Drill Down vs Deep Bell
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Drill Down
Explore a procedurally generated mine by drilling downwards, collecting minerals, and upgrading your equipment. The mine evolves with your choices, creating a unique map each time. Uncover a story as you delve deeper into the earth.
- One-thumb portrait controls
- Persistent, non-regenerating mine
- Dynamic environmental hazards (water, gas, lava)
- Visible rig upgrades
- Surface camp progression
- Offline play
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Drill Down is a beautiful portrait mining game where every run takes you a little deeper, until one of them reaches the centre of the earth. You drive one machine into one mountain. Put a finger anywhere on the glass and the rig turns toward it and eats its way there. No buttons, no menus while you are down, just a heading and a tank of fuel. When the tank runs low the hoist pulls you home with whatever you were carrying. Nothing you cut is ever undone. The bore you opened yesterday is the road you ride down today, so the mine slowly becomes a map of your own decisions: the shortcut you drilled, the flooded gallery you gave up on, the seam you followed sideways for two hundred metres. Between runs, the surface is where you spend it: • a machine rebuilt part by part, every upgrade bolted on where you can see it • a museum that fills up with the minerals you carried out • a camp that quietly changes as the shaft gets deeper Hard ground refuses a weak cutter outright. Water finds your tunnels and sits in them. Gas collects along the roof and waits for a spark off the wrong rock. Deeper still, the ground is hot enough to cost you fuel just for being in it. There is no losing here. There is only the gap between where you stopped and where you were trying to get to, and the mountain will be exactly as you left it when you come back. Underneath all of it, a professor pays you by the load and does not say why. Others came this way before you. Their rooms are still down there, and what they left behind is the reason none of them made it home. Features: • one thumb, portrait, no second control anywhere • runs of a few minutes that fit into a gap in the day • a mine that is never regenerated and never reset • layers of ground that each look, sound and cut differently • flooding, gas and lava that behave like themselves rather than like traps • minerals to find, haul out and put on a shelf • upgrades visible on the rig from the moment you buy them • a surface camp that grows out of what you bring back • a neighbour with a boat, a borrowed digger and work of his own • expeditions to places that are not your mountain • a story on the radio, and an older one written into the rock • an ending, and a way to reach it • no ads, no in-app purchases, no timers, fully offline Keep going down. It stops sounding like rock long before you arrive.
Deep Bell
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A town sank on a night of storm forty years ago. Its bell is still ringing. Drill down through the seabed and bring up what the town left behind. You are a diver with no name. From the salvage barge Kamome-maru you ride a diving bell down to Shizugane, the harbour town the sea took. • A seabed that shifts: sand pours into your tunnels, rubble tumbles and lava hardens where it meets the water. Every dig changes the ground beneath you. • Light and air: lamp oil, an air hose and a reserve tank. Fill your satchel, empty it at the bell, and go again. • Lower the bell down the tunnel you dug, and start your next dive from there. • Six depths, six worlds: the Shallows, Shizugane, the Cathedral, the Ship Graveyard, the Vents and the Trench, where the Great Bell lies. • 43 relics and 15 keepsakes, each holding a piece of the town's last night. • Restore the clock tower, the organ and the foundry, and rebuild the harbour. • A crew of three: a gruff captain, an engineer with no time for superstition, and a boy kept awake by a bell beneath the sea. And a question no one asks out loud: who is the diver? • Eels that steal your ore, squid that ink, crabs, anglerfish. They are few, and all give fair warning. Or switch on relaxed mode: no injuries, no thieving eels, just you, the dark water and the dig. • Play one-handed, in portrait. • A pixel-art sea, and music that shifts as you go deeper. Buy once. No ads, no in-app purchases. Plays offline.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Deep Bell at $0.99 against Drill Down's $1.99. On ads, in-app purchases, device support and iOS requirement there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Drill Down costs $1.99 and Deep Bell $0.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
| Parameter | Drill Down | Deep Bell |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $1.99 | $0.99 — better |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Update frequency | Every 4 days | — |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 | 15.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 156 MB | 106 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 9+ |
| Developer | Luis Herskovic | 東京AI映像合同会社 |
In-app purchases
Drill Down
No in-app purchases
Deep Bell
No in-app purchases









