Doggo Dig Down (PC)

There’s something oddly satisfying about digging a hole in a video game. While it’s menial labor in real life, in a video game, every piece of dirt you move is a clear sign of progress. Construction is similarly satisfying for essentially the opposite reason, every new piece added to the build another sign you’re closer to completion. Doggo Dig Down takes both of these and has the progress on one feed into the other, and while an excellent idea in theory, Doggo Dig Down also shows why there needs to be more at play than alternating between two simple tasks.

 

Doggo Dig Down does wrap its play in a cute concept. When choosing which save file to start with, the player gets to pick between three different breeds of dogs, the doggos all having silly looking cube shaped designs. The true goal of the game is pretty simple, that being to dig down as deep into the dirt as possible to bury your favorite bone, but it’s not a task that can be completed quickly. Your doggo is packing a device that allows it to quickly suck up dirt, each chunk of dirt a square on a grid that you can toggle on or off. Your pack can only hold so much soil though, so after a bit you need to empty it somewhere, the area above your humble doghouse being the perfect place to put it. The core gameplay loop becomes quickly apparent, as you need to scoop up as much dirt as possible and then offload it where it won’t get in the way of more digging, but to make things a bit clearer for younger players, a pleasant voice will explain how the game works and provide any information needed while happily cheering for the doggo when it finds new things.

Building up isn’t just about ditching dirt either, because as you climb higher into the sky, you’ll find presents that will give your doggo new abilities. Most of these take the form of small upgrades to your dirt pack like more capacity or a wider digging range, and these upgrades are doled out at an unfortunately slow rate. Digging down comes with its own rare rewards, but these instead are purely visual, your Doggo able to get a few different hats to wear. Making the work go faster will require finding these upgrades, but the sad truth of Doggo Dig Down is that there is so much empty space in the game. The action takes place on essentially one long vertical strip only as wide as your game’s window, the space seeming to be evenly split between the sky and the underground. Neither one is really populated well with interesting stuff to find though. Most of the area below your feet is just a long stretch of featureless dirt, and while there are secrets hidden in it, they’re just as sparse as the hats, meaning that you might not even uncover any unless you aim to clear out all the dirt. Even at max capacity though, you’ll never be able to carry enough dirt to make that a feasible task unless you want to sink hours upon hours into the task. Up above you it’s not much better, the few things breaking up the solid blue background being a few bouncy clouds. The time between getting an upgrade can be surprisingly long even when working at maximum efficiency, and it’s hard not to be a little disheartened when that upgrade turns out to be something like unlocking the ability to change the colors of dirt you place down.

 

The color changing power does play into one supposed feature of Doggo Dig Down, and that’s the ability to make pixel art with the dirt you’ve dug up. The limited horizontal range does sabotage this some, but if someone does want to make little pictures with stuff they’ve gathered, it is a serviceable enough canvas… but hardly an art tool compared to games with more freedom or variety like Minecraft or Terraria. The main goal of play is almost assuredly going to be making progress on going deeper underground and getting higher into the sky, and while it can be visually bare and tedious at times, it does hit those two levels of basic satisfaction mentioned at the very start. Seeing how deep your hole is or jumping off the side of your skyward staircase and marveling at how long you have to fall contextualizes your progress, but this definitely feels like a game better fit for mobile phones where you could fiddle around in it for a bit rather than committing to it for a long play session. However, there are definitely some areas for improvement, and it even almost touches on these with a few of its late game powers.

As you reach higher and higher into the sky, you’ll eventually get some skills that seem like godsends. The jetpack seems like a no-brainer for a power-up, the increased jump power allowing you to leave more space between dirt platforms or dig deeper shafts, but the jetpack starts off rather puny and only barely finds its usefulness once you’ve neared the end of your joint climb and dig. Another skill that seems almost too little too late is the power to teleport back to your doghouse. While digging down you need to keep making sure you have ways to get back up, and to get down from your skyward staircase involves a plummet that can sometimes drag on. The teleport allows for much quicker switching between the two styles of play, the player still needing to climb up to the sky or fall down the hole to continue those tasks but it does remove some of the less involved moments of play. Delaying this power makes some sense as it does speed up the process considerably, but the price of doing so means sometimes the hole digging does feel like the type of menial labor it shouldn’t be emulating. Figuring out how best to dig and build does require a bit of planning and thought, but a few more helpful powers early on could make for more impactful progress benchmarks than finding a hat or getting a very slight digging upgrade.

THE VERDICT: Doggo Dig Down tried to bank on the innate satisfaction of seeing your work pay off in two ways. Clearing away dirt and building up into the sky with it both have clear visual markers for progress, every bit of work clearly putting you closer to your goals, but the goals are sadly too spread out to really enjoy reaching. The hats and small upgrades can almost be disheartening to find due to their simplicity, the more helpful finds that could speed up the work kept until late in the game. Doggo Dig Down is still a cute and relatively stress-free experience, but the task asked of the player grows old quickly, the payoff for work rarely being worth the time invested to get there.

 

And so, I give Doggo Dig Down for PC…

A BAD rating. Successfully building up and digging down takes between 2 to 3 hours, and while Doggo Dig Down is meant to be a casual experience, it almost uses that as an out so it doesn’t need to include more involved or entertaining elements. The creators clearly recognize that there is some fun to be had in making a giant hole and building a tall staircase to the heavens, and having one feed into the other does allow a swap between gameplay approaches so that you can’t dwell on either task too long. Sadly, as the game wears on, the activities grow longer rather than more interesting. Too much time is spent traversing things rather than working on things, and the abilities that could overcome the downtime of climbing out of pits or falling off of your build are kept out of the player’s hands for far too long. Having only the basics of satisfying play means it starts off okay, but it sticks around too long and becomes monotonous for it, never really sinking down into an outright chore but still missing the extra oomph that would invigorate the longer portions of climbing and digging.

 

Doggo Dig Down made a very simple mistake in thinking that it could base the game around its single style of play. Like a chef adding salt to a meal, a certain amount will enhance the flavor, but once it becomes the dominant part of the dish, its appeal rapidly begins to fall off. Doggo Dig Down starts off well when you’re only digging or building in small doses, but once each of them becomes predominantly down time between brief bursts of activity, the thrill has faded and there’s nothing there to replace it or reinvigorate it. Doggo Dig Down is just too bare bone, its small successes buried beneath the emptiness that dominates the experience.