Sorry, A Game About Digging A Hole, I’ve found a game that’s even weirder. It’s called Mashina. It’s also a game about digging, except you’re a little robot made out of trash, in a world also made out of trash, and it’s all kind of beautiful.
The first thing you may notice is how strange Mashina’s aesthetic is compared to … pretty much anything else on Steam. Everything is made out of real world objects, like wires and crumpled paper, and it’s all animated in stop-motion. Judero, the developer’s previous game, has a similar aesthetic, but it leans harder on the claymation side of things.
In Mashina, you’re a little robot in a little robot world where everyone believes in you. You have a big drill and mountains of dirt to dig through. Sometimes you find minerals shaped like Tetris blocks and have to fit them into your inventory. At least in the demo, there are no time limits, no economy, and no real overarching goal other than to be a happy little guy who digs.
When I found a clump of minerals too big to break down, I hooked it up to the refiner by drawing a conveyor belt. The refiner is also a little robot with a smiley face who watched me putter around with my jetpack collecting rocks because a different robot told me to. After a few minutes of digging, I was congratulated and sent to the surface.
Surprise! Mashina ditches the 2D side-scrolling view and goes full 3D when you’re above ground. It turns out you’re on an island surrounded by green ooze. None of the robots have anything to say about it though. Maybe they will in the final game, but in the demo you can only pick up two quests before it’s over. The first quest is to refine more minerals (easy), the second quest is to deliver a baked potato (delicious). You’re given explosives to break through the rocks you can’t drill through and disco balls for digging “in a funky way,” per the description. The hardest part is giving the baked potato away.
And then the demo for Mashina ends. Other games might not satisfy you in such little time, but Mashina absolutely does. Its handmade everything compels you to poke around and see what you can interact with, almost like a point-and-click adventure game. And it’s characters are extremely charming for how little they say. Like Proto, the rectangular robot who gave me all the tasks. Despite all the ooze and the trash, they love their island: “One day I will invent a way to love things two-fold because, at the moment, I simply couldn’t love it a squidgen more.”
Mashina doesn’t have an exact release date yet, but it’s supposed to come out sometime in 2025. You can wishlist it on Steam right now.
