Keep on Mining!

You hover your cursor over a rock. A small pickaxe appears and starts chipping away at it. Then another pickaxe. Then a dozen, swarming the rock face like eager little termites, and by the time you look up the afternoon has gone the way of the rock. That is Keep on Mining!, a mouse-only incremental from EagleEye Games that arrived on Steam on 30 July 2025 and now sits at Very Positive on the strength of thousands of reviews, 93.6 percent of them thumbs up. It costs A$7.50. Most people finish it in an evening or two. Both numbers feel correct.

Mine rocks

The pitch is one sentence long. Hover your cursor over rocks and they take damage. Any rock inside your mining area spawns its own pickaxe to carry on the work while you wander off to bother another rock. Rocks drop ores, ores are smelted into bars, and bars buy permanent upgrades in a big skill tree. That is the entire grammar of the game, and the pleasure of it is watching the sentence compound.

Three small scenes

You hit a wall of stubborn ore. Nothing you do at the rock face fixes it, so you duck into the skill tree and buy one more point of pickaxe damage, which looks pathetic on paper, until the wall stops mattering. That's the loop.

You level up and the game deals you three random talent cards. You pick one, it makes you stronger, and every card you take also quietly raises the health of every rock in the game, a tax on progress that somehow plays like momentum. That's the loop.

You unlock the Mine, which mines by itself and instantly crafts the bars for you, and somewhere in there you stop being a miner and become a mining company that happens to own one mouse. That's the loop.

The pickaxe economy

Under the hovering sits a proper little economy. Different rocks drop different materials, materials craft new pickaxes, and each new pickaxe hits harder and digs faster than the last. The skill tree runs parallel to all of it, doling out permanent stat upgrades that never reset. The design keeps one bottleneck in front of you at all times, and the game is the sound of that bottleneck dissolving.

Cards, and a tax on every card

The talent card system is the one place the game asks you to think ahead. Three cards face up, you keep one, and the health of every rock ticks up as payment. It is a small negotiation with yourself, repeated at every level, and it is why the midgame stays interesting even though the verbs never change. I am not convinced the rock HP increase is perfectly tuned, but it errs in the right direction: forward.

The Mine, for when your wrist gives out

Once the Mine unlocks, the idle layer switches on. It mines rocks on its own and crafts the bars instantly, which makes the whole thing a natural backdrop for a workday, and reviewers use it exactly that way. One logged roughly fourteen and a half hours with the game open while working. It is mouse only, playable without timed input, and carries Steam Cloud, custom volume controls, Family Sharing and 22 achievements.

Short, and honest about it

The reviews converge on one shape of complaint: it is short. 'You can experience everything it has to offer in just 2 or 3 hours,' one says, and even fans report full completion in around five. But the same reviews keep circling back to what that brevity buys: a clear ending, in a genre addicted to endless treadmills. 'This game does not waste my time,' writes a reviewer who scored it 4.5 out of 10 overall, and then gave the addictiveness a 9.

The other recurring gripe is the look. The art style gets called 'at best uninspired', and one review goes further, suggesting an AI could have made it because 'it lacks heart or personality'. I cannot settle the AI question and I am not sure it matters much, because what the pixels lack the systems pay back: nobody calls a spreadsheet uninspired while the numbers keep going up.

Verdict

Where to play

The game runs on Steam (Windows), and it travels: the same game is available as a mobile version on iOS and Android. The mobile build carries the full progression loop, which means the numbers keep climbing whether you are at a keyboard or waiting for a bus.

An incremental lives or dies by whether the next upgrade feels like a decision. Keep on Mining! gets that right often enough to fill five hours, and then, unlike most of its genre, it stops. If you want a small machine that turns a spare evening into ore, this is a good one, and at A$7.50 it is priced like one too.