Hole Is Mine Review

Purifying a Divine Hole, One Thrown Minion at a Time

Hole Is Mine, from developer Incrementalist (previously behind the well-regarded incremental Astro Prospector), launched on Steam on August 10, 2026 at $7.99. It's an incremental mining roguelite with a simple premise: a mysterious, sentient Hole has spoken, and it wants purifying. You do that by diving in, breaking blocks, and gradually recruiting an army of "Mini'Ohs," small companion creatures you can literally pick up and throw at obstacles and enemies to mine and fight for you, before gearing them up with equipment and skill-tree upgrades to dig ever deeper. Following a Next Fest demo and a closed playtest earlier in the year, the full release has already gathered 212 English-language reviews at a 94% "Very Positive" rating, a strong showing for a genre built on quick, disposable indie runs.

A Charming, Well-Polished Loop That Reviewers Genuinely Love

The overwhelming majority of the review pool describes Hole Is Mine in almost uniformly affectionate terms: "cute," "charming," "well polished," and "made with a lot of love" are phrases that recur across dozens of independent reviews. The Mini'Ohs themselves are a consistent highlight, both for their art style and for a delightful, well-corroborated feature that lets players pull names from their Steam friends list to label their companions, leading to more than one reviewer joking about the results. The gear system, letting each Mini'Oh equip up to four pieces across different categories to unlock passive synergies, earns repeated praise for adding a real layer of build strategy on top of the core throwing-and-mining loop, and the game's ending catches multiple reviewers off guard with an unexpectedly heartfelt, emotional beat that several explicitly call the best part of the whole experience. Reviewers who also played the developer's earlier Astro Prospector consistently frame Hole Is Mine as a worthy follow-up, praising the shared art direction and calling it "just as good as the first," even as a few note they still prefer the original's slower, more purely idle pace.

Throwing Controls and Late-Game Visual Clutter Are the Real Complaints

Set against that goodwill, two specific, mechanical complaints recur often enough to count as the review pool's genuine consensus criticism. The first is the throwing control scheme itself: because the same left-click input is used both to use consumable items and to grab and throw a Mini'Oh or the player's own backpack, multiple reviewers independently describe moments of frustrating imprecision when several interactive objects overlap on screen, especially once a run is a few hours deep. The second, closely related complaint is visual clutter: as the player accumulates dozens of Mini'Ohs, damage numbers, and status effects, several reviewers say the screen becomes difficult to parse, with more than one specifically calling out losing track of dropped equipment or their own totem beneath a crowd of minions. A quality-of-life visibility slider or "collect all" button for scattered loot comes up as a specific, repeated request. These aren't dealbreakers for almost anyone in the pool, several reviewers explicitly frame them as "minor" or "annoying but not a big deal," but they're consistent enough to be worth flagging rather than dismissing as isolated nitpicks.

Short and Sweet, Though a Vocal Minority Wanted More Out of the Grind

Length is the review pool's most genuinely divided topic. The typical playtime to fully complete the game and unlock all achievements clusters tightly around four to six hours, and most reviewers treat that as exactly right, praising the game for "respecting your time" and not overstaying its welcome the way longer incrementals in the genre sometimes do. A smaller but vocal minority disagrees, wishing for more caves, more equipment variety, harder late-game challenges, or simply more content overall, with one reviewer noting the full release only added roughly an hour of additional content over what the free demo already offered. A separate, more substantive criticism, raised in detail by a handful of reviewers, is that progression leans too heavily on backtracking to farm resources in earlier caves whenever a new area's difficulty spikes past the player's current gear, a cycle that a couple of otherwise-positive reviews single out as the game's single biggest structural weakness, even though most say the pacing improves considerably by the final stretch.

Verdict

Hole Is Mine earns its strong reception honestly: it's a tightly-scoped, visually charming incremental with a genuinely satisfying core loop, a surprisingly emotional ending, and enough gear-based build variety to reward players who engage with its systems rather than just clicking through. At $7.99 for four to six hours of well-polished, low-stakes fun, and with an optional infinite mode for anyone who wants more, the value proposition that so many reviewers cite is a fair one.

It isn't without real, specific friction: the shared throw/use control binding and the late-game visual clutter are corroborated enough to matter, and the game's reliance on farming to clear stat walls in its middle stretch will test the patience of players expecting a purely idle experience. For fans of the incremental genre, and especially for anyone who already enjoyed the developer's earlier Astro Prospector, this is an easy, low-risk recommendation; for players hoping for a longer or more purely hands-off idler, it's worth going in with expectations calibrated to a short, hands-on afternoon rather than a sprawling long-term grind.

The freeform equipment and skill-tree systems, while occasionally noted as unbalanced by a handful of reviewers, do enough to keep the genre's familiar number-go-up rhythm from feeling rote, and the willingness to end the whole experience on a genuinely earned emotional note is the kind of touch that's easy to undervalue in a genre mostly built around throwaway sessions. Whether Incrementalist can sustain that same level of craft across a third, larger project remains an open question, but on the evidence of Hole Is Mine's reception, this small team has built up real goodwill worth watching.