A Game About Digging a Hole Review - Feeling Holey

I believe we all have the urge to dig holes. Be it because we saw a dog do it, to hearing that we can dig to China, digging a hole is everyone's childhood activity of choice at some point in their life. Games have certainly put variations on this, with Minecraft, Terraria, and many others having you dig for materials to build. Now we have A Game About Digging a Hole, brought to us by the publishers of the arguable hole-adjacent Super Dungeon Maker, which just celebrates the act of digging.

There isn't much story, and it's not like the game really needs it. All you need to know is that your character buys a house after seeing an ad that promises there's a treasure buried in the backyard. Now all you need to do is get it. To do so, you buy an automatic shovel.

Using this you can begin the holy (holey?) act of digging. This is as simple as clicking a button to remove a small chunk of dirt from the ground. You'll remove chunk after chunk as you slowly move further and further underground.

Thankfully, there's cool stuff buried in your backyard. At first, you can find shiny rocks and coal to sell, but before long you'll be finding more and more valuable materials. You can use these to upgrade your tools, in true incremental game fashion, allowing you to dig bigger holes, use a jetpack to escape, and get some tools like lamps for when it gets dark, or dynamite to blow up rocks.

I feel the need to mention that A Game About Digging a Hole is not secretly a horror game. While the lower you go the more foreboding stuff can feel, especially with some creepy tunnel noises, there are no jump scares or surprise monsters.

There's just one caveat to this: Your automatic shovel has a weird quirk. You see, if the battery runs empty at any point, it explodes, killing you instantly. What this actually means in practice is that you respawn in your garage with minimal health and your inventory emptied out, but this is a rather important thing for you to keep an eye on.

Despite the presence of a health bar, there are no enemies in the game. It's mostly there for fall damage or the rare instance where you may do something stupid (like me) and stand on one of the lava rocks that occupy some of the deeper levels of the hole. Unless you fall and forget to activate your jetpack at any time, or purposefully let your battery explode for funsies, you'll be fine and likely will never die.

A large chunk of your enjoyment of A Game About Digging a Hole will end up being on the incremental elements. The genre is well known for being based all around the joyful feelings "number goes up" brings you. As you progress, your bigger shovels and battery capacity certainly help that feeling. However, there's also the problem that there's very little to upgrade. I maxed out all four of the game's tools about 2/3rds of the way through it, before I had even found the most valuable materials, and it certainly made the last chunk of the game feel hollow.

There's also the bigger problem caused by the game's dirt. There's no dirt physics, which may not seem like a huge surprise for a silly $5 game about digging a hole. This does result in a bunch of small floating pieces of dirt that are easy to get stuck on. It's more of a problem early in, when the shovel destroys bigger chunks of dirt and becomes automatic then you'll see less small floating dots of dirt, but it's still frustrating, especially when you can get stuck on one.

A Game About Digging a Hole Review | Final Thoughts

But, again, A Game About Digging a Hole is a $5 game that takes about two and a half hours to fully dig the hole and complete it. If you really need an incremental game in your life with deep mechanics and gameplay, stuff like Cell to Singularity, Cookie Clicker, Sixty Four, and Melvor Idle will fit the bill much better.

None of them, however, will bring the pure satisfaction of digging the hole that A Game About Digging a Hole will bring. It's a childhood favorite activity for a reason.

A Game About Digging a Hole was reviewed on PC with a copy provided by the publisher over the course of 3 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.