I yearn for the excavation site. This is the result of spending too much time with Dig Dig Dino, the newest release from Playdate’s long awaited Season 2, and a game about digging up dinosaurs and detritus.
It is, as with many of Playdate’s games, presented with an untold amount of charm and carefully cultivated visuals, making the most of the handheld’s crisp monochrome screen, with a tightly crafted gameplay loop that is surprisingly moorish. It’s about digging. And it’s good.
Your archeological team are a series of humanoid animals, led by a canine chap in a jacket – Dig Dig Dino’s Alan Grant – with each of your companions in charge of an important sector for your dig, including the archivist collecting artefacts, a scientist collecting DNA strands – when has that ever worked out? – and a tech guru who provides you with upgrades and enhancements like Q from James Bond, only he’s a pig. No, not a chauvinist pig, an actual one.
The central gameplay loop revolves around digging. You have a set amount of energy, as well as a shovel and a drill, and each time you dig through a particular layer of soil, you use up some energy. Rocks are your main nemesis, and you have to drill these into oblivion to get to the sweet bones beneath, with some taking multiple hits to shatter. When your energy runs out, that’s the end of this run.
You then take the cash you’ve earned from whatever you’ve dug up – whether that’s coins, trash or actual archeological finds – and buy upgrades, improving how much digging your spade does, or gaining new technology like a radar that helps you locate items of interest. Once you’ve spent all your money, you head out to dig up some more things, and start all over again.
The funny thing is, you’ll keep doing it. It probably shouldn’t work, but there’s something hugely appealing and fundamentally satisfying about clearing an area or digging deeper to find the missing DNA strand for a particular dinosaur. There’s also a puzzle element to it, uncovering the tip of a bone or artefact, and then working out the most efficient way to excavate it with the energy you have remaining.
There’s plenty of longevity here, with multiple areas each hiding a series of skeletons, as well as different artefacts and treasures. When many Playdate games have a finite lifespan, or explore a very acute set of mechanics or ideas, Dig Dig Dino has just the right hook to keep you coming back.
Dig Dig Dino is just delightful, and it goes to show just what developers can achieve with the consistently surprising handheld.
