Dig Deep is an idle mining game that is incredibly difficult to review as I used the game for myself to be an exploration of whether or not I enjoy idle games or not. If you like idle games and seeing an abstract scoreboard rising exponentially at speed, you’ll likely get a lot more out of the game than I did. I think my conclusion here is more that idle games aren’t for me rather than Dig Deep being a poor game.
Dig Deep on PS4 starts you off as a miner in a mine shaft. You walk around with the analogue stick mining the floor and collecting coloured rubble balls. When your backpack is full you climb up the mine and deposit the goods. Very quickly you are able to expand what you can carry and hire AI help with other miners joining you in the mine shaft. Using your collected resources you can then upgrade their efficiency too. You can also boost your own performance if you want to get involved by buying pets to give collection or speed boosts too. However, once you get some support in, you can start to immediately switch off from being actively involved in the game and watch the game play itself.
Once you cross certain resource thresholds you can then open up the next mine which will require you to start the process again. Each mine you open will be worth more and so the barrier to the next mine gets raised higher and higher but fundamentally what you do in the first 30 minutes is exactly the same as what you’ll do in the 30th hour. Therein lies my problem. Nothing changed, altered or felt different. Ever. It was just a different coloured floor I was mining and I just didn’t feel connected to watching my coffers rise. I felt disconnected from the playable experience and ultimately bored.
However, Dig Deep leans into this because a lot of idle games are meant to be a distilled hands off dopamine hit of low effort entertainment. From that perspective, Dig Deep actually succeeds because its so hands off and low effort, you don’t need to do anything to eventually win. It just wasn’t for me. Other idle games offer more variety in tasks or some strategy to go faster or speedrun optimal set ups. You can’t really do that with Dig Deep because each mine is weighted heavily to being more productive than the previous ones so you just invest in the new shiny mine and leave the rest to rot.
Whilst it might appeal to the low effort dopamine hit crowd, I came away from Dig Deep cold. I need more from my idle games to keep me engaged and connected. I spent most of the gameplay time in Dig Deep letting it do its thing slowly in the background whilst I waited for my platinum trophy to arrive and that feels wrong. Each to their own though…
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