Digseum

Digseum opens with a museum that has nothing in it. No exhibits, no gift shop, nothing behind the glass but ambition, and the only sensible response is to go outside and start digging. Rat Monthly's debut arrived on Steam on the 9th of December, 2024, priced at A$ 4.50, and it has since collected a 97% positive rating across thousands of reviews, which is the kind of number museums get named after people.

The loop: dig, display, repeat

The premise fits on a receipt. You dig relics out of the ground, you put them in the museum, and visitors pay admission to shuffle past them. The money buys upgrades, the upgrades make digging faster, and the faster digging turns up better relics for the halls, and around it goes. The store page promises 12+ excavation sites and 50+ relics, and neither number is padding: the sites change what is under the soil, and the museum decides what the soil was for.

The digging itself is the part everyone mentions first. Each relic is a shape half-buried in a grid, and you chip the dirt away around it without smashing the thing you came for, which anyone who spent time on the excavation minigame in Pokémon Diamond and Pearl will recognise in about four seconds. IndieLoupe's review clocked the resemblance too, and their reviewer finished the whole game in a single 2.3-hour sitting, mostly because stopping felt worse than continuing. Credit the sound design here: every strike of the pickaxe lands with a chunk, the relics pop loose with a flick, and the lofi soundtrack by Loyalty Freak Music hums underneath without ever asking to be noticed.

Three scenes from the pit

Ten minutes in. You have pulled a giant feather and a golden monocle out of the Mud Pit, propped them on plinths, and the first visitors are shuffling past in a slow line, paying for the privilege. It is not the British Museum. It is yours. That's Digseum.

An hour in. Mount Stone is unlocked and the skill tree is open, and you are weighing whether the next payout goes into your digging kit or into the museum's tills, doing arithmetic about visitor throughput while the kettle boils. You were supposed to be making tea. That's Digseum.

Two and a half hours in. The credits roll, the halls are full, and instead of uninstalling you are on the incremental games subreddit reading a thread titled 'I just finished Digseum and woooah, what a nice game!' to check whether strangers felt it too. They did. That's Digseum.

The museum side of the bargain

What lifts Digseum above the average clicker is that the museum is not decoration; it is the economy. Visitors pay based on what you display, so every relic has two jobs, first as a dig target and then as an income stream, and the upgrade tree splits your money between excavation abilities and the museum's earning power. Gaming On Steam called the progression clear and the upgrades meaningful almost immediately, and the first ninety minutes prove it: there is barely a stretch where you are clicking just to fill time, because the next unlock is always one dig away.

The Dream Tree

There is a prestige layer called the Dream Tree, fed by Dream Fragments, and it works like New Game Plus for your stats: spend fragments on permanent boosts, then run the whole dig again from the top, faster. It is the part of the game I like least, and IndieLoupe flagged the same trouble. Put your fragments into the wrong branch and earlier decisions lose their value, and once you are hunting a final fragment before a reset, the relics themselves stop mattering while you tunnel for currency. Mount Stone aside, the later zones are also mechanically identical to the first, wearing different decor over the same dirt. For A$ 4.50 this is a complaint shaped like a suggestion, and it still counts.

Short by design

Digseum runs about two and a half hours to the credits, and Gaming On Steam unlocked every one of its 10 achievements in roughly three. Their review opens with the sentence that belongs on the store page: this is an incremental game that knows when to end. Most idlers are built to be abandoned; this one is built to be finished, and the achievements unlock naturally along the way instead of padding the runtime. The late game ramps hard, so a few final upgrades barely matter before the curtain falls, which is the price of an ending this clean, and I would pay it again.

Verdict

Digseum is the rare incremental that respects your time, and the rare debut that plays like a third game from a studio that has done this before. The digging is satisfying, the museum loop hums, the Dream Tree is lopsided and the zones repeat, and none of it matters at the price of a flat white. If you have ever bounced off an idle game because it demanded your evenings forever, this is the one that lets you leave. Buy it on Steam, dig for an afternoon, and enjoy the look on your visitors' faces when the halls are full.