Fill Up The Hole is a neat incremental city builder all about helping FEZ lookalikes fill a gaping crater

Back again with the finest from Steam’s daily crop of demos and nestled among the brain rot sims is one for Fill Up The Hole. It’s a game about filling up a hole. Not a metaphoric chasm left by unrequited love or a mind-cleaving loss, but an actual hole, stone and soil scooped out to leave a yawning pit that needs filling. Better yet, it’s a rather generous hole: throw something in and you’ll get money in return, a bit like a reverse wishing well.

Described as an incremental city builder, Fill Up The Hole sees you using that hole-money to create a city from nothing. A house to start, shelter for your little FEZ lookalike peons, who’ll happily dart about to hoover up trash and throw it into the hole. Next a factory to generate more trash, a catapult to punt said trash into the maw, a research facility to unlock upgrades and abilities to upgrade your buildings, and so on. There’s even an ability that beams in a bulldozer to shovel up all your trash for an immediate windfall.

Before long, you’ve got a humble settlement on your hands that’s a visually pleasing hive of activity. More peons, more trash, and finally the hole is sated, triggering an earthquake that razes your little city, a clean slate to start that hole-filing all over again. But like what you’d expect from an incremental game reset, upgrades carry over, making your peons and city a tiny bit more efficient this time around. And, more importantly, there’s a bigger, hungrier hole for you to fill and fill it you will. So, off you go to produce as much trash as you can to throw it into the hole until the next seismic rumble.

The loop is deceptively simple matched by an equally rudimentary all-but-monochrome pixel art style that’s reminiscent of those nascent DOS games from the early 90s. It’s cute and soundtracked to a selection of lofi hip-hop slow bangers for a very breezy and tranquil little atmosphere. No AAA gloss, glitzy lighting effects, or emotive orchestral swells here. 

Don’t let that put you off though: there’s something about Fill Up The Hole that’s piqued my interest. Could it be the inadvertent (or maybe intentional) commentary on the human propensity for generating rubbish? Ever wonder what happened to all those fidget spinners? Plastic packaging on bloody bananas? Maybe I’m reading into it too much. It’s more likely that Fill Up The Hole taps into what makes the best incremental idle games like Cookie Clicker, Kittens Game, and A Dark Room so damn moreish: the satisfaction of small but perceivable progress to prompt you to continue. You can let the game tick away in the background like an idle, but it’s very much designed for active playing.

All this is curtailed abruptly in the demo due a three-earthquake limit so there’s a sense you’re only scratching the surface of what Fill Up The Hole has to offer. It’s penciled in for release in the nebulous launch window of Q3 2025, so hopefully developer Technologie XC has it ready by the end of the year.