mineshaft, I find some additional copper and a gold nugget! I dig into it and break through to see this:

The faint outline of.... TREASURE!

But not... THE treasure!

I try using the dynamite on the 'unbreakable' rock at the mine entrance - dropped nearby, the dynamite doesn't harm it.

Dynamite placed directly on top of the rock however removes it and leaves a nice big hole.

Ok, I think I've explored the air pocket enough-I could use it as a basis for going down further but I still like the staircase. I went back to where I broke through to it and tried to smooth out the stairs near the air pocket so I can still walk up / down them and will continue the stairs beyond that.

My upgraded shovel is making larger 'holes' so it's actually getting more difficult to create a smooth, walkable slope.

Actually I think the happy face X would look better if I dug out the whole area around it and made the first layer of the staircase open-air. So I'm going to go back to the surface and work on that. I found the air pocket about 3/4ths of the way around the face-pillar so I'm getting close to being underneath my original starting point anyway.

My 8-year old son saw me digging and wanted to see the game. Showing him the mineshaft I was wandering around in the air pocket when this other thing-detector popped up saying 'object detected'.

It appears to be directional, going to try to find it.

It's a key!

At this point my son wanted to play and got into it, the staircase was abandoned in favor of digging straight down and screenshots and blog documentation were abandoned in favor of letting a child have a good time. We found some voles in the garden, home inspection should have caught it, won the game, don't own the house anymore. A really solid, zen game for five bucks - good times.

My HOA was very unhappy.