When you boot up A Game About Digging A Hole on PS5, you get exactly what the title promises – you dig a hole. But what starts as a modest, almost meditative act of scraping away backyard dirt soon evolves into something faintly absurd and quietly compelling: a slowly deepening descent into mystery, grime, and hidden secrets. On the surface, it’s a humble simulator about digging. Underneath, it becomes surprisingly earnest, even a bit eerie at times.
That transformation – from innocent garden shovel work to subterranean unease – is the game’s biggest narrative charm. You begin with a basic spade and a dream: there’s treasure beneath the house you just bought. You dig, find ores, sell them, upgrade your gear – shovel to drill, small backpack to bigger cargo hold, weak battery to powerful drill power cell, foot travel to jetpack. With each upgrade, the digsite becomes more than just a pit – it becomes a tunnel system, a groove of your own design. Later on, the discovery of hidden mines and strange items suggests there’s more to this hole than simple soil. The payoff feels almost absurd, but satisfying in a weird way.
Gameplay itself – on PS5 as on PC – is a lesson in low-effort, high-return. Holding down R2 lets your auto-shovel do the work, and you watch the hole grow deeper and wider, layer by layer. Early digs feel slow and inconsequential, but as you unlock better tools and gear, each action feels more meaningful; each layer peeled away feels more weighty. There’s a satisfying loop of digging, reward, upgrade – then deeper digging. It hits that “just one more scoop” itch with shocking effectiveness. Still, when you’ve unlocked all the upgrades, found most of the ores and reached the bottom, the drive to keep digging wanes.
On the technical and audiovisual side, the PS5 version preserves the game’s indie-level, charmingly minimalist aesthetic. Visuals lean cartoony and colorful, not aiming for realism but capturing a cozy, almost playful tone. The digging animations – especially once you switch to drill – give a small but satisfying sense of weight and transformation; the growing chasm you carve out becomes its own kind of canvas. Controls are approachable, the HUD clean and uncluttered, and shifting between digging, selling, and upgrading feels smooth. The clean simplicity helps the game deliver on its modest ambitions.
Audio and atmosphere complement the simplicity. The ambient rumble when deep underground and the sound of dirt being displaced lend enough immersion to make solitude feel oddly real. It’s not a sweeping orchestral score – in fact, there’s no grand music at all – but rather subtle sound cues: digging, clinking ores, distant echoes, the hush of underground tunnels. It’s modest, but effective, and good for a few hours of low-pressure play.
That said – and here’s where the shine dulls a bit – A Game About Digging A Hole never outgrows its modest ambitions. The upgrade loop, while initially rewarding, can feel grindy and ultimately shallow. The physics of digging aren’t always convincing: stray pixels of dirt may linger, occasionally obstructing movement or causing clipping issues, and the game’s dynamite – supposed to help clear large rocks – sometimes feels unreliable or underwhelming. Moreover, the ending – while odd and amusing – hits abruptly; by the time you reach “the bottom,” there’s a sense that you’ve squeezed all the fun out of the hole, and little incentive remains to revisit it. The lack of deeper content – more tools, more surprises, or a more robust replay-friendly structure – is noticeable.
Still, for what it is – a small, low-price, low-commitment time sink that delivers a unique, meditative, slightly absurd digging experience – A Game About Digging A Hole works. On PS5, with smooth controls and the same core appeal intact, it doesn’t reinvent gaming – but it doesn’t need to. It’s a playful, minimalist ride that simply offers a few hours of fun . If you go in expecting exactly that – a hole, some dirt, some laughs and a weird little secret – you might just find yourself digging long after you planned. For those in the mood for something absurdly simple, quietly addictive, and oddly melancholic for a few hours, it’s worth the spade time.
Score: 7.4/10
Press Play Media 