A Game About Digging A Hole review

  I bet you can guess what A Game About Digging a Hole is about. True to its name, this game is exactly what it advertises, and barely anything more than that. For its short runtime, it's enjoyable for what it is, which is -- again you can probably guess -- a game about digging a hole.  

A Game About Digging a Hole opens by showing an advertisement for a house that allegedly has treasure buried deep in the backyard. You then play as the intrepid homebuyer who invests in some fantastical digging equipment and go to work digging deeper and deeper behind the house.

You control all the digging action using goofy first-person controls that make the entire expedition seem especially comical and ill-advised, though the actual gameplay makes digging a very deep hole about as easy as possible. There's no need to worry about ladders or all that much extra equipment. You just dig, collect things you find underground, return to the surface using your convenient jetpack, sell stuff, upgrade, and get back to digging.

At the start of A Game About Digging a Hole, the whole journey feels especially sysiphean. Your digging implement makes tiny impressions in the dirt and the rocks you sell barely get you any money to improve or change anything. When I first started playing I even thought that maybe the whole game was a sort of a joke made at the player's expense about how hard and seemingly endless the task of digging a really deep hole actually is.

I continued thinking this until I reached a depth of about 10 meters by the game's estimation and suddenly I had an indication that I was near something buried. Without giving too much away, this discovery seems timed with the upgrade system also clicking into place and making A Game About Digging a Hole very much the straightforward game it appears to be. You just keep digging until you're at the end, which takes a couple of hours at most, though I guess you can dig around a bit more to find more treasures or create your own tunnel system or whatever.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about A Game About Digging a Hole is that it lasts about as long as it should. Right around the time I was over what this game was, I fell -- quite literally -- into the ending. The ending sequence adds a bit more context to the opening in a way that is mildly clever, and then lets you start again with some achievements and stat tracking unlock.

While this is a neat addition to the game, I'm not sure I care that much about it to endeavor to play A Game About Digging a Hole again. There was some appeal in its initial premise, but everything about it is a little too barebones and janky for my liking. It is a good and memorable vignette, though, and one I am glad I experienced.

To just talk quickly about the iOS port, the controls stink but it also almost doesn't really matter. The game is simple, short, and not even all that punishing if you happen to perish a time or two. I can tell the developers are aware of how thin their premise is in how they keep things really easy and even remind you if it's been a while since you saved.

A Game About Digging a Hole is exactly what it purports to be. There are some moments of discovery and novelty, sure, but none of them go so far as to suddenly turn the game into something else. It is really just a game about digging a hole, and it's about as neat as that sounds.