Okay, so that was like a trance. I bought this game this morning. 3 hours later I was done. I didn't stop. I couldn't pause. I was lost in the sauce, utterly and completely overtaken by this primal, hard-coded drive to see a number go up. I have no clue how Rat Monthly - the canny developer behind this precious gem - managed to make a few hours of my life just evaporate, but they achieved it with ease.
See, DIGSEUM is nothing special on the surface. An idle incremental clicker to its very core. You click on stuff, gather stuff, and said stuff makes a number ramp up, and go high. You can pretty much open up the game, uncover a few artifacts, buy a few upgrades, and leave it open for a few hours to accumulate enough wealth to buy more upgrades without any effort. However the game, like any good clicker, allows you, bah - incentivize you to not just let the slow progress crawl to its destination, but actively participate in the process. Your goal? Make the most popular museum in the world, visited by bajilions of little peeps. How to achieve it? Dig through various biomes to uncover artifacts to proudly display in said museum.
Simple enough! But the devil lies in the details. The simple loop of uncovering artifacts is strangely addictive. It's unexplainable, but the steady growth of difficulty - both via ground being tougher to crack and the maps expanding in size - is expertly paced with an increase in your own 'archeological power'. You can buy upgrades for your pickaxe strength and area of effect. You can invest in marketing to generate more traffic. And most importantly - no biome gets 'obsolete'.
This, I think, is the key power of DIGSEUM. In many other clickers and idlers, the initial tools are quickly outpaced by the newer upgrades, zones, and options. Not here. As you uncover the same artifacts over and over, they both level up their value and the zone multiplier, so it's always fine to dig at the same site. As you unlock additional permanent upgrade system, it's again worth of coming back to the 'cheap biomes' just to dig out the Dream Fragments needed for those upgrades. And then, on that new unlocked tree, some modifications improve each zone, once again making them relevant, staying always within the 'good to use' place. It's a brilliant display of balance, a very clever set of little nudges to make sure the game never feels like jumping up stairs, step at a time. Every rung of the ladder keeps being of some worth to play with.
It's a great little number-chasing game. It never felt dull, never tried to roadblock me or create insurmountable challenges. Every single run through it was a steady increase of my numerical powers, letting me dig deeper and deeper, exploring those tantalizing new biomes that cost a fortune to dig in! At some point, let's say 3/4 into the game I began to snowball, amassing so many upgrades and high-level relics that my growth became exponential, and it felt like I was careening into the end at terminal velocity. And then, it was over, credits rolled, as I blinked out of my haze, this firm focus that took over me for the duration...
For a whole of 3 bucks, it was a rush. A perfect little morsel of a game to digest over a single sitting - might be it just clicked with me the right way, of course, and this style of game surely won't be for everyone but, damn... If a number going up gets you by the gahoolies, be wary and be excited, for DIGSEUM might be the injection of simple pleasure you're looking for.
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