Picking Up Steam: SteamWorld Dig (PC)

Even in a world full of steam-powered robots, someone’s got to do the digging for metal they’re made of, although Rusty didn’t raise his pickaxe to contribute to society. After his uncle’s passing, Rusty ends up being the one to inherit his claim, but Rusty knows there must be a deeper reason to it then just giving him a good source of income. So, Rusty starts digging down, the ores and gems he finds just a means to the end of learning what his uncle must have wanted him to discover.

SteamWorld Dig is a side-scrolling platformer with a bit of combat, but first and foremost, it’s a digging game. Your tools and your tasks revolve around plunging down into the mines and digging through dirt and stone in search of useful resources to help you dig even deeper. When the adventure kicks off, there really isn’t much more to it than that. You swing your pickaxe above, below, or in front of you, and you can break through a block of earth, harder substances taking more swings as you try to find the minerals that can actually be taken back to town to sell.  There’s hardly any danger to worry about; don’t dig under unbreakable rocks that will squash you and use your pickaxe to quickly dispatch the trilobites you unearth and you’ll be able to clear away a long descending route through the mineshaft.

The basic act of digging is always good for scratching a primal itch in the back of the human brain, uncovering little goodies through some light labor leading to brief moments of excitement as you make your way to your small rewards. The only big consideration near the start really is trying to keep your mine navigable. Rusty is able to do wall jumps so he can slow his fall to avoid damage or make his way back up a vertical shaft, but it’s still likely wise to make something a bit cleaner to navigate to avoid slip-ups. Trips back to town start off a bit of a hike because you need to climb your way back out every time, but eventually as you reach new subterranean regions you’ll be given shortcuts back, and more importantly, you will soon get the option to purchase teleportation devices that you place by your own discretion, meaning its on you how to spend your resources to set up your own way back to the incredibly tiny town of Tumbleton.

Rusty’s starting gear is pretty paltry, but once you’ve got a good haul of ore and gemstones, you can pop back to Tumbleton to talk with the few robots inhabiting the place. You can sell all your findings for cash to then spend at a slowly growing set of vendors, not only able to increasingly improve things like the strength of your pickaxe, your carrying capacity, or how long your light lasts down in the dark but manageable mines, but you’ll be able to pick up items like ladders you can place and those crucial teleporters. A stop by Tumbleton provides the reward for all that digging you’re doing and you’re usually having to make some informed choices on how to spend your cash since it doesn’t come to you too quickly, but SteamWorld Dig doesn’t starve you either so oftentimes if your packs are too full for more digging, you can bet that return trip to town is going you make you at least a bit more capable when you dive back in.

As you start making it deeper underground, you’ll start finding places with a greater range of threats as well as more visual variety than just a mineshaft full of soil. Enemies start to be something you might worry a bit about, explosions, projectiles, and harmful barriers starting to make you consider how to dig to get safely to something to take it out before it messes up your work or sends you falling down a deadly drop. Areas become less packed with just dirt and stone, the player needing to avoid dropping down into a cavern, move intelligently to get around dripping acid, and locate helpful pools of water as the steam-powered equipment required for heavier digging needs refreshing. However, enemies do still feel most like effective nuisances that interfere with digging rather than dangers you tackle through a real fight. Often the best choice is just to hit them in the face with your pick still, although one of the last upgrades at least lets you be a little smarter since it lets you attack at a distance. Besides a stand out finale, most hostile encounters are there to complicate the digging rather than serving as exciting encounters. Death can lead to a loss of cash, although your resources are kept near where you fell so you can potentially go scoop up the minerals so long as they weren’t destroyed. It certainly helps the few moments you do die avoid harming the flow of the adventure without it outright being meaningless, a decent balance for something that doesn’t feel as important to the grand scheme as the mining work.

However, SteamWorld Dig does have some puzzle-solving, and you’ll be seeing some of it even in the game’s fairly straightforward first mineshaft. Every now and then you’ll come across a door leading you to a more structured challenge area. The mines themselves are randomly generated, but these caves include curated puzzles that often ask you to work out how to move around or use a new ability to proceed. Your abilities don’t complicate things too much, often making things more convenient or giving you an extra options like the steam-powered digging tools. These small but appreciable upgrades do work as another way to break up the digging work, giving you a moment where you work your brain a bit more and walk away with something that helps you with your main task, sometimes in a big way. You’ll never become a powerhouse that carves through stone like butter or anything, and while there’s very few reasons to revisit old digging spots, you can definitely feel how much you’ve improved should you take your tools to an earlier spot and see how capable you’ve become. The later areas do briefly threaten to get a bit too far away from the thrill of digging though, but the game does start to pull it back after giving you some new abilities and more importantly remembering to provide more spots for you to carve your own path rather than having open drops be common. The randomization can alter this part of the experience certainly, but it does feel like there is an intentional squeeze based on a middle area’s introduced gimmicks that just needs a little gumption to get through so you can get back to what the game does best: digging.

THE VERDICT: SteamWorld Dig’s all about the fundamental joy that comes from digging. You spot something you want to dig up, figure out how you want to make a path to it, contend with any dangers near to it, and move onto the next one before heading back to town to turn it all in. It’s not too complicated, even the puzzles found in caves not being real headscratchers, but the rewarding loop is preserved well even if it means enemies you encounter are more bumps on the road than exciting disruptions to your regular work.

And so, I give SteamWorld Dig for PC…

A GOOD rating. SteamWorld Dig has the fundamentals of a digging game down pat, the simple pleasure of working your way towards more efficient digging being your reward for your finds a pretty easy way to motivate you. SteamWorld Dig doesn’t outstay its breadth of content either, the game not needing to get more complex since digging down to the bottom of what’s available won’t take you so long its simplicity wears thin. The caves are a smart and effective disruption that don’t strain the design too far, but it does feel like more substantial upgrades could have made for some more exciting highlight moments rather than it leaning mostly on the satisfaction of gathering valuables through gradual but fairly brisk work. The game’s ending does show a bit of creativity with what can be done with the game’s systems and it even incorporates more active action than usual, as most of the time contending with threats and danger in the mines is usually something you have the room to figure out and approach as desired. The foundations of the digging system are done well to make it addictive to keep pressing into the mines for a bit longer, but the rest of the experience isn’t as attention-grabbing despite having the decent mystery of Rusty’s uncle’s intentions and the occasional shake-up to what can be found down below.

SteamWorld Dig puts digging front and center in the title for good reason. You’re not going down there to fight or solve puzzles so much as you are looking for the next valuable mineral, and by building around that core, you’re never ripped away from the enjoyable digging work for long. Sure the digging could have been more robust, but SteamWorld Dig is also a good game to go to for the simple thrills of gradually earning easy progress with just enough disruption and necessary forethought to give it some meaningful structure.