A Fistful of Dirt is a game about penetrating mysteries, and that pushes the player forward to find out what’s ahead. It’s not just about digging underground and dredging up gold and crystals. This vague background that is quite nearly irrelevant to the initial character drives of Rusty and Dorothy helps provide an air of mystery about the game. You remember the sequel to the original Planet of the Apes where the mutated descendants of humanity lived underground and worshiped a nuclear bomb? Well here the Apes are replaced with Steambots and the humans steeped in religiosity are traded away for Golumn-esque ghouls clutching haphazard dynamite.Įxactly what grim fate befell the planet? Image & Form Games did release a statement filling in those details, which I included in my review of SteamWorld Dig 2in its entirety. Wells’ The Time Machine, or better yet since I made that comparison with SteamWorld Dig 2, think Beneath the Planet of the Apes, instead. What interests me most is the portrayal of the SteamWorld games as some kind of bizarre and distant post-apocalyptic future. A Fistful of Dirt takes place after Tower Defence but the only direct sequel so far, Dig 2, fills in the plot between Fistful of Dirt and Heist. There is a loosely related story thread through each of the SteamWorld games which I find quite fascinating. Lola operates the saloon and is maybe possibly a painted lady, and that’s about it. Cranky is an aged Steambot who runs an upgrades workshop, supplying Rusty with several early pieces of equipment to make his spelunkery easier. Dorothy, who appears in the sequel as the protagonist, runs a trade shop where Rusty can exchange the ore and gems he mines for currency. Rusty’s digging and dugging is supported by the townsfolk of Tumbleton ( spoilers: highlight to reveal) which later includes a few more residents. Taking up his dearly departed uncle’s pickaxe, Rusty begins to explore the underground macrocosm, uncovering untold riches, lodes of ore and crystals, veins of precious metals, as well as secrets from the past waiting far below. As it turns out, Rusty has inherited the deed to his Uncle Joe’s mine, but when he arrives at the town where the mine’s entrance is located, he discovers that his dear uncle has gone the way of the Steam-dinosaurs. This is Rusty the Steambot and he has reached the town of Tumbleton, population 3 (considering one member of that population is a saloon girl it must be a rather interesting town, indeed). SteamWorld Dig: A Fistful of Dirt opens in cinematic fashion with a lone figure trekking through a vast Wild West desert, his glare evocative of Clint Eastwood. I’ve still SteamWorld Heist to play but how long until we get SteamWorld Dig 3: the Steambot with No Name? That’s not entirely a bad thing because the last thing I wrote of Dig 2 was this: “ Dig 2 left me wanting more, so now I begin the hunt for SteamWorld Dig and Heist!”ĭig 2 instilled in me a hunger for more of this steampunk/Western infused universe, and since the first Dig is a much more compact game, a shorter jaunt through this world, it was an appetizer that doubly whet my appetite. Going back in time from that high point toward A Fistful of Dirt carries with it the added challenge of not entirely coloring my take on the older game with my affection for the newer, but this is nonetheless my necessary perspective on it. Dig 2 is in fact the fourth game in the SteamWorld series following SteamWorld Tower Defense, SteamWorld Dig: A Fistful of Dirt, and SteamWorld Heist in that order, so Dig 2 had the benefit of learning from its predecessors to become the great game that it was. I’m sure most of us know someone who insists upon the quality of some tv show though they include the caveat that you have to sit through so many episodes before the series comes into its full flower.Īnalogously, this is true of SteamWorld Dig 2 in terms of its refinement, not to incriminate the previous games of poor quality at all, mind. By then, presumably, the show has gotten good, pardon the expression. The plus side of watching a television series some ten or so episodes in is there’s that opportunity for the show to find its footing and identity, its confidence. This was also my first experience with any of the SteamWorld games by developer Image & Form Games, so I had the unique vantage of ingesting the series at its latest and most refined entry. When last I explored the SteamWorld, it was in SteamWorld Dig 2, released September 2017. When they need to save their sorry souls, folks head for the frontier.” People go west when all bets are off: a reputation in ruins, a love gone wrong. “Historically, people move west more than east. This article is available as a well-read review on our YouTube channel!Ĭlick here to see all audio reviews on this site.
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