Burrowlings

Free demo · Full game on Steam in April 2027
★ Liked the demo? Rate it on itch.io: it helps other players find it.

In active development. Burrowlings is being built right now, and this demo is where we try things out. It gets updated often, and your feedback decides what changes next, so tell us anything: what hooked you, where you got stuck, what made you stop.

Four tiny burrowlings in hard hats. One oil lamp hanging over the shaft. Straight down, a very long way down, the planet's core.

Picks swing, the rock cracks, the floor drops and gold spills out. But the lamp is burning. When it goes out, the dig is over. Spend the gold, send them back down, and get a little deeper every time.

Every dig, the crew grows: diggers with picks, drillers on their rigs, bombers on wooden decks up the walls. Your clicks smash the rubble at their feet. Spend your gold in a web of upgrades with no right path through it. Nothing tells you what to buy. Working that out is the game.

Play online with up to 4 players. Share one shaft in co-op, or race side by side in versus, and drop a block of ice on a deeper rival to freeze their diggers and burn their lamp twice as fast.

The whole first descent, from the grass to the core, in about 15 to 20 minutes: four walls, elemental diggers, drillers and bombers, and something waiting at the bottom. It ends at the core. The full game comes to Steam in April 2027.

Controls

• Left click: smash the rubble under the mouse
• Space: smash the oldest chunk of rubble, or start the next dig
• Esc: the menu (pauses a solo dig)
• x1 / x2 / x3, top left: the dig's speed
• In versus, drag the ice from the bottom left onto a deeper rival's shaft to freeze them
• F11: fullscreen

Install

Play it right here in your browser (Chrome or Edge work best), or download it, unzip it and run it: nothing to install. Solo needs no internet; online play does.

• Windows (64-bit): run Burrowlings.exe. If Windows says it protected your PC, click More info, then Run anyway: the game isn't code-signed yet. It needs a graphics card with Vulkan (most from the last ten years).
• macOS (Apple silicon and Intel): the game isn't notarized by Apple yet, so the first time macOS refuses to open it. Try once, then open System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.
• Linux (64-bit): run Burrowlings.x86_64. It needs Vulkan too.

In English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Simplified Chinese: the game picks yours, and Options changes it.

Feedback

Tell us how far you got, what made you stop, and what you wanted more of, in the comments below or on our Discord. It's also where to find someone to play co-op or versus with, and where every update is announced. Every message gets read.

★ Liked the demo? Rate it on itch.io: it helps other players find it.