A Game About Digging A Hole - Switch Review

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but not only does A Game About Digging A Hole invite you to do exactly that, it lives up to that expectation to a fault. This isn’t one of your streamer gems where it says you’re digging a hole but then somehow end up fighting an angry, underground god with shovel magic. There’s none of that. It really is just about putting your shovel to the earth and defying God the old-fashioned way: Terraforming. There would be a kind of zen quality to the game though, were it not for the weirdly high number of technical faults for a game like this. 

You start out with the imaginatively named Shovel-matic 2000, an X to start digging from on your back lawn, and somewhere far underneath your backyard is a nebulous goal to be reached. You can sell the ores you dig up but it’s only for the purposes of purchasing digging upgrades, and only ever rocks of increasing value and not, well… something more interesting. That said, WYSIWYG has never been more applicable - let’s dig in.

The Good

If you’re old enough to remember the glory days of Flash games, A Game About Digging A Hole will have a distinct and familiar vibe to it. That is to say, every part of the player’s arsenal is upgradeable at expected, uniform costs across the board, with progress scaling linearly for both player upgrades and loot values. It’s also an extremely simple gameplay loop of digging up dirt, collecting shinies, selling shinies, buying bigger equipment, and then going back to step one. It’ll give you a handful of achievements to aim for in what I’d generously call its “new game plus,” but that’s the only time it deviates from its main focus. 

I would almost classify it as a “cosy game” in that way, were it not for the possibility of falling to your death or having your battery explode and kill you. The stakes are low, however, as you only drop whatever ores you’re carrying at the time, keeping your money while being returned to the surface so you can fix yourself up. Without a ticking clock element, or a need to optimise resource gathering as much as possible, there’s really nothing that pushes you towards the goal other than the pursuit of the goal itself. And the play area provided is large enough that, if you  wanted, you could play for hours and do nothing but dig out dirt with truly no other purpose. You can do that. The game will just let you. 

This kind of simplicity isn’t strictly a bad thing, and counting in at maybe a couple of hours to finish it entirely, it’s a comfort game of sorts. It does indeed remind me of the flash games I’d play during overnight shifts in a call centre. It was something I played during a Christmas gathering when I was feeling too sub-human to communicate. It doesn’t demand a lot of your attention while scratching an itch in your brain. It is effectively a fidget toy in video game form and for the asking price, it’s fine.

TL;DR

• Low stakes, zen gameplay that scratches an ADHD itch

The Bad

I can’t believe I’m saying this about a game about digging a hole in your backyard but this game is in dire need of some quality of life and technical improvements. The biggest problem is that there’s the occasional hitch where the game just freezes up for several frames before resuming. Its second biggest issue is one of general slow down and framerate dips. Both of these issues become worse the further into the game you get. 

It’s possible that, perhaps, it was due to how long I had the game running for; however, when your game is designed to be beaten in a single, short sitting, a couple of hours shouldn’t be a big ask. In the interest of full disclosure, I was playing on an OLED Switch. So, you know… perhaps I needed the awesome power of a Switch 2 to fully enjoy the digging experience at its best. There were also a couple of occasions where menus would appear but the in-game controls would still be active. Stuff like this and the freezing are especially egregious frustrations in a game that’s meant to be a relaxing, zen-like experience. 

The game also hits its own ceiling too early on, with upgrades maxing out well before you reach the end, but no additional progress markers to keep you going until that point. The few treasures that you’ll find are just more resources, and while I’m normally a fan of design loops that reward gameplay with more gameplay, we’re not exactly dealing with Monster Hunter here. It ironically becomes a bit of a grind. 

By the end I found myself wanting desperately for some kind of variation and the monkey’s paw buried somewhere in the game curled in that very instant. At the risk of spoilers, there’s an out-of-place “action sequence” at the very end that felt both out of place with the rest of the game, and like the dev had run out of ideas. It just felt like a lot of misinvested development time that could have been spent instead polishing the parts of the game that were actually fun.

TL;DR

• Weirdly frequent technical faults for such a small game
• Loses focus on the core gameplay at the end, to its detriment
• While short overall, you’ll still max out too fast and grind towards the end

Final Score: 6/10

I mean, it’s a game about digging a hole in your backyard and selling rocks. It shouldn’t have as many technical issues as it does and could maybe use a little pizazz in the design department but I’ll give it this: It never claimed to be anything else. If you’ve got a few bucks left over from a gift card or just want something virtual and inoffensive to distract yourself for a while at the Christmas gathering, this will certainly fill those gaps.

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