I Am Busy Digging a Hole Review (PC)

I Am Busy Digging a Hole. We Are Busy Digging a Hole. A Game About Digging a Hole. Perhaps I missed the memo here, but from the sounds of it, video games about turfing up backyards to unearth ores and other natural rarities are the in thing these days. I understood the obsession when it came to Deep Rock Galactic, seeing as that particular episode involved a great deal more than getting your hands dirty for the sake of it. But games that are literally about digging holes for no reason other than to bandage the questionable desire to wax the dirt continues to bewilder me, truly. It seems I’ve yet to see the incentive behind it, much less the reason to grab a shovel and delve deep beneath a tree with no root attached to it. And yet, here I am, shovel in hand, about to do it again.

I’m not sure what it is that draws me towards this unusual pastime, but I can’t imagine that it’s the carrot-on-a-stick system that it dangles in front of me. It isn’t the graphics, either, or even the fact that it offers lavish assortments of jewels and special ores for me to pluck out from beneath the garden soil. Honestly, I don’t know what it is that compels me to keep digging. And yet, even without a reason for me to return to these bottomless pits, I often find that three hours will soon pass, and I’ll still be chipping through the dirt and exchanging miniature clumps of earthly minerals for pocket-sized chump change and pointless tool upgrades, wondering where it all went wrong, and then asking myself whether or not I should descend even deeper into the underbelly of ores. Well, that same thing happened here. Go figure.

Two Feet in the Grave

I’d already subjected myself to the lunacy of having to carve through excess waste to mine jewels and minted ores in A Game About Digging a Hole, and so, it didn’t take much for me to pick up the shovel and get to work. I knew the score: dig into the abyss from a local backyard burial site, and exhume various ores to help fund even more daring expeditions. It wasn’t all that different, in the case that, the initial portion of the journey shifted around the same process of building tunnels, mapping their corridors, and finding just enough ores to give that all-important tool a little extra oomph. Oh, it was like flicking a light switch, or succumbing to second nature or mere muscle memory.

I Am Busy Digging a Hole doesn’t exactly beat around the bush by filling your head with manuscripts of irrelevant jargon, nor does it hide behind a hidden meaning or whirlpools of information. It isn’t a fancy play on words; it’s exactly what it says it is on the tin, nothing more, nothing less. It is, for lack of a better description, a game about digging a hole. And as the proud owner of said hole, you have the simple task of digging deeper into it, and unlocking certain rarities that idle down below the surface. Why? Well, why not, I guess. It’s a pointless exercise, trying to establish the reasoning behind it. Mining for gold — we’ll leave it at that.

I Can See My House from Here

Making progress in I Am Busy Digging a Hole is as dull as you might expect it to be. It’s slow, taxing, and often painful work—to the point where you often have to question your ability to keep shoveling for hours on end with little to no respite. In a typical day, you will make a small amount of progress, boost your shovel’s efficiency level, and then return to the pit, all in the hopes of finding even rarer ores in the depths below. It’s a repetitive cycle that doesn’t boast too great an incentive, yet it manages to dangle that carrot on the end of its stick, almost as if it fool you into thinking that, if you can follow it for long enough, then you will eventually hit rock bottom, or at least, the previous treasures that sit at the bed of the pit.

I Am Busy Digging a Hole is certainly a lot more cartoonish than A Game About Digging a Hole. It’s more of an entry-level incarnation of the same idea, if anything. Yet, it works well, and it compliments the other components that the game brings to the table — like collectible dragons, for example. The gameplay isn’t massively different, but with fewer goals to fret about or skill trees to navigate, it does feel a little easier than your bog-standard mining sim. Not that this comes as much of a surprise, mind you. It’s digging a hole in your backyard. How tough can it be?

Verdict

I’ve dug enough holes to understand how indie games like these continue to attract attention, and believe it or not, it doesn’t boil down to the fact that some users will follow breadcrumb trails for no apparent reason other than to remediate their own boredom. It’s the “endgame” that compels you to dig deeper into sandboxes like these—the thought that, if you can inch just a little further into the dirt, then you’ll eventually reach an illustrious cavern of unimaginable riches or what have you. And it’s a textbook case right here, in I Am Busy Digging a Hole. It’s the not knowing what looms on the bottom that makes you want to upgrade your tools and spend another hour shoveling forward. Granted, the big payoff is rarely worth the effort — and yet it continues to entice us, regardless. Odd, that.

I’d like to imagine that, if you have the patience to stick around in titles like PowerWash Simulator, then the chances of you reaching the inner circle of a soil-smothered labyrinth of jewels will be astronomically high. I’ll level with you — the climax isn’t necessarily worth the commitment, but if you don’t mind losing a few hours to a relatively mindless graft in exchange for a few minted gems, then you should find what you’re looking for here. And if it doesn’t scratch that peculiar itch of yours, then hey — refer back to the earlier comment about the dime-a-dozen digging-centric indies. You won’t find a shortage of ore here.