Cozy Holes

I spent an embarrassing amount of time just standing on the surface of Digby's island before I ever dug a single hole. The world up top rewards that patience: narwhals circle the shoreline, sand tornadoes carve their own lazy divots without threatening you, and half-buried structures poke out like the ears of something enormous sleeping just below. FlashPoint Games is a two-person operation, and you feel that handcraft everywhere, in the warmth of the colour palette, in the meditative soundtrack that players have flagged as genuinely hypnotic, in the decision to tell every story beat through carved stone tablets rather than a single line of dialogue. The moment you do break ground, the loop becomes clear and deliberate: dig through layered biomes (loose sand first, then glowing crystal caverns, then ore-veined rock, eventually molten metal), collect what you find, spend that progress on five upgradable traits (Dig Speed, Dig Size, Shovel Toughness, Climb Speed, and Detector Level), then go deeper. There is no inventory screen to manage, no items to sell, no death state, no timer. Discoveries fill a single progress meter and that meter feeds your upgrades. It is a purposefully frictionless design, and for the audience it is aimed at, that is the whole point. A magical metal detector pulses when story tablets are nearby, and those tablets piece together the history of Digby's tribe, a civilisation of sentient shovels driven underground by an asteroid strike, leaving Digby buried and forgotten on the surface. The premise sounds absurd written out plainly, and it absolutely is, but the emotional sincerity with which FlashPoint sells it is hard to resist. Honesty requires flagging the rougher edges. The shovel's physical hitbox collides with terrain in ways that feel clumsy, particularly when climbing back out of a steep dig, and some players have reported camera jerk and frame-rate trouble on lower-end machines where graphical options are sparse. The player hitbox is also described as oddly large relative to what you can see of Digby, which creates friction when you want to work in tight spaces. These feel like early-release growing pains from a small team rather than fundamental design failures, and FlashPoint has been visibly responsive to community feedback since the game's original early access period. The full release landing in February 2026 suggests meaningful iteration happened. Who is this for, then? If you need challenge, enemies, or systemic depth, look elsewhere. Cozy Holes is aimed squarely at people who want to feel something quiet while their hands stay busy. The narrative payoff, following the spiral symbol downward through layer after layer until a reunion in a forgotten underground city, is the kind of ending that lands precisely because the game never raised its voice to get there. The soundtrack does the emotional heavy lifting in the same register: not dramatic, not forgettable, just present in the way a good ambient record is present. For players who appreciated A Game About Digging a Hole but wanted something with a heartbeat underneath, this is the next logical step. Approach it knowing what it is and it delivers exactly that.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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