Review: A Game About Digging a Hole (Nintendo Switch)

You spend the entirety of A Game About Digging a Hole, well, digging a hole. And though it may not sound the most exciting, it kept me entertained a couple hours. However, this game is definitely meant for those who enjoy slowly paced, repetitive simulators. If you’re looking for a challenge or adventure, you’re not going to find it here.

In this digging game, you start by buying a house for only $10,000, under the impression that there’s buried treasure in the yard, which is all yours once found. In order to obtain this buried treasure, you must tear up your new yard. The game starts you out with a little shovel that digs little holes. As you dig, you’ll find resources such as stones, coal, and iron which you can sell to upgrade your shovel to dig bigger holes. The deeper your hole gets, the more resources you’ll find. The deeper the resources, the more they sell for.

You hold resources in your inventory, which can fill up. If that happens, any resources you dig will be destroyed, rather than picked up. This starts the repetitive journey of gathering resources, running to the surface to sell them, and then heading back to your hole to gather more. As with your shovel, you can also upgrade your inventory, allowing you to carry more resources before returning.

Along with the shovel and inventory upgrade, there’s also the shovel battery that can be upgraded. Of course, A Game About Digging a Hole couldn’t allow itself to be too easy, so it includes a feature in which your shovel has a battery which, when drained, explodes. If your shovel explodes, you lose all of the resources in your inventory and start from your yard again; so, not a huge loss. However, your shovel isn’t the only thing that drains your battery. As you dig deeper, you’ll start to rely on a jetpack to get you back up to the surface. You can upgrade your jetpack as well.

While this is mostly all you’ll get in A Game About Digging a Hole, you’ll also find a few extra features, such as mines, which you detect with a device that pops up when you’re near one. You can also locate money bags with another detecting device, and even two keys which allow you to open a chest in your shed. You can buy dynamite to break bigger and stronger rocks you find down deep, as well as lights for when you start to lose sunlight.

A Game About Digging a Hole gives you a few hours of digging simulation, with fun mechanics and strategy, which, for $5, isn’t bad at all. My only two problems with the game were that I found it lagging a lot. While digging, it quite often froze for a second or two. This didn’t exactly ruin the gameplay, but was definitely an inconvenience. My other problem was that I finished upgrading all of my tools long before I reached any important distance. The fun, mechanical aspects of the game were therefore lost, and I found myself in an even more repetitive cycle of gathering resources, selling them, and having nothing to spend my money on.

Otherwise, I found the controls very simple, the graphics fun, and the overall vibe entertaining, satisfying, and rewarding.