Hero image: A Game About Digging A Hole Together announcement trailer. Image: Mi’pu’mi Games
I will say it straight away: the best news in this week’s pile of trailers was not a new hero or a big launch date. It was a game about digging a hole, and the fact that its sequel is letting you dig it with your friends. I think that is exactly how a small game should grow, and I wish more of them grew that way.
A Game About Digging A Hole Together was announced on Xbox’s YouTube channel this week, and the pitch is almost comically modest. You dig into the sand at the beach, collect what you find, sell it, upgrade your equipment and keep going down after a treasure that is supposed to be buried somewhere below. That is it. There is no release date yet, and the store pages just say it is to be announced.
What I like is what the developers chose not to do. On the Steam page they say they wanted to keep the minimalist formula of the first game and focus on what players asked for, which was “more time to dig and the ability to dig together”. I mean, how often does a sequel announcement promise less of a reinvention rather than more? Usually the second game has to be bigger, louder and full of systems nobody asked for, and I think a lot of lovely little ideas get buried that way, if you’ll excuse the pun.
This one goes sideways instead of up. It is the same digging, the same beach, the same hole, and now there is someone standing next to you in it. That sounds like a small change, but I do not think it is. A game you play alone is a thing you do to pass the time, while the same game with a friend becomes a thing you do together, and those are two very different evenings. Wouldn’t you rather spend an hour laughing at how badly your mate is digging than spend it being told about a crafting tree?
I also cannot help liking the tone of the whole thing. The developers point out that you can still dig on your own, “if, like us, you don’t have any friends”, and I’d argue that joke tells you more about the game than any feature list could. It does not take itself seriously, and it does not pretend that digging a hole is anything grander than digging a hole. That kind of honesty is rarer than it should be, and it makes me trust them with the sequel.
Now, I know what you might be thinking. Is a co-op mode really enough to call something a new game? Maybe not for everyone, and I will not pretend I know what the full thing will look like, because all anyone has to go on so far is a trailer and a store page. But I would rather a developer spend its time on the one thing players actually wanted than pile on everything they did not, and I would happily take a game that knows what it is over one that is trying to be five things at once.
So I will be watching for a date, and I will be hoping more small studios take the hint. Give me the thing that worked, give it to me with a friend, and leave the rest out. As for me, I know which job I would pick in a two-person hole, and it is whichever one involves the least shovelling.
Source: Steam – A Game About Digging A Hole Together, XBOX on YouTube – A Game About Digging A Hole Together Announcement Trailer