Koumuin Yamete, Ana o Horu Koto ni Shimashita (公務員辞めて、穴を掘ることにしました) Review

God knows why I played this game. Curiosity, probably.

Koumuin Yamete, Ana o Horu Koto ni Shimashita (公務員辞めて、穴を掘ることにしました)

The title sounds like a joke, and that’s exactly what it is: a 4399-tier doujin minigame. I don’t know if the old “Chengguang” platform is even still alive, but this is the kind of thing that would only exist on a site like that.

The game is short. Our thoroughly goofy-looking protagonist ditches his shut-in wife at home to dig a hole by the front door, and ends up in another world. There are multiple endings—one where you dig down, come back up, and find your wife has run off with someone else; one where you tunnel through time and space. But the whole thing is just snark and shitposting, so you’re not expecting anything actually interesting out of it.

And the “jokes” in this game are genuinely hard for me to parse. Maybe it’s because I’m not a young Japanese person, but my face the entire time was the old-man-staring-at-his-phone meme:

“What the fuck is this? What’s supposed to be funny here?”

Thoughts like that. The plot is honestly at the level of a chuuni kid with mental problems making stuff up on the spot. Zero surprises.

What did surprise me wasn’t the content, though—it was the assets. I was stunned to find the game uses so-called “free assets,” and even more stunned that those free assets are… actually pretty good.

Our punchable protagonist, the heroine with the headphones, and the girl with the backpack—you can tell they were dug out of some Japanese free-asset library, but they somehow fit this nonsense plot perfectly. Genuinely unexpected.

The creator has made a bunch of similar games using the same free assets—the most recent one features a muscle guy. I looked at their earlier work too: all stick-figure style. Probably they realized their own art was too ugly, gave up, and went hunting for free assets.

The game even has an OP song, and of course the song is free too. Putting together a whole game out of this much free material—the author is some kind of genius.

Remember, back in the Chengguang days, a lot of the assets on there were pirated.