There Is mORE Review

Mine by Day, Defend by Night, Repeat Until Dawn Feels Fragile

There Is mORE has a premise that sounds like three different games stitched together, and against the odds, solo developer ByteBeyond has made the stitching hold: dig into a procedurally generated underground for ore and treasure during the day, then rush back to base before nightfall to defend your core against waves of monsters with swords, spells, towers, and traps. Each of those halves would be a reasonable small game on its own — a mining-and-digging loot loop, or a wave-based tower defense — but pairing them creates a genuine risk-reward tension that neither half manages alone: dig deeper for better ore and you'll find yourself racing the clock back to a base that isn't ready for what's coming, while playing it safe by day leaves you under-equipped for the fight at night. Released as a full 1.0 on September 18 after almost three years of development and roughly six and a half months in Early Access, There Is mORE landed with an unusually strong 91% positive rating across 33 reviews — a genuinely rare thing for a game this mechanically ambitious to pull off cleanly.

A Survivors-Style Build System Bolted Onto a Mining Sim

The system holding the whole thing together is a deep, Survivors-inspired progression loop: more than 25 unlockable spells, over 20 types of ore to mine and sell for gear upgrades, a full skill tree, and equippable rings and items that all combine to radically change how a given run plays out. Reviewers consistently single out the spell system and build variety as the game's strongest asset — multiple reviews describe experimenting with spell combinations as "genuinely fun" and note the game goes noticeably deeper into roguelite progression than closer genre relatives like Dome Keeper or Hold the Mine, which several reviewers cite by name as the obvious comparison points. One particularly detailed English-language review calls out the day/night cycle's resource-planning pressure specifically, along with a nice touch where cave darkness deepens the further underground you dig — a simple environmental signal that raises tension the deeper a run goes, rather than relying purely on enemy stat inflation to make late runs harder.

An Almost Three-Year Development Story, Told in Public

What sets There Is mORE apart from a typical Early Access cycle is the sheer density and transparency of ByteBeyond's post-launch communication. Between the March 3 Early Access launch and the September 18 1.0 release, the developer shipped roughly ten numbered major content updates — new towers, a repair-with-shards system, a full level-up rework, new enemy types, movement overhauls — on top of a constant stream of hotfixes and roadmap updates, all delivered in a plain, direct, first-person voice that reads like a developer genuinely working through community feedback in real time rather than checking a marketing box. The demo alone went through five major public revisions and was kept alive well past its original planned shutdown date specifically because players kept engaging with it. That kind of visible, sustained iteration is exactly what Early Access is supposed to look like, and it shows in the review base: several reviewers explicitly mention having beta-tested or closely followed the game through its full development, describing the "just one more run" pull that kept bringing them back across dozens of updates.

Where the Ambition Outruns the Onboarding

The recurring complaint across an otherwise strongly positive review base is the interface and onboarding experience — more than one reviewer describes the UI as "confusing," warns that new players should expect to spend "at least an hour" just figuring out the game's overlapping systems, and notes that There Is mORE doesn't do much hand-holding for a genre mashup this dense. That's a real cost of combining three distinct genre loops into one game: mining, base-building, and roguelite spellcasting all come with their own interface conventions, and reconciling them into something a first-time player can parse quickly is a much harder design problem than building any one system well in isolation. A smaller but recurring note is that the magic system feels tonally disconnected from the mining-and-survival core to at least a couple of reviewers, who found the spell variety impressive on paper but slightly out of place next to the grounded digging loop. None of this derails the experience for the large majority of reviewers, but it's a legitimate rough edge for a first hour, and worth going in aware of.

A 10-Day Cycle With a Boss Fight, and an Endless Mode After

Structurally, There Is mORE gives players a defined 10-day cycle culminating in a boss fight, with an Endless Mode unlocking afterward for players who want to keep pushing depth and difficulty past the main content. That's a sensible shape for a roguelite — a clear finish line for players who want closure, plus a genuine long-tail mode for players chasing deeper runs and better builds — and it's backed by full controller support and a Steam Deck Verified badge that ByteBeyond specifically worked with Valve to earn during Early Access, a level of platform polish that's easy to overlook but genuinely uncommon for a solo-developer project at this price point.

Verdict

There Is mORE takes three familiar genre loops — mining, tower defense, and roguelite spellcasting progression — and fuses them into something that, against reasonable odds, actually works, backed by an almost three-year development cycle and an unusually communicative, feedback-driven Early Access period that clearly earned it real community goodwill. The interface asks more patience of new players than it should, and the tonal fit between grounded mining and flashy spellcasting won't land for everyone, but the underlying risk-reward loop of digging deeper against a ticking clock is genuinely tense and replayable. At $16.99, it's a confident, well-supported full release from a developer who visibly listened throughout Early Access — worth the onboarding friction for roguelike and survival-crafting fans willing to push past a rough first hour.