Hi everyone, thrilled to be here — finally! I’m Brjann Sigurgeirsson, the worst-named CEO of the worst-named game development studio in the world, Image & Form Games. I’m here to present perhaps the world’s worst-named game: SteamWorld Dig. It launches on PS4 and PS Vita this year. Don’t let the title fool you — the game is great!
Image & Form is a Swedish game developer based in rainy, windy Gothenburg. There’s a dozen of us, and the rest of the lot is a bunch of brilliant, hard-working, and quite childish people. I also work hard and am rather childish myself, but instead of being brilliant all the time I focus on hogging credit and interacting with you guys. You can read more about all of us right here.
Take the role of Rusty — a lone, mining steambot — as he arrives to an old mining town in great need. Dig your way through the old earth, gaining riches while uncovering the ancient threat that lurks below.
SteamWorld Dig is what we call “a mining platform adventure.” The objective is mining, the controls are those of a platformer, and it’s a story-driven game with a defined beginning and end. It’s been compared to Minecraft and Terraria, but those are sandbox games and not that similar to SteamWorld Dig — which is more of a Metroidvania type of game. You dig down, find gems and minerals, get back up to the surface, sell the loot to upgrade your equipment, and go back down again. Both soil and enemies get tougher the further down you go, and also other aspects of the environment.
SteamWorld Dig is a dense and immersive experience, and it contains no filler. It’s designed so that the hours you spend with the game will be the best hours you’ve spent in a long time. The game has been nominated for — and has won — numerous Game of the Year awards all over the world.
Now that SteamWorld Dig is coming to PS4 and PS Vita, we’re so proud we could cry. Having the game on a console is a long-standing dream, and we’re very pleased that console will be the magnificent PS4. SteamWorld Dig has already proven itself as a great handheld game, and it feels like the Vita was made for it. The crisp, vibrant graphics almost pop off the screen, and the controls are super solid.
When we first released SteamWorld Dig in August 2013, a lot of people immediately asked us to bring it to the Vita. But the port seemed like a “long” project, and so we decided to make a stop along the way to release it for Steam first. That way, we would have single-screen play and HD graphics just begging to be brought to PlayStation. Still, now that it’s done, we never thought it would look this good.
Happy gaming!
