Drill Down: Mine the Earth

Drill Down is a beautiful portrait mining game where every run takes you a little deeper, until one of them reaches the centre of the earth.

You drive one machine into one mountain. Put a finger anywhere on the glass and the rig turns toward it and eats its way there. No buttons, no menus while you are down, just a heading and a tank of fuel. When the tank runs low the hoist pulls you home with whatever you were carrying.

Nothing you cut is ever undone. The bore you opened yesterday is the road you ride down today, so the mine slowly becomes a map of your own decisions: the shortcut you drilled, the flooded gallery you gave up on, the seam you followed sideways for two hundred metres.

Between runs, the surface is where you spend it:

• a machine rebuilt part by part, every upgrade bolted on where you can see it
• a museum that fills up with the minerals you carried out
• a camp that quietly changes as the shaft gets deeper

Hard ground refuses a weak cutter outright. Water finds your tunnels and sits in them. Gas collects along the roof and waits for a spark off the wrong rock. Deeper still, the ground is hot enough to cost you fuel just for being in it.

There is no losing here. There is only the gap between where you stopped and where you were trying to get to, and the mountain will be exactly as you left it when you come back.

Underneath all of it, a professor pays you by the load and does not say why. Others came this way before you. Their rooms are still down there, and what they left behind is the reason none of them made it home.

Features:

• one thumb, portrait, no second control anywhere
• runs of a few minutes that fit into a gap in the day
• a mine that is never regenerated and never reset
• layers of ground that each look, sound and cut differently
• flooding, gas and lava that behave like themselves rather than like traps
• minerals to find, haul out and put on a shelf
• upgrades visible on the rig from the moment you buy them
• a surface camp that grows out of what you bring back
• a neighbour with a boat, a borrowed digger and work of his own
• expeditions to places that are not your mountain
• a story on the radio, and an older one written into the rock
• an ending, and a way to reach it
• no ads, no in-app purchases, no timers, fully offline

Keep going down. It stops sounding like rock long before you arrive.