Stonerill

Stonerill is a game about going down. Wow wow Games released it on Steam in September 2024, and the store description is refreshingly literal: control a drill, dig through the ground endlessly, collect the resources you pass, and upgrade the drill so the next descent goes deeper. Buried bombs are the hazard, depth is the scoreboard, and Steam leaderboards turn the whole thing into a polite competition over who can reach the most unreasonable stratum. The controls are three keys: S or Space to dig, A and D to steer.

What complicates the picture is everything around the game rather than in it. It arrived at a price point usually reserved for full productions, with a tiny player base and no meaningful review footprint, which makes it one of the hardest entries in this index to evaluate honestly. The loop itself is legible in a screenshot. The value is not.

What the loop feels like

You bite into the surface, resources tick up with every meter, and the drill hums downward while you steer around a dark shape you have learned to assume is a bomb. That's Stonerill.

Then the run ends, the upgrade menu opens, and yesterday's terrifying depth becomes today's commute because the drill now cuts twice as fast and the bombs announce themselves a beat earlier. That's Stonerill.

How it actually works

A frank note on sources: both of our research passes failed to find this specific game, one drifting to similarly named titles and the other to a completely different RPG, so this write-up stands on the store page's own documentation rather than an independent mechanics deep-dive. On that record, the systems are three. The drilling loop converts depth into resources in real time. The upgrade menu, opened with Enter, spends those resources on drill speed, yield and survivability. And the bomb field adds a risk layer, since a careless run ends the descent early and sends everything but the leaderboard position back to the surface. Leaderboards are the only meta structure on offer.

Where it stumbles

Two things hold it back from an easy recommendation. The documentation problem is real: with almost no player reviews, no guides and no community consensus, there is no way to judge balance, long-term depth or how the loop holds up past the first few hours. And the pricing is difficult to square with the scope: a single-mechanic descent toy carrying a flagship-priced tag invites expectations about content depth that nothing on the store page substantiates. Curious players should treat the price as the puzzle and wait for it to resolve.

Playing it today

Stonerill is a Windows release on Steam. For drilling with a deeper paper trail, Mr. Mine is this site's documented mining-idle favorite, and To The Core takes the dig-deeper-and-upgrade loop somewhere far more systemic.

The verdict

A classic descent loop wrapped in near-total obscurity and a price tag with delusions of AAA. The drill mechanics are honest and the bombs are fair, but everything that would justify confidence, from balance notes to community wisdom, has yet to exist. Wait for a sale as deep as the shafts.