Steamworld Dig 2 might be a known quantity, but it’s a great game regardless. I almost knew exactly what I was getting into when I booted the game up - and besides a few interesting ideas thrown in, I was exactly right - but that sweet loop of exploring mines, finding materials to sell in order to buy upgrades to allow you to do the same thing over again was just the thing I needed. I don’t exactly remember the original Steamworld Dig, but this one is just better in every point and a great game you probably should play.
The game starts with Rusty, the protagonist of the first game, going missing. You explore some ruins and solve a few puzzles, fight a small boss and then get to the town, the main hub for your adventures. Here you’ll sell your materials, buy upgrades and equip special mods, unlock them by turning in artefacts you’ll find in puzzle rooms and leave to explore some other area of the map via the exhaustive fast travel system. You can also speak to the various NPCs to hear their opinions about the state of the story at the moment.
Exploring the mines is pretty fun, you start with a very limited number of movement options, but you can upgrade a lot of your gear to improve where you can go and what you can do. You start with a lamp that actually runs out pretty quickly, but after a while this isn’t an issue anymore, enemies also become progressively more manageable and at the end of the game you can deal with pretty much every situation, flying around with your jetpack, grappling to walls and ceilings, shooting bombs and healing yourself along the way. You unlock these upgrades by buying them - if your level is high enough - and you get some mods to equip using cogs you’ll find around the map and mostly in challenge rooms.
These challenge rooms can be pretty tricky, some of them are easy and can be brute forced, but others - like the one where you have to go through a few rooms without hitting any switches by mistake - are actually pretty hard. Others are logic puzzles where you move minecarts around, and you’ll have the occasional enemy-filled area where you need to dodge everything. These challenge rooms are neat and often have multiple hidden treasures - like cogs or artefacts, which then feeds back in the upgrade system, allowing you to progress through these rooms with more ease.
I had a simply great time with Steamworld Dig 2 and -almost- completed it 100%. It’s not too long an adventure and the mechanics acting together work really well, resulting in a gameplay loop that just makes you want to go dig up one more haul.
