Dig Deep

Genre: Idle Game

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local Split-Screen)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Best Mobile Games 5-in-1 bundle, along with Om Nom: Run, Pudding Monsters, Run Sausage Run!, and Sausage Wars)

Dig Deep is a family-friendly Idle Game released on mobile devices in 2022 and ported to Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in 2023. This game has you playing as a featureless yellow stick figure man digging deep into one of various square holes in the ground to collect resources, and gradually hire better and more competent workers to assist you with this task.

The presentation in this game uses simple, colorful 3D visuals with simplistic character models. It’s bright at appealing, but not distinct or memorable. This is backed by plunky piano music that keeps things upbeat, and joined by the sounds of your digging, which oddly sounds like the rasping of paper.

You’ll start the game digging on your own, which simply involves moving back and forth in one of the five-by-five square-shaped pits. You clear dirt as you move across one of the grid tiles in the pit, and clearing all 25 makes the next layer down accessible for digging. Collect all of the colorful balls you dig up, as well as gold coins and diamonds, and when your pack gets filled, bring them back up to the surface to unload them. over time, you’ll earn experience to level up, which gives you an even bigger pack so you can make less-frequent trips to the surface.

Even with this being the case, this task gets to be repetitive, which is why you’ll want to hire workers to make things go more quickly. On the surface, you’ll be trading your various resources for upgrades, and upon unlocking a worker house on the left side of the area, you’ll be able to “rent” workers to start digging up the hole and bringing back resources for you. Other upgrades include helper pets and temporary boosts, as well as access to areas farther to the right, with each successive area being more costly, but featuring a more lucrative hole to dig.

These workers are what makes this an Idle Game, as they will continually collect resources for you even if you do nothing. However, regardless of how involved you are, there’s a problem, one that I feel may be best illustrated by a joke:

^{Bob the city construction supervisor hires Jim as a new worker to paint the lines on roads in the city. Bob bBrings Jim to the beginning of a long stretch of highway, sets a paint bucket on the ground, and hands Jim a brush. Jim gladly accepts it, and gets to work.}

^{At the end of the first day, Bob checks Jim’s work, and he’s impressed – Jim completed ten miles of road. However, the next day, Bob was a bit disappointed to find that Jim only completed five miles. The third day, Jim only managed to complete two and a half.}

^{The next day, when Jim only completed a little over one mile, Bob called him into his office.}

^{“I’m afraid I’ll have to fire you,” Bob said, “You started out so well, but your work has been on a constant decline since the day I hired you. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”.}

^{“I’m really sorry,” Jim said, “But I’m doing the best I can, honest! It’s just becomes harder and harder to keep up with the workload when I keep getting farther away from the paint bucket!”.}

Ba dum tsh.

Anyway, getting back to the game, whether you’re moving resources out of the pit yourself, or having your workers do it, you’ll be looking at diminishing returns the farther down into the pit you get, not because there are fewer resources, but because the trip back up and out keeps getting longer as the pit becomes deeper.

For the first hundred layers, you’ll all be moving slowly up and down a ladder (thankfully clipping through each other rather than getting in each others’ way). After 100 layers, you’ll finally unlock a faster elevator. But then it won’t be until you’ve gotten 1000 layers underground that you’ll unlock a teleporter to bring you and your workers back to the surface. That’s quite a long ways, and until then, the trip back and forth can become increasingly long, even with an elevator.

This is offset somewhat by starting up each progressively more lucrative pit, but this just means you start this same process all over again with bigger numbers, which doesn’t exactly feel like progression in a real sense. What’s more, unlike some other Idle Games on Nintendo Switch, the workers do not continue to do their jobs when you quit the game. You have to keep the game actively running to make progress, even if you’re not actively playing it.

To be fair, there is something oddly compelling about digging deeper and deeper holes, building up your resources, and seeing your hole-digging empire get increasingly bigger. But too many issues here act like a hindrance to the feeling of true progression here, and before long Dig Deep feels more like a chore than an actual game. I don’t know about you, but if I’m working a job, I prefer it to pay actual money, not digital coins and diamonds.

tl;dr – Dig Deep is a family-friendly Idle Game where players dig down into square pits to get resources, and hire workers to assist with this effort. Unfortunately, the game progression here feels increasingly slow before long, and the “idle” part of the game doesn’t work when the game isn’t actively running. As Idle Games go, this one starts out feeling pretty compelling, but it doesn’t take too long before it just feels like you’re digging yourself a bigger hole.

Grade: C

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