For The Cost of Bioshock Infinite, You Could Buy 60 Copies of Miner Dig Deep (More If You Count Tax)

I’m forever in love with Arcadian Rhythms for introducing me to Miner Dig Deep. Waking Mars was one thing, but the true palate cleanser after the unpleasant cacaphony that was Bioshock Infinite was Miner Dig Deep, a $1 Xbox Live Indie Game made by the Three Brothers Ribaux who seem to have done nothing else and it is a goddamn shame. (It’s probably for the best–I love Miner Dig Deep so goddamn much that if I could find an email address for them I would be pestering them daily with ideas for cool new features and badass things that could happen in the sequel that I would be daily pestering them to make.)

Look, it’s a super simple game. You’re a miner, there’s a mine, and you’ve got to chip away at the dirt and get gems. You bring the gems to the surface and buy tools, which make digging down easier. The further you dig, the better gems you get, and the more you can sell them for. Eventually you make it to the bottom, you find the largest diamond in the world, and you can either start a new mine or continue bumming around getting more gems. The whole time, soothing guitar music plays–light, pleasant instrumental stuff seemingly made by one of the brothers with a copy of Garageband–and it’s got pleasant, colorful graphics. The worst thing that happens in the game is you get hit by a boulder or fall down too far, at which case you just reappear at the top of the mine having lost all the gems, maybe ten minutes of progress at most. It’s just a happy game.

But there’s a surprising amount of intricacy hidden in the game–it’s a much more carefully-crafted game than it first appears. Miner Dig Deep is essentially three sets of mechanics–economic, physical, and architectural–which influence each other. You spend a lot of time gathering gems to sell and buying equipment (economic). You navigate the mine by jumping around, light platformer style (physical). And you build the mine, essentially designing the levels (architectural). Changes to one affect the other. You buy better equipment (economic) which alters your abilities, allowing you to more easily navigate the mine (physical), which in turn lets you dig deeper and more efficiently (architectural), which lets you find more valuable gems that sell for higher prices (economic), which in turn lets you buy even better equipment…. The equipment list itself is well-thought-out–I could see a game giving into the temptation to give tons of gear, but Miner really only has a couple of basic types and spends most of its upgrades on stronger versions. This allows for an extremely tight design–essentially nothing is useless.

It feels almost churlish to point out the game’s flaws, given how they’re mostly cosmetic. The sound effect for the drill/grapple hook is annoying as hell. Descending to the bottom of the mine, in the latter stages, takes a little too long. Really and truly, for what the game is, that’s pretty much all I found wrong with it. There could be more to it. I could see the game refined into a sequel with more gem types, with different types of soil, maybe a bigger mine, different tools.

And that would be cool. But I’m not greedy. Miner Dig Deep took me a few days to play and I loved every moment of it. After the first day, I would sit on the couch, mute the TV, put some music on shuffle, and just zen out. AJ, commenting on his Arcadian Rhythms article, called the game “therapeutic”, and I completely agree with that. Let’s call it 7 hours I spent with Miner Dig Deep. In those seven hours, I did not murder a single person, did not spend a minute contemplating a convoluted story that turned out to not be worth it, and felt a deep connection to the environment I was exploring. Ken Levine could learn a very solid lesson from the Ribaux Brothers.

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Tags: arcadian rhythms, bioshock infinite, featured, miner dig deep, waking mars