One-night stand: Drilla
There are poor name choices, and then there are VERY poor name choices.
Drilla‘s title falls into the second category, hands down.
In my second straight sleep-less night (yay!) I decided to keep observing how mines are depicted in public imagination, taking mobile games as a starting point. So, after Pocket Mine 3, the choice was Drilla: an endless idle crafting game in which the player has to turn on, and then watch working, a mechanic drill. Excitement went over the rooftop here, didn’t it?
yep, that’s a watermelon
The gameplay is quite essential: after turning on the drill, the player should tap on the screen to gather materials while the machine keeps digging in a (truly) endless vertical descent. If the drill runs out of fuel, a few taps on the screen are enough to solve the problem. If the player gathers too many materials, it is sufficient to upgrade the storage part. This is where Drilla becomes odd to me: all you have to do is tap every now and then, sometimes very fast, then upgrade the machinery in a engineering-like interface, and go back to endless tapping on the screen. While the dynamic here is the same as Pocket Mine 3 (gather, obtain money, buy upgrade, repeat), Drilla’s progression is just too straightforward to present any type of uncertainty nor contest to the player.
Plus, there are some design choices that elude me. The minimal interface doesn’t help in creating atmosphere, and tends to create distance between the player and the game. Sometimes UI elements are right in the active section of the screen, being a disturbance for the gameplay. On the other hand, I found the upgrade menu very neat, with a touch of engineering and blueprinting that fascinates me. However, I wonder: what’s the meaning of the pistols, bones, and other unrecognizable stuff that appears in the background after the drill digs towards the center of earth? What’s their purpose? What should they represent? I don’t know, maybe they are meant as comic relief. After all, there is also a level in which the machine digs through a watermelon for some reason.
As I anticipated, I can see no challenge at all in Drilla, except for the required patience that the player should invest in the game to keep going, reaching new levels and upgrading the drill with fancy (?) stuff. The player becomes almost a passive observer with no influence at all on the overall experience, except for those few moments in which he/she should upgrade the machine. It feels like the game is trying to show, through procedural rhetoric, how maintenance works. How human work is increasingly being replaced by automation, and the man’s intervention is required just to upgrade, repair, or turn on some machine. This dynamic is exasperated, as Drilla keeps working even if you leave the game in the background: while I changed tab on my smartphone, in order to take some notes for this post, it kept digging. I left it at 12.927 and resumed at 15.411. Automation at its best.
Anyway, what’s interesting for me to notice is how mines are depicted in media such as videogames: always with the same palette, items, and designs. Verticality is a prevalent, if not needed, element. Horizontal excavation has been limited to a supporting role, mostly. This brings a sense of vertigo in mining games, a feeling of entering the unknown, representing that exploration of darkness that obsesses humankind since the dawn of time – and that we see depicted in every media.
zero/3 