A Review of a Game About Digging a Hole

With the introduction of the shovel to Helldivers 2 (big win for democracy), digging holes in games is having something of a moment right now. In honor of that moment, and the countless suspiciously phallic trenches players will inevitably dig because of it, I want to talk about another game that pays homage to the great tradition of deleting large patches of dirt: 2025’s A Game About Digging a Hole.

A small indie game by Cyberwave studios, A Game About Digging a Hole takes about two and a half hours to complete – I have 2.7 on record – and can be purchased on Steam for $5 (or as the devs say: “only one coffee”). In it, you play as a nameless character who has just purchased a house rumored to have treasure buried in the garden. You start the game with a small trowel (which is battery powered, and explodes if it dies), a small backpack, and a conspicuously placed X in the middle of your backyard. As you start digging (which you can do anywhere, the X is just guidance), you come across various and sundry buried materials that you can sell on the surface for money – which you’ll need, because replacing your shovel’s battery comes with a price tag (did I mention it explodes?). You can also use excess money to upgrade your shovel, which increases its dig radius; your backpack, which increases how many items you can carry; or your battery, which increases how much you can dig before it runs out. You can also buy and upgrade a jetpack, which consumes battery life to give you a boost upward – something that becomes very helpful as your hole becomes deeper – as well as placeable lights for the depths and single-use sticks of dynamite to blow through especially hard rock. It’s worth noting that dynamite being able to mine through hard rock isn’t explained anywhere, you just have to figure it out by yourself. Something I did – eventually.

The core gameplay loop of A Game About Digging a Hole is generally well timed and avoids feeling “grindy”: I found that I didn’t have to come up to resupply too often, and every time I did I had earned enough money to feel a marked sense of progress. Plus, the action of digging itself is fairly satisfying, as is learning to navigate the twists that inevitably develop in your hole as you take advantage of openings left by veins of valuable ore. Occasionally, you’ll come across a structure underground, which is a fun break from the digging and gives the game a sense of mystique. That said, I do wish there had been more variety in the structures, and the metal-detector-esque beeping that was supposed to help you find them as you got close was hard to read and felt more frustrating than fun. 

While the core of the game is enjoyable, there are some notable polish issues that affect how it feels to play. On the smaller end, the death screen is shockingly mundane. When I die because I overused my robo-trowel, ran out of battery, and exploded, I would like something more than just text on a screen. Even something simple, like the explosion particles and semi-transparent death screen out of Minecraft would have gone a long way towards reinforcing the silliness and surprise of what is in principle a very funny mechanic. The real issue though, the one that takes this from a “fun game to suggest for an afternoon” to a “can’t in good faith recommend,” is a quirk of the dirt’s physics. The dirt in A Game About Digging a Hole is one amorphous mass, meaning that your shovel removes a set radius from wherever it's pointing, as opposed to a fixed block of mass a la Minecraft or Terraria. It’s also not subject to gravity (presumably so your tunnel doesn’t collapse in on itself). The result is that as you dig you’re likely to leave behind small specks of dirt that weren’t quite included in the dig radius on either side of them. These specks, despite being so small they’re at times barely visible, ARE ENOUGH TO CAUSE COLLISION, STOPPING YOU FROM MOVING THROUGH THEM. This means that as you navigate your pit, you’ll periodically find yourself suddenly unable to move and lose all your momentum. Additionally, because you need the crosshair to be over the dirt itself in order to dig, and the specks are small, identical in texture to the dirt behind them, and often in poorly lit areas, when you do inevitably get stuck behind one, getting past it can be extremely difficult and frustrating. There’s nothing that kills the joy of caving quite like finding out that you suddenly can’t move, can’t figure out why you can’t move, and now have to spend several seconds trying to find what’s catching you to perfectly align your crosshairs and make it go away. While small, this inconvenience comes up a lot, and it significantly harms the game’s flow.

This is enough to block your movement

Lastly, the game has a twist ending. Upon reaching the bottom of the map, the player stumbles upon an entrance to a deeper, darker area haunted by the growls of a mysterious monster. Here, they find a pack of giant moles roaming the immutable caverns, and after sneaking past them and finding the treasure discover that it was all a setup: the chest is empty, the moles have you cornered, and the game ends with a cutscene of the same real estate agent that sold you the house to begin with marking another tally in his notebook and relisting the house to entice another victim. All in all I like the ending: it has a sense of comedic punch, an interesting twist, and truth be told when I was playing through it, alone and in the dark, I found the pit at the bottom genuinely kinda scary as I first stumbled onto it and heard the mysterious growls coming from below. That said, like the rest of the game, the ending suffers from a general lack of polish. 

Death by mole produces the same bland game over screen as the battery exploding, once again hamstringing what would otherwise be a positive comedic moment. Even more annoying is the way that the game takes away your abilities. While in the last stretch, you can’t use your jetpack, dynamite, or lamps. This on it’s own doesn’t bother me: while it’s certainly a breach of the games themes to stop me from blowing up the moles with dynamite in a room I’ve dumped so much money into lighting it might as well be outside, I understand that that would have undermined the way that this last stretch is supposed to feel, and I’m willing to give it a pass for such a silly twist. The implementation of the lamp restriction specifically is really cool: if you place one below the bottom of the digable area, it will flicker and go out. This little touch goes a long way towards making the area feel creepy, especially when you’re first figuring out how to approach the foreboding cave entrance. The jetpack and dynamite, however, do nothing but give you a text notice that you can’t use them here. This is both immersion breaking and anti-climactic: while the lamp going out builds atmosphere, the prohibition on the other two feels entirely arbitrary. Surely there were design approaches out of this problem – could the ceilings not have been short enough that the jetpack provided no value? Would the moles being able to survive dynamite not have added to their humorous menace? 

Overall, A Game About Digging a Hole falls short of where it should be. It has a fun premise, an entertaining sense of humor, and a scope that respects its players' time. It also has numerous gameplay issues that range from missing potential to critical flaws. I will certainly be following Cyberwave to see what they produce next. As it stands, however, while I liked the game as a whole, it’s a few polish fixes off from being recommend-able in good faith.