Rock Bottom

It's a been a while since I played a game this refreshing :D

A good quick game. Felt good to play. Progression worked well. Sound enjoyable. solid for the price point.

It's a bit flawed in the end game, Game design feels misguided at times. but the early game is pretty fun. Nice concept; dig around, you have limited energy to mine, but every stat, pickaxe and stamina is upgradable. The art style works quite well, and it had a certain something that kept me going with it. Theres a few issues though. With the exception of one level, each level you go to only has one type of mineable material on it, gold, crystal, sea crystal etc. In the later part of the game when you get to the second base, you get access to some new and cool mechanics. But also are introduced to "alloys", these are metals/ingots you can make only by combining three other materials. This seemed like a unnecessary complication. There are skill trees for different things, like mining speed, damage, special pickaxe effects to damage more blocks, you level up the skill branches by spending materials in them. Some quite nice ideas here. But eventually the skill trees for different features all dive into the alloys, which then means instead of farming on one level to upgrade something, you have to go farm on three, but to repeat the earlier point each level already has one unique ore only on it. It feels like alloys were added in to try and pad the game out. Each alloy also takes multiple of the three resources (8 to 12 i think). So it means you are only gonna maybe get 200-400 of that alloy, and you will definately need a lot more than that. You can also level up the amount of materials you get from each ore block, and can level up the furnace to have multiple inventory slots for depositing and collecting. But the ratios feel off. On the first (gold) or second (iron) levels I might fill up my 8 inventory slots, but the two levels after that, with all upgrades, I am lucky to hit four levels 4-7 it was close to two or three slots filled. These things sadly add up to make the late game a bit of a grind, but the early game is pretty nice, up to level 5/6 I think. I did give up on this before hitting the last level, the grind just intensified too much for me.