Undersoil vs Idle Roadie

Somewhere under this beach is everything anyone ever lost. Undersoil is a pixel-art dig-and-collect game about the slow, satisfying business of finding things. Sweep a metal detector along the shoreline until a beam of light marks a spot. Dig it out. Carry it home. Brush the dirt away by hand and find out what you actually pulled up — and how well it survived down there. Then the only decision that matters: sell it, or put it on a pedestal where everyone can see it. THE LOOP • Sweep the sand until the detector finds something • Dig it out on the tap bar before the dirt wins • Carry the find overhead to the cleaning table • Spray and scrub off the grime by hand to see what you've got • Watch the condition land: OK, Fine, Good, Excellent, Mint or Pristine • Sell it for cash, or display it and let it earn gold while you are gone 159 THINGS TO FIND Bottle caps and fish bones near the top. Crowns, meteorites and things that have no business being buried on a beach a long way below. Twelve rarity tiers run from Common to Primordial, and only your single best specimen of each earns a pedestal — turn up a better one and the old one gets bumped. SIX LEVELS DOWN Home Beach is only the lid. Take the miner's cart down through The Undersoil, The Deep, the Lava Pools, the Sulphur Sink and the Abyssal Trench. Each level buries richer things and asks for better gear to get them out. GEAR THAT EARNS ITS KEEP Shovels, detectors, sprays and bags, five tiers deep at every level. A better detector finds more. A better shovel digs faster. A bigger bag means fewer walks back. A MUSEUM THAT PAYS Thirty pedestals on the sand. Everything you display earns gold in plain sight, and keeps earning while the app is shut. Tourists wander in to admire the good ones. ALSO • Plays offline; cloud save keeps your progress if you reinstall • No account, no sign-up, no email address • Seventeen languages • Free to play. Rewarded ads are always your choice, and there is never a full-screen ad in your first session.

You run a stage production company. You start with one wedding speaker in a village hall. You end up on a stadium tour, with drones, pyro and twelve trucks looking for a parking space. In between, there is the gear, the crew, and the cable. THE GEAR IS THE HERO 36 pieces of gear, from the village hall speaker to the 40-metre giant screen. Each one shows up on stage when you buy it, and each one has an opinion. The 12-channel console has one channel that crackles, nobody knows which. The LED wall has a dead pixel. It became the mascot. A CREW THAT WORKS WHILE YOU SLEEP Hire a sound engineer, a lighting operator, a video tech and a road manager at every venue. They relaunch everything, even when you put the phone down. While you are away, your crew takes down stages, eats sandwiches and earns money. You collect it all when you come back. SIX VENUES, SIX STAGES Village hall, music bar, concert hall, festival, arena, stadium. Every move changes the stage: a bigger crowd, a bigger band, banners in the audience. Everything is drawn in the control-room style: dark console, seven-segment displays, backlit keys. GO BACK ON TOUR When you have seen it all, start again with Gold Records that boost everything for good. Recruit legendary crew: the motivated intern, the one who knows the cable, the sound engineer who hears a buzz from the car park. AN IDLE GAME THAT RESPECTS YOUR TIME • One hand, portrait, sessions of 3 to 10 minutes • No forced ads, ever: ads are always your choice, for a bonus • Your own music keeps playing, the game never cuts your podcast • Daily goals, login calendar, tokens earned by playing • 30 / 60 / 120 fps modes, volume settings, Dynamic Type friendly • 14 languages Idle Roadie is made by a live-event technician and a lot of gaffer tape. It is a fond, self-mocking tribute to the people in black that nobody sees. Tired, invisible, indispensable. And if it fails, it's the cable.