It’s time to bring back our Steam Treasures series.
With hundreds and hundreds of titles now receiving the all-important right to be on Steam - through Valve’s Greenlight initiative (that Gabe Newell now wants to do away with) - the idea of a “jewel” of an indie game somehow “making” it through to the service (against all odds!!) no longer carries the same much any weight.
Where Valve’s standards may have changed (for better or worse), ours haven’t: In this series, we review budget-sized, budget-priced, big-small games that deserve to be added to your Steam library, period - even, when they’re not currently in a bundle for beans! Our first new entry to the series, then, is none other than the aptly-titled SteamWorld Dig: A Fistful of Dirt.
Curiously, the game’s developer, the Swedish Image & Form, actually did not target Steam first, as the game found its original home on the Nintendo eShop. Even on the Nintendo 3DS - a system I don’t currently own or have access to - the game immediately caught my attention due to its colourful look and feel, cute robot designs, and overall Steampunk shenanigans.
Ultimately, nomen est omen, and so forth, and we computer folks ended up receiving a full OS smorgasbord, from Windows to OSX to Linux, all via Steam. I was overjoyed to discover the game was to be ported so quickly over to PC - there still exist footage of me posting awful puns on Twitter. That’s how excited I was about getting to play the game.