After creating your character, you are thrown into a procedurally generated world, equipped with some basic tools. With little instruction, your task is to gather some resources with the aim of creating a shelter. You can hack away at the ground using a pick-axe. Any block you destroy is added to your inventory, so you will stockpile a large amount of dirt and stone in addition to more valuable ore. The dirt and stone blocks can be placed elsewhere, meaning you can construct your house, or use them as a bridge or platform to help you traverse the environment. The ore comprises of copper, iron, silver, gold, as well as rarer and stranger ore like demonite, meteorite, and hellstone. You can craft the more powerful weapons, tools and armour with these.
The in-game time cycles between day and night although you are unaware of the exact time unless you craft a watch. When you are on the surface, you can estimate the time judging by the sun's light. Enemies are limited to minor enemies such as slimes during the day, but at night, stronger enemies will appear in greater numbers, requiring players to have a shelter as well as a good source of light.
The combat follows a simple system in that you simply click to attack. The mêlée weapons have different ranges and speed, but you can just mindlessly click whilst moving to retreat to a more advantagous position. Weapons such as a Broadsword have a slower and arced swing, whereas Short Swords have a fast horizontal stab motion. There's a variety of long ranged weapons such as explosives, darts, arrows and guns. You can equip magical weapons which require the use of mana to attack. Shooting stars may fall during the night, and collecting 10 of these increases your mana pool.
Most enemies serve as a distraction, but are strong in numbers, so it's important not to get trapped from both sides. If you die, you re-spawn back at your shelter, with the penalty depending on the difficulty you selected. You can play where you just lose a few coins, lose all your items, or only have one life (permadeath). You do not get experience from killing monsters, so the progression lies in finding the heart-shaped stones to boost health, or gain stronger weapons and armour.
In terms of armour, there are three slots; one slot for head, chest and legs. You have additional slots for accessories, which can give you benefits such as faster speed, double-jumps etc or change your appearance without giving you attribute bonuses.
As you dig, you will come across natural tunnels and caves which can contain treasure and various monsters and traps. Often, the depths do seem safer than travelling across the surface where basic creatures will roam during the day, and more powerful ones appear at night. The creatures can follow you down into the caves, so it can be a good idea to fill your entrance with dirt to prevent them from entering. The land is split into diferent biomes, so by travelling horizontally you will see different environments; deserts, jungles, snow, ocean, corruption and more.
Once your inventory is full, it's a good idea to return to your house to create new items, and dump the rest in chests to be used later. You can also give your house an extension; building rooms can allow non-player characters to move in.
The graphics are done in a retro, pixel-art style. It's simplistic, but doesn't hinder the game-play. The lighting model plays a large part of the game. You constantly have to place torches to be able to see, and the light acts in a realistic way. So leaving blocks in front of light sources will limit the light's reach. The water behaves in a similar fashion and will drain downward if free space is available.
Due to the lack of guidance, the game is quite hard to get into. The interface is a bit fiddly and there's plenty of items to acquire. Quite often in games like this, the focus is on experimentation and self-learning, but it would have helped to be guided through the game mechanics, at least have the option to enable a more in depth tutorial. The Android version of the game does have a tutorial, but it has never been added to the PC version.
There is no dialogue or story, and a lack of civilised towns across the land. Aside from the NPC's that can reside in your house, the land is simply to be mined. The game is all about exploration, mixed in with building and combat. There's plenty to discover, yet at the same time; it is quite shallow and repetitive. Since I played Steam World Dig recently and it shares a lot in common with that, the game seemed to get old fast. If you keep playing until you have defeated the bosses, I'd imagine you could be playing for 20 hours. There is a multiplayer mode which could further extend the game's life. You could even create different characters and experience new worlds, but essentially it's going to play the same.