A Game About Digging A Hole ending, explained

A Game About Digging A Hole might seem like a cozy game about digging a hole, but the game’s narrative takes a rather uncanny turn.

You are a regular guy in A Game About Digging A Hole who finds an advertisement for a house on sale with treasure buried in the garden. You look to turn a profit by purchasing the property and start digging the garden in hopes of getting rich. However, an evil scheme is being plotted against you underneath the garden.

Here’s everything you need to know about A Game About Digging A Hole’s ending sequence. 

A Game About Digging A Hole plot, explained

A Game About Digging A Hole starts with you just taking a regular stroll along your neighborhood to find an ominous vehicle stop next to your road. A faceless person jumps down from the truck and uses their notebook to write down tally marks as they try to keep track of something. They nail down a poster about selling a house and leave the spot using their truck.

The deal on the house grabs your attention, and you invest immediately in the Super Mega Digger 3000 Ultimate 2.0, which helps you start the digging process in your new house’s garden. While the digging might look harmless initially, it explodes as its battery reaches zero. It’s a very poor design choice but makes the gameplay interesting. You dig a hole and come back to your garage to pay a little price to charge it. Later, you unlock the Jetpack, which also consumes your charge but gives you an easy way to drop down into the hole without hurting yourself.

The journey starts slowly, with you simply collecting stones and working toward your achievements. However, the speed gradually increases. You can also upgrade your inventory, improve your shovel to dig deeper quickly, and even use lamps to light up your way in the dark parts of your hole. As you go deeper, you start finding better ore, such as silver, gold, and diamond, which you sell using the computer in your garage. 

Occasionally, you get hidden money pockets or treasures in the mine shaft, which push your progress to reach the end of the hole: the dungeon. This dungeon has three big moles who guard the treasure. Since you don’t have any weapon, you use your stealth to go past these moles.

To your surprise, the treasure chest is empty, and the moles are waiting to eat you—that’s where the game ends. There is another cutscene after you die, with the same vehicle and person coming to put down the poster about selling the house and update their tally.

The tally marks here make sense as the owner of the property is plotting down how many people fell prey to greed and died to the moles, essentially giving free money to the person in charge. To date, 23 people have fallen prey to this nefarious plan, and more are in line as they purchase the house in the future. There is a brief zoom on the vehicle’s number plate at the end, and the mole’s picture suggests that the person has put those moles underground to kill people digging down and always get the house back from the tenants.

It’s a social commentary on greed. If we’ve learned anything from horror films, don’t buy cheap houses because they’re pretty much always a trap.