BODY: There is no good reason that digging a hole should be this entertaining. And yet here we are: the co-op sequel to one of 2025's strangest breakout indie games has a release date, a price, and a Nintendo Switch 2 version.
Shochiku's Game Business Division announced that A Game About Digging A Hole Together, co-published with the German label rokaplay select, arrives December 4 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC. The price is ¥700 — roughly $4.50 — and the publishers say Xbox Game Pass support is also planned, which effectively makes it free for subscribers on day one.
The premise is exactly what the title promises. You are handed a shovel and a patch of ground, and you dig. Deeper holes reveal buried oddities, upgrades, and the slow, compulsive satisfaction of watching a pit become a cavern. The "Together" in the name is the new part: this entry is built around cooperative multiplayer, so the excavation becomes a shared project — or a shared disaster, depending on how coordinated your friends are.
The original single-player version became an unlikely Steam success story in 2025, powered by a pocket-change price tag, a self-explanatory title, and streamers who discovered that watching someone dig a hole is unaccountably watchable. Pricing the follow-up at ¥700 across four platforms is a deliberate repeat of that formula: cheap enough to be an impulse buy, and cheap enough to buy for a friend.
The insider take
The detail that raises eyebrows in Tokyo isn't the game — it's the logo on the box. Shochiku is a 130-year-old institution, the company behind Yasujirō Ozu's films, the Tora-san series, and the kabuki stage at Tokyo's Kabukiza. Its move into game publishing has been quietly aggressive, favoring exactly this kind of small, weird, internationally portable indie title rather than prestige projects. For a company whose name signifies classical theater to most Japanese consumers, a ¥700 digging game with German co-publishers is a telling bet on where cultural relevance is actually being built.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).