Beardy the Digger

I'll be straight with you: Beardy the Digger is the kind of game you measure in lunch breaks, not weekends. It's a 2D side-scrolling platformer built around one tight loop - collect diamonds across hazard-filled levels, survive long enough to unlock the next world, repeat. Solo developer Dyatlov Pavel of White Ink kept the scope honest at 40 levels split across two worlds, and that compression actually works in the game's favor for the first hour or so. The hazard design spans lava pits, poisoned darts, and timed obstacle sequences, with some levels cutting the visibility down to the cone of a helmet flashlight. That last touch is a decent idea that adds genuine tension to otherwise familiar platforming. The structure has a light gatekeeping mechanic: you cannot simply barrel into World 2. The first twenty levels must be cleared in a flexible order, but you need to hit a diamond quota before the second world unlocks. It is not a demanding threshold, but it nudges you toward thorough play rather than rushing exits - a smarter design choice than it first appears. Each level also has multiple viable paths, and the game quietly rewards the cleaner, more complete route. Potions with unpredictable effects show up mid-level and add a small variable to otherwise static puzzle layouts. These are modest ideas, but they give the game more texture than a bare collect-and-exit format would. Here is where my spreadsheet instincts kick in and the problems surface. The control scheme assigns movement to WASD and the pickaxe swing to R, a pairing that community members flagged almost immediately as awkward under pressure. The settings menu is non-functional as reported by players, so you cannot remap or adjust anything. Gamepad support is partial at best - one player noted having to manually configure a Steam controller layout just to get acceptable results. For a 2D platformer where reaction timing matters, that is a meaningful friction point. There are also reported bugs around achievement tracking, incorrect diamond counts between worlds, and a level-select glitch that opens the wrong stage. Given that the game has fewer than 25 Steam reviews and is running a near-dead concurrent player count, the odds of a patch landing are slim at this point. The honest framing here is that Beardy the Digger is a free solo experiment from a solo developer, built in Unity with a Lightweight Renderer Pipeline that keeps system requirements genuinely minimal - any modern machine handles it without complaint. The pixel art is clean enough, the atmospheric audio does its job across the level environments, and the game's comparison to classics like Dig Dug is not entirely unwarranted in spirit, even if it doesn't match that pedigree in execution. The 73% positive rate on Steam's 23 reviews is about right: it works, it just has obvious rough edges that nobody has gone back to sand down. If you have zero cash to risk and thirty minutes of curiosity, the price of entry here is exactly right. Anyone expecting SteamWorld Dig depth should look elsewhere.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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