I thought it was a cute and casual little mining sim right up until it devoured my entire morning

Cute games: they're cute. Sometimes they're extremely cute. Once in a while they even have the word "cute" in their title, like Gemporium: A Cute Mining Sim. With a name like that, I thought, it's probably just a breezy little game where you dig up gems.

And it is. At first. As an industrious little mole in Gemporium, I've just inherited a cozy home and gemshop from my dearly departed grandmole, a loving bequeathment until you note the little P.S. in the will: grandma also left you all her debt, which is exactly a million bucks. That's a lot to pay off. Better start digging!

In a corner of my new house there's the entrance to a mine, so I spend my days underground digging into walls and hoping to find gems valuable enough to sell in my shop. Mining is a minigame where you tap around with a hammer until you find a little nugget amid the dirt and stone. Once the nugget is freed by enough tapping, you play another minigame at your workbench to dispense with its crusty coating.

Finally, you can polish it with a cloth and see what you've got: an amethyst, an opal, a ruby, maybe even a diamond. Chances are it's cracked—that's what happens when you bang on rocks with a hammer—but you can still sell it in your shop to your gem-hungry customers: a groundhog, a mouse, a pigeon, a worm dressed like a cowboy, all with very specific tastes in jewelry.

Easy enough: mine, refine, and sell. But when I made my first handful of coins I bought a bigger sack so I could carry more gems up from the mines at once, and after a few more sales I bought a little hand-operated drill.

That changed everything. Now I bang around downstairs with my hammer, but the second I spot a promising nugget, I switch to my drill to slowly and carefully extract my prize instead of just whacking it until it comes loose. Fewer cracked stones means more moolah for moleman. And that means more upgrades.

Now I've got a TV in my mole-hole that tells me what gemstones are hot that day and a magnifying glass that tells me what gems I'll find in each dig spot before I even start hammering. After one especially profitable day I also bought myself an upgrade that means each spot I mine in will produce two gems instead of one. And I've just unlocked haggling, which means I can get a good deal from customers even if they don't really want what I'm selling.

It sounds like I'm halfway to easy street after just a week of mining, but don't forget: Gramma hung a debt around my neck and I owe loan shark (he is a literal shark) one million smackers. So I've still got a heck of a lot of mining to do, but on the plus side there are a bunch more upgrades to unlock that will make my operation more profitable.

The main thing is I sat down this morning to try out this cute little mining game for a few minutes and when I looked up again it was lunchtime. There's a free demo of Gemporium you can try for yourself right now: the full game launches on Steam August 7.