[Impressions] SteamWorld Dig 2

After being so engrossed with SteamWorld Dig, I played the sequel only a couple of days after completing the first one. How was it? Well, in the first couple hours I wasn’t feeling as immersed in the gameplay loop of “mine the underground, obtain gems and minerals, trade them in for cash”. That’s when it clicked to me that I should be thinking of these two games as two different takes on the same core principle of digging an underground 2D world.

On one hand there’s the original game, very straightforward in its gameplay and world design of “you collect loot, trade the loot for money, use the money to upgrade your stuff”, with the occasional finding of a rarer currency, also used for upgrades, along with very well-defined world areas that divided the underground in four different layers.

On the other hand, there’s SteamWorld Dig 2, which feels like a completely different take on the premise of exploring an underground for loot and gear upgrades/unlocks. Here, the game spreads across multiple different areas horizontally, that is, instead of finding new areas by digging deeper, you’ll find a fair share of content exploring to the left or right of the hub city, though you do find a couple of smaller areas as you dig deeper downwards. On top of it, the connections themselves between the areas are more intricate, instead of being found “naturally” as you dig down, you need to pay attention to your sides otherwise you might have to backtrack later in the game to progress. Along with this, comes the possibility of having a more open aspect to the story, that is, instead of the linearity of digging deeper and deeper to progress to the next area, you can ignore the story for a while and go explore the opposite side of the world. This actually turns out to be quite a good idea, since it leads to a handful of upgrades and gear unlocks. However, if you can “accelerate” some parts later in the story through exploration, I don’t think there are any story parts you can skip, at least any that I could find a way around.

What about the gear unlocks? I felt that the unlocks were designed specifically for this game and wouldn’t make sense in the previous one. For example, in this one you unlock “alternatives” to what you had in the previous game, like the hook shot instead of a double jump, with a couple of additional abilities like the - no, I won’t spoil it. What I’d like to get across is that the abilities you have in this game feel like they were built to be used in a more open space and that definitely shows in the puzzles you come across or the simple underground tile placement instead. Just to clarify what I mean by open space, it’s not specifically about the underground per se, rather it’s the above ground that has a lot of space to be explored until you find an entrance to another big underground area. Again, the Metroidvania aspect of the series comes into play, as you progress in the game and unlock new gear and tools you’ll get access to previously unreachable parts of the world.

While I still haven’t spoken of the story, it was indeed a nice compliment to the gameplay, given that I had played the first game. In this one Dorothy, the bot that traded your loot for gold in the first game, has set out to find Rusty (the main character of the previous game) after what transpired at the end of the previous installment. For the rest of the game, she (and you of course) travels from area to area guided by sightings of her bot friend trying to find him. One thing I want to point out is that while you do find a decent amount of characters throughout the 7-hour-ish story, none of them felt like anything special. It’s true they are just like the NPCs of the previous game, and that’s exactly the problem. While before there were just a handful of them, and they felt reasonably distinct and with a personality, here they just become a blur with no hope of being remembered. Instead of being characters you remember because they were funny or had any impact in the story, they are there just because.

All in all, SteamWorld Dig 2 is another fantastic game that I wish everyone could try at some point. The more I played this game the more I could tell how much the developers, Image and Form International AB, have matured. Most importantly, it was great to see many ideas being formed throughout the adventure, converging into a cohesive experience, chockful of easter eggs, secret areas and new gear and tools to find and play with.

#steamworlddig #steamworlddig2 #nintendoswitch #impressions #2018