Fresh from Shipaton
Impossible to Dig
Turkish has an expression for a hopeless, painstaking job: digging a well with a need…
iPhone · iPad





About this app
Turkish has an expression for a hopeless, painstaking job: digging a well with a needle. This game is that expression, taken literally. You have one sewing needle. The water is about twelve meters down. Each tap moves you 0.2 mm. The well is in no hurry. THE DIG Tap. The needle scratches. The depth counter moves, and it reports four decimal places, because the difference between 0.8400 m and 0.8402 m is the entire point. It is a side-view cross-section of the ground you are ruining: topsoil, clay, gravel, bedrock, and eventually the dark wet layer where the water lives. TOOLS ARE FOUND, NEVER SOLD The earth hands things back while you dig — an old coin, a bone, a pottery shard, a root. Worthless at the bazaar. Priceless down here. Trade them for a safety pin (2×), a nail borrowed from a fence (5×), your grandmother’s good spoon (20×, and she has questions), and finally a bucket that keeps digging while the app is closed. Every tool is earned by digging, in every well, forever. Not one of them is for sale — no starter pack, no shortcut, no button that skips the wait. You cannot pay to dig faster. That rule was decided before anything else in this game and it is not up for revision. WHAT ISN’T HERE No ads. No timers. No energy bar. No daily streak to lose. Exactly one notification, and it stays off until you switch it on yourself: the bucket, saying once that it has filled up. Nothing else ever arrives. The game itself needs no connection at all: every meter, every tool and the share card work in a basement with no signal. Three things use the network when they can find it: the optional Game Center leaderboard, iCloud quietly keeping the same well on your other device, and RevenueCat, which handles the one purchase. If none of them ever finds it, the well does not mind, and a purchase you made stays unlocked. REACHING WATER Twelve meters takes as long as it takes. When the water finally rises up the shaft, you get your depth, your day count, your tap count, and a share card: the whole well as one narrow vertical strip, sky at the top, water at the bottom, dug with a needle. Proof, for whoever wants to see it. THE VILLAGE The first well, Old Yard, is free from the first scratch to the last drop — the full twelve meters, the water, the share card, all of it. Nothing is held back from the free game. If you want more ground, a single one-time purchase opens the rest of Kuyuköy: Garden, Rocky Plateau, Orchard, Threshing Floor. One payment, once, and there is nothing else to buy after it. Your toolbox stays the same. The ground changes. English and Turkish, both written rather than translated.