I was nosing around for a feelgood story to perk you up after this morning’s depresso news stew. But then I thought: what have you done for me lately? So instead, we’re going to write up the release of Diggergun, a life sim platform game about burrowing for lithium, in which you lose a portion of your take-home pay to costs based on real-world current UK tax, national insurance, debt and household expenses. Glorious! That’ll teach you to show up here, expecting some kind of escapism.
In my defence, it seems possible for Diggergun to become more of a feelgood game if all of the aforesaid realworld statistics improve. But I’m not sure this will ever transform into Wandersong, exactly. One of the first things I did in the Steam demo was develop symptoms of what I assume is lithium poisoning. There may also be supernatural threats ahead: white eyes in the dark, and little green men (self-described, anyway – the visuals are monochrome) who talk of ancient evils below. Is a Balrog worse than the cost-of-living crisis? This we may discover.
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As in Hardspace: Shipbreaker, you start the game owing a hefty sum to a giant corporation, the operators of a weird Cornish mining operation on the isolated and therefore, unregulated Bal Island. To pay off the debt – or so you’re told by your employers – you must jump and gun-dig through a “diverse range of randomly generated mines and intricately hand-designed levels”, all of them presented as 2D platters of destructible blocks, gems and hostile critters. It’s sort of Spelunky but with Minit’s art direction, and each floor is (so far) more of a single-screen puzzle than a procedural ecology.
You’re bound by an energy gauge that decreases for every floor you descend, and punishes you in various ways for overdoing it. You can deposit your lithium load and return to the surface by heading to the exit on each level. Also on the surface: a gloomy town’s worth of miners, managers, loansharks and shabby apartments, like Tristram if it were founded by Weyland-Yutani. There are people here you can bond with to pursue a multiple-ending storyline. I feel like my best friends so far are the toilet and shower in my apartment, which restore a precious point of energy apiece.
Diggergun is the work of solo developer Kabloop, and has an autobiographical underbelly. “I started working on the game three years ago, after a very unpleasant experience working at a video game publisher,” the developer told me over email. “Something I didn’t expect was that Diggergun’s themes about workers rights and the minimum wage have become more relevant today than when I started.”
“Whilst things are looking bleak, it’s my hope that Diggergun can be a part of a much needed discussion about workers rights, and our duty of care to one another,” the dev went on. “As opposed to ranting at people, my game attempts to highlight its themes through its emergent gameplay. For example, if the player does their job correctly they’re rewarded with more work… something I’m sure we can all relate to.”
If all this sounds too relatable, know that the game has some uncomplicated upsides. The setting is pleasantly mysterious and there’s some wonderful audio design. Signboard text unfurls with a warble of Morse code, and your character makes a digital plinky-plonk noise when they walk that I found immediately endearing. Still, none of that’s going to pay the rent. Find out more on Steam.
