One-night stand: Pocket Mine 3
My nights have become extensions of my days, as in: I’m struggling with insomnia.
In order to fill the blank between “staying voluntarily awake” and “finally being able to sleep for a couple of hours” I’ve tried to: read, watch Netflix, browse the internet, write, listen to music, and – last but not least – play games. Yesterday I decided to make the most out of that (wasted) time by trying any interesting game in the Android store, and write a post on it the day after. So here we are.
The rules are simple: I choose a random game without reading its description nor looking at screenshots, download it, and play it until I enter snooze city.
For the first entry in this series I picked Pocket Mine 3: a roguelike, dungeon crawler, endless scroller, idle game (che alla fiera mio padre comprò).
Pocket Mine 3 in action
Pocket Mine 3 captured my attention for its title, as lately I’ve been working on some projects that involve mines, their depiction in media, and their representation in the collective imagination. It was fun to see how certain tropes found place in a well crafted gameplay, that revolves around simple mechanics and minimal input by the player: all you have to do to play Pocket Mine 3 is tapping on squares, so that your little miner can destroy said squares/blocks of terrain, digging deeper into a procedurally generated mine until you reach the bottom (or your pickaxe expires, monsters kill the miner, or the edge of the screen touches him/her). It’s interesting to notice that the player knows, since the beginning of each level, how deep he/she should dig to complete it; this is a key element that helps to manage resources – namely, the pickaxe durability or special abilities – adding a bit of tactics to the gameplay.
There are a lot of different blocks in the game: normal terrain, minerals, explosives, treasures, monsters, and unbreakable ones too. Each category gives a specific feedback, and costs a different amount of pickaxe durability to be mined, but almost everything is drawn from mine’s collective imagination. There are, as you could expect, a lot of minerals to collect in order to gain money (isn’t mining all about capitalism, and profit?); the crates contain mostly explosives, or gas, that should facilitate the progression through the mine; there are treasures, such as rare mushrooms, herbs, or antiquities, to exchange with useful goods. The rhetoric is always the same: dig, gain, get better equipment, dig more lucrative stuff, gain more money, get even better equipment, etc. Destruction brings money, money brings more tools, better tools bring more destruction.
While Pocket Mine 3 drawns from the collective mine’s imagination, it must be noted that mostly of its aesthetic choices come from western culture: the TNT dynamite, bombs, and characters meet the common depiction (already seen in Spelunky, for example) of such imagination. Aesthetics are quite pleasant to look at (even for tired eyes), and the palette is the one you would expect from a game inspired by mines: brown, gold, red, and metallic colors mixed with some pastel dyes.
What amazed me the most about Pocket Mine 3 is its well-made combination of elements: for a roguelike such as this, it was impossible not to insert a series of randomizing elements (diverse characters, equipment, etc.). Developers did it in a way that winks at gatcha games, with booster packs, collectible cards/heroes, multiple elements that involve level-up mechanics. There are even daily, weekly, and monthly challenges to unlock special equipment (so there must be a team always producing new content behind this game: cool!). All wrapped up by a veil of microtransactions, of course; however I noticed that the player can obtain certain boosts and benefits by watching short advertising videos, which is a nice compromise.
As expected by a game like this, it becomes addictive soon: a simple gameplay (with a basically flat learning curve), plus endless possibilities given by PGC tend to create a winning mix, especially for me. Nevertheless, if tonight insomnia strikes again, my partner will be another game.
zero/3 
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