SteamWorld Dig 2 is impossible to put down

I just wanted to play for about an hour or so to get a taste of SteamWorld Dig 2 before I went to bed. I ended up going to sleep at 3 a.m. I don’t do that with every game. It takes something special to keep me up into the early hours of the morning, and developer Image & Form’s latest release is absolutely special.

SteamWorld Dig 2 is out now on Nintendo Switch, and it is hitting PC, PlayStation 4, and Vita over the next week. It picks up the story of the original game and has you tracking down Rusty, the hero in the first Dig (and it doesn’t have much to do with the events of off-shoot strategy game SteamWorld Heist). To accomplish this, you explore an underground map hiding tons of treasure as well as power-ups that increase your adventuring capabilities. The core loop will have you traversing mines and caves looking for gold until your backpack is too full to carry anymore. You’ll then travel back to the surface — hopefully using a fast-travel pneumatic tube that you’ve unlocked — and spend that money to enable your character to go even deeper and find even more gold next time.