Backyard Digger Review (PC)

As the saying goes: if you’ve dug one hole in your backyard, then you’ve dug ‘em all. Well, technically nobody said that, but given that we’ve had both A Game About Digging a Hole and Keep Digging jolt to fruition in the past month alone, I’m convinced that there is a saying somewhere that follows that mantra. And to reinforce that saying, we also have another game about digging holes in backyard spaces afoot. Aptly titled Backyard Digger, the latest dirt-scooping garden sandbox brings just about everything that both the aforementioned titles have in their toolkits: a pile of mud, an open yard, and a sturdy shovel that allows passage through a seemingly bottomless cavern of ores, materials, and wealth beyond your wildest dreams. The rest of the game, as you can probably imagine, is self explanatory.

Backyard Digger doesn’t need to dress itself up as a special kind of experience. In fact, the game openly states what it is on its tin: a first-person crafting game in which the only real objective is to shovel through mounds of dirt in your backyard, upgrade useful tools and other equipment, and see how far you can go before hitting rock bottom. And by rock bottom, I mean an emotional barrier that only stretches as far as you’re willing to push it. The digging experience, on the other hand, remains as nonlinear and as open-ended as one might expect of such a bottomless graft. With that, you probably won’t find a shortage of nooks and crannies to turf up. The question is, should you?

Mining for Gold

If you haven’t romped through a game like this before, then here’s all that you need to know: a cavernous hole in your backyard houses troves of natural ores and rarities, and a player—you, of all people—spends a ludicrous amount of time digging through it in the hopes that something at the bottom will lead to wealth and prosperity. There isn’t a goal for you to chase, so to speak, but there are plenty of small milestones to unlock—incentives that effectively fork out minor but somewhat useful rewards, including upgrades for your shovel and pickaxe, and other stat-boosting add-ons to elevate your efficiency and stamina.

It starts out as one would expect: with a small plot of land in a backyard, and a rusty ol’ tool that you can use to make small dents into the earth below. Simply put, the more you dig, and the deeper you go, the more you begin to unlock. With greater depth comes better resources, and with greater resources comes more opportunities to delve a little deeper into the back pockets of its world. As you progress towards the pit of the ore-riddled underbelly of said world, you also come to unearth various challenges, including lethal environmental effects and death-defying verges.

With all of the above said, I will say this: Backyard Digger isn’t a difficult game. Like a lot of its kin, it’s actually an incredibly therapeutic game, as it does all in its power to ensure that you have another perk to pursue or an avenue to explore, regardless of how deep you are or what the status of your equipment may look like. It doesn’t house any fascinating secrets, nor does it keep a veil on anything mysterious at the pit of its core. That said, it does generate a pleasant experience that’s oddly satisfying to chisel through. But honestly, I think that’s all it does.

Just Keep Digging

Keep Digging had something of an edge to it; the fact that you could carve into architectural ruins and sites, for example, made it so that you always had a piece of history to unearth. In Backyard Digger, however, there isn’t much for you to discover aside from the usual ores and murky pits. There are better natural resources to find, for sure, but there isn’t much else to keep you second guessing as you carve through the dirt to unlock another platform in the underground tunnels. And that’s a shame, really, as I would’ve liked to have seen more depth in the world design. But as it turned out, the lower layers just weren’t any different from the higher anchor points.

The gameplay itself is still pretty straightforward, despite having one or two teething issues and visual drawbacks. It’s a simple digging game, and so, what you see is what you get: a button-mashing experience that mostly consists of hammering out clumps of dirt and foraging for resources to lumber back to your workshop on the surface. To that end, I wouldn’t say that you need to be an architect to master the basics of digging and foraging. It’s a laid-back process at heart, and so, again, while it doesn’t offer much by way of complex mechanics or challenges, it does provide a simple-to-navigate system that, if adopted correctly, can generate several hours of gratifying content. The only question that you might want to ask yourself is, is it worth it? The jury’s out on that one.

Verdict

Backyard Digger doesn’t do anything particularly special to reinvent the wheel, nor does it elevate the rubble-riddled blueprint that both A Game About Digging a Hole or Keep Digging recently brought to the table. Having said that, it does bottle a lot of the same satisfying gameplay elements that fans of the mindlessly repetitive grafting often enjoy, with its familiar yet universally accepted progression hooks and equipment milestones bearing a solid foundation for an oddly therapeutic experience. Again, it isn’t special, but at least it checks all of the right boxes.

I’d be lying if I said that Backyard Digger will change your life, or even give you something to write home about. The simple truth here is that, while you are likely to enjoy the simple pleasures that come with the monotonous graft of digging holes in your backyard, you aren’t likely to remember the “big payout” that nestles in the closing moments of the journey. It’s one of those situations—an anticlimactic finale that you enjoy for a brief period of time, but then ultimately forget shortly after the final pieces of ore have been shifted and the credits begin to fade. If that’s what you would call fun, and if you think that a relatively small payout is worth the blood, sweat and tears, then you’ll probably enjoy flicking the dirt in this backyard for a handful of hours.