Sometimes my plans don’t work out. My first candidate for this week’s column, due to transoceanic communication breakdown, turned out to just be a demo, while my second is embargoed for another 3 weeks. As a last resort, I went ahead and played the cheap digging game.
This was only a hail-Mary because A Game About Digging A Hole is already fairly well-known. It’s been out for a month, has over 9,200 reviews and a Very Positive rating on Steam, and seems to have strong word of mouth, as that’s how I heard about it in the first place. As previously noted, one of my goals with this column is to highlight games that ordinarily wouldn’t get much hype, but AGADAH is already on track to be one of this year’s designated indie sleeper hits.
It does feel like it’s the pilot for a bigger project, however. AGADAH is short, simple, and cheap, and treats those qualities like they’re features; its Steam page repeatedly notes that, at a starting price of $4.99, it costs less than a fancy coffee. From the jump, AGADAH’s developers are careful to manage your expectations.
You play AGADAH as an anonymous person who happens across an ad tacked to a billboard: someone is selling a house in your neighborhood for only $10,000 and there’s a treasure hidden in its back yard. It then makes a hard cut to you, a newly broke idiot, standing outside your new house with a shovel and a dream.
Your goal is to dig into your back yard until you find the treasure in question. For some reason, you’re equipped with an electric-powered shovel that runs off a portable battery. If the battery’s power ever runs to zero, it explodes, which drops you back at ground level with minimal health and battery life.
However, you can find mineral deposits in the soil as you go which can be sold online via the computer in your new garage. The money is used to recharge the shovel, treat your wounds, and gradually accumulate upgrades to your battery life, shovel efficiency, and carrying capacity. You can also buy a jetpack, which becomes necessary early on to both escape your own hole and safely descend to where you left off.
The systems do end up puncturing the game’s sole plot element. Once you get far enough down, you start reliably finding gold, platinum, and diamond deposits, which made me wonder if the treasure you’re after really was all the ore you mined along the way. There was a point early on where I’d have been happy to settle for the quarter-ton of precious metals, the functioning jetpack, and what appears to be a small house in a decent neighborhood.
As it turns out, there is a last-minute plot twist, but it’s a little crazier than that. Once you’ve reached AGADAH’s conclusion, which took me just under 3 hours, you can immediately start over with some bonus objectives to complete its achievement list.
For most of its running time, AGADAH is a calming experience that taps into some of the same meditative vibes as Hardspace: Shipbreaker or Powerwash Simulator. You have a job to do and are largely left alone to do it. It’s the sort of game that exists to help you work through your podcast backlog.
It does start getting more complicated as you get further underground. Lava rocks can damage your character on contact, you’ll need to bring dynamite to destroy certain obstacles, and it’s not hard to accidentally fall to your death. Once you get about 20 meters underground, it also adds a sort of ticking-clock element where you need to save enough battery for the end of each run to be able to escape from your own tunnel.
AGADAH also has a strange issue with its lack of physics, as disconnected chunks of dirt or rock end up suspended in mid-air unless you carefully destroy them all. I could look up from the bottom of my excavation and see concentric rings of debris floating in space, which created the impression that I was the only thing in this universe who was subject to gravity.
The most crucial problem with AGADAH is that you have to click a lot. You initially have to dig out each shovelful of earth by “hand,” which leads to a lot of repetitive motion. The fourth shovel upgrade does turn it into a sort of vacuum drill, which finally allows you to hold down the button and blow away all the earth in your path, but my wrist was already feeling the strain by that point. If you’ve got a gamepad with a turbo feature or some other workaround (i.e. a younger relative or offspring who hasn’t wrecked their body yet), it’s worth using for AGADAH.
While A Game About Digging A Hole lasts, it’s a decent project simulator with a simple but absorbing core loop. Most of my criticisms boil down to either quality-of-life issues or requested additions, and quite a few people seem really mad about the ending, but it’s a decent, short time-waster. In a perfect world, this is simply the teaser for a more elaborate, somewhat crazier Another Game About Digging A Hole, with better physics and an auto-shovel system.
[A Game About Digging A Hole, developed by Cyberwave and published by Drillhounds, is now available on PC via Steam. This column was written using a copy of the game purchased by Hard Drive.]
