Mining and Dwarves

Mine rocks, recruit dwarves to mine them for you, spend the proceeds on upgrades and abilities, keep going. Mining and Dwarves, released 27 August 2026 by Sockhouse Studios, is exactly that simple a pitch, delivered with a specific design choice worth noting up front: no prestige system, no reset-and-repeat loop, just persistent progression from start to finish. Whether that's a refreshing change or a missed opportunity depends heavily on which review you read.

A loop several reviewers found honestly boring

The sharpest criticism here is unusually consistent across independent, highly-upvoted reviews. "The game is just... boring. Progression is incredibly linear with very few impactful decisions to make or interesting trade-offs to consider," reads the most-upvoted negative review, with 36 votes behind it. Another, describing the moment-to-moment play in detail, says: "You have one screen with either some rocks or a ball. You mine the rocks until they disappear, then the ball comes up... That's basically everything that happens, all the time," adding that the upgrades and skills on top of that "feel like they actually add anything to the game except more noise." A third calls it "offensively simple," saying they expected something to shift after the ten-minute mark and it never did, concluding "it's like every incremental on the market was blended together and watered down."

That's a coherent, specific pattern rather than scattered complaints — several reviewers independently land on the same description of a game whose skill tree changes numbers without changing decisions. Length compounds the issue: independent reviewer estimates converge on five to six hours to unlock everything the game offers, "the longest are the last ranks of the last few upgrades that barely offer anything," in one reviewer's words.

A developer who apologised, specifically and fast

Here's where this review has to give real credit. Two days after launch, Sockhouse Studios posted an update headed with an apology, not a marketing line: "We owe you, the player an apology for making the critical mistake of making achievements an unnecessary grind." The patch that followed specifically rebalanced the post-victory skill tree so its final upgrades could be reached "without an excessive grind," while explicitly preserving the option to idle for players who preferred that over active play. The day before that, a "Thank you for playing!" post promised the team was "actively squashing any bugs / performance issues, all reported by the community" and reading every piece of feedback on Steam and Discord.

That's a specific, humble, fast response to a specific, real problem — and at least one reviewer says it changed their mind: "I was going to give this game a negative review because I was SO ready for the game to be over, but the heartfelt message from the dev about why they made the game won me over." It's worth being precise about what the patch does and doesn't fix, though: it targets the endgame grind specifically, not the more fundamental "this loop doesn't offer real choices" complaint that dominates the harshest reviews. A faster path to the ending doesn't change what the ending is made of.

A visible boost from outside the review corpus

Worth flagging honestly: several of the most-liked positive reviews reference watching "imcade," an online personality, play the game before buying it themselves — "Watched imcade have fun. Decided to give it a go," reads one; "Cade played. Cade must approve," reads another, part of a small cluster of similarly-phrased reviews. That's a normal, above-board way for a small release to find its early audience, and doesn't change the substance of what those reviewers say about the game once they played it — but it's a relevant fact about where a chunk of this specific 118-review corpus came from, in a launch window barely a week old at the time of writing.

What the completion data shows

The achievement curve suggests the balance patch may already be working as intended: 57% of players have the "WIN_GAME" achievement and 40% have maxed every skill, both healthy figures with no visible cliff for a week-old release. That's consistent with a game whose worst grind wall has genuinely been softened, even if the more fundamental complaint about a repetitive, low-choice core loop remains unaddressed by any patch so far.

The upside of playing it safe

It's worth acknowledging what this design conservatism buys the game, since the harsher reviews risk making it sound worse than it plays. A reviewer who bought in at the discount specifically pushes back on the value complaints, noting the two-hour opening session was enough to feel satisfied before letting it "chill for a day" and returning — which is precisely the rhythm an incremental like this is built around, and a rhythm the negative reviews measuring it against a much longer game don't really engage with. None of the reviews report bugs, crashes, or predatory monetisation; whatever else is true of it, Mining and Dwarves is a complete, functional, honestly priced small game that simply chose not to take many risks with its own design.

The verdict

Mining and Dwarves earns a 5.5. The core loop works exactly as advertised and never breaks, the persistent-progression design is a fair alternative to prestige-loop fatigue for players tired of that structure, and the developer's fast, humble response to launch feedback is genuinely better than most small studios manage. But "boring," "generic," and "watered down" are words that several independent, detailed reviewers reach for on their own, describing a skill tree that changes numbers without changing decisions — and no patch so far has touched that deeper complaint.

Worth a look at the discount if you want another simple mining incremental for a relaxed afternoon and don't already own several similar games. If you're choosing between incrementals and want one with real branching choices, the reviews here are unusually direct that this isn't it.

If you'd rather your progression system have real decisions baked into every skill rather than a single climbing number, Wanderer builds its systems around exactly that kind of choice, at no cost to the offline progress the genre promises.