Digseum is a new clicker game – one of those games where you click madly on things while the numbers go up – that Steam recommended to me last week. The timing was perfect. I’d just finished installing the final art work in my Animal Crossing museum, and here was a brand new museum to fill with trinkets and doodads pulled from the earth.
DigseumPublisher: Rat MonthlyDeveloper: Rat MonthlyPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC.
Pulling trinkets and doodads from the earth is very much what Digseum is about. So far, it’s very simple and pleasant going. You have a museum, and the more exhibits you have means the more visitors you have, which means the more money you get flowing in. You find things to exhibit by clicking on grids of earth and uncovering the stuff under the surface. You’re hemmed in by stamina, which means you can only swing your pickaxe so many times in one session, so finding buried objects in even a small grid quickly becomes a bit like a game of Battleships. You learn to punch speculative holes all over the earth in the hope of finding something that glints.
Then the loop kicks in. Find multiples of the same exhibit and it levels up, which means more visitors, which means more money. That money, meanwhile, can be spent on improving stamina, how many holes your pick opens with a single swing, and how easily it bites into the earth. You can also pay for marketing, which improves visitor flow, and you can buy new plots to dig in, which means new exhibits etc etc.
1 of 3 Caption Attribution Digseum.
Pretty soon all the numbers are going up, and everything you spend money on just makes the numbers go up faster. It’s elegant, as clickers tend to be, but it’s also more than elegant. By chucking in the Battleships-style digs, players get a better sense of the role that luck plays, I think.