DIG Raiders: Anomaly Extraction Análise (PC)

I was all for the idea of letting E.T. phone home, but once I realized that it made more sense to keep him docked on Earth, I decided against it. I had a debt to settle, and that little snot green alien was the answer to all of my problems. Or, so I thought. I figured, if I was able to fool him into building an assembly line, work a nine-to-five in a shopping mall, or host a dance class with an adoring online crowd, then I’d make a profit. If—and it was big if—I could dig deep enough, and if I could repay my debts, then I could transform an alien encounter into a profitable empire. I just needed the friends to accompany me and to abandon their moral compass. That was another issue that even the aliens couldn’t solve.

DIG Raiders: Anomaly Extraction is a bit like Keep Digging, only without the clumps of mud and with a little more, well, extraterrestrial tomfoolery. While the point of the game is vaguely similar—to burrow your way into the dirt and to collect sunken treasures and upgrade your tools and what have you—there is a lot more to it than your average incremental digging gig. See, the problem you have isn’t so much with the dirt and the ores, but with the aliens, the debts, and the idiotic friends who haven’t the slightest clue how to operate a trowel. That’s your main problem in DIG Raiders: the lunacy of the situation, and all of the chaos that comes with it.

DIG Raiders is a game that gradually gets weirder as you spend more time with it. At first, it starts out with a simple task: to unveil the remnants of an alien civilization beneath the surface, and to gather enough treasures to pay off your debts. Shortly after that, you find yourself with a trove of bizarre scenarios to juggle—a cast of animal-skinned characters, a Backrooms-like mall, a neon district of automated systems, and a general sense of weirdness that, unless you witness it with your own eyes, you wouldn’t normally believe. It’s all a little “out of this world” — but that’s sort of the point. DIG Raiders knows of its weirdness, and it wears it like a paper glove.

A co-op game at its core, DIG Raiders leans into all of the usual “friend-slop” tropes to create a contextless playground for like-minded miners to carve into, with a nonsensical world, a bouquet of sandbox-like elements, and an open-ended mission format which multiple users can manipulate to wreak a little havoc and laugh at one another’s expense. With a shared debt in the balance and numerous ways for each player to accrue funds, the game invites each mining enthusiast to deface the soil, collect items of value, and extract alien DNA to either dispose of or use as a crutch for additional sources of passive income. And yes, you can force the aliens to dance. Don’t ask.

As I said, DIG Raiders isn’t a game that makes a lot of sense. Unlike A Game About Digging a Hole—a game in which you actively search for the core and follow the usual upgrade-based progression tiers—DIG Raiders invites you to get a little more creative with your work. Mining, for example, isn’t restricted to ores and lumps of dirt, but random objects like vending machines and ATMs, for example. Moreover, as you don’t have one core to knuckle in on, but nine unique layers that range from believable to totally absurd, the labyrinth isn’t what you would refer to as predictable. With every descent that you make, a new portal opens up to you and your squad, and with it, more opportunities to exploit your alien neighbors for wealth.

Although you can play DIG Raiders alone, I can’t say that it’s the definitive way to experience it. See, DIG Raiders is a lot like your usual friend-slop experience, in that it shines brightest when under the influence of a broader audience. With friends, it’s a lot of fun to slog through, especially when you’re actively working together to pay your debts and conjure up fascinating ways to expand your network. Alone, it isn’t quite as entertaining, given that you have all of the weight on your shoulders, no breathing room to experiment with vast possibilities, and no reason to chuckle at the frequent oddity. To say that it’s a lonely experience wouldn’t be true. That said, DIG Raiders is definitely a game that stands out as a multiplayer-oriented affair rather than your traditional single-player digging simulator.

In any case I’d say that another addition to the mining pool would be a waste of time. With DIG Raiders, though, I can make an exception. Despite being a bit of a jumbled mess with a whole lot of moving pieces, it is a genuinely entertaining game that delivers on its promise to fashion an oddly engaging experience out of an extraterrestrial hook. With thanks to its nine layers of kookiness and its vast open world of colorful aliens, bizarre interactions and oddball adventures, it does, for better or worse, make for a jolly old time.

While there is clearly a bit of room for improvement in the technical aspect of the game, DIG Raiders is, against all odds, surprisingly enjoyable, more so if you have the friends to join you on your journey and share the burden of an ever-climbing debt with. With a few game modes to explore—Story and Showdown, for example—you have a sizable chunk of material to work through, too. Add the fact that you can also play as several characters with varying abilities, as well as monopolize an entire underground empire with all sorts of seemingly unrelated business ideas, and you have quite the lead weight on your shoulders.

Verdict

DIG Raiders: Anomaly Extraction takes the ores and the on-rails elements of an incremental digging sim to even stranger depths with a totally absurd mine-and-monopolize co-op experience that, while still being in receipt of a few minor flaws, captures all of the best aspects of a lovable friend-slop chapter. It’s utterly ridiculous I’ll admit, but that’s partly what makes it all the more appealing. Who doesn’t love a dancing alien?