SteamWorld Dig 2 is a single-player 2D platform action-adventure metroidvania video game developed and published by Image & Form. It is the fourth installment in the Steam World series of games and the direct sequel to 2013's Steamworld Dig. It was first released in September 2017 for Nintendo Switch, Linux, macOS, Windows, PlayStation 4, and Play Station Vita. It was later released for Nintendo 3DS in February 2018, for Xbox One in November 2018, for Stadia in March 2020, and for Amazon Luna in October 2020.
Publisher Rising Star Games released physical retail copies of the game for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 in 2018.
Following Rusty's disappearance at the end of Steamworld Dig, Dorothy, a robot who he had befriended, travels to the mining town of El Machino in order to search for him. Along the way, she comes across Fen, a remnant of the Vectron that Rusty had previously fought, who joins Dorothy as a navigator.
SteamWorld Dig 2 Presents Examples Of:
- Aerith and Bob: In the second game, The Yonker brothers: Mic, Luke, Josh, and Zebulon.
- An Economy Is You: El Machino are populated with handfuls of NPCs who only exist to service the player character or sell you upgrades, with some only providing dialogue. It's justified, as nobody but Dorothy is willing to search El Machino's mine due to recent earthquakes.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Normally, when you die, you respawn at the surface with some of your minerals lost, but while in a bonus cave, you can die as many times as you like with no cost, respawning at the cave entrance.
- Apocalypse How: Class X at the end of SteamWorld Dig 2, due to Rosie's unstable reactor going haywire and blowing up Earth, forcing surviving Steambots to set up colonies among the stars and on Earth's fragments.
- Bait-and-Switch: Ronald's Treasure Chamber in 2. To open it, you need to backtrack through the entire Temple of the Destroyer, searching for braziers that you've only just now gotten the upgrade to light. When you finally get there, the chamber contains... a single Trashium deposit.
- Subverted in that a hidden passage in the chamber leads to not only an incredibly valuable Ametrine jewel, but three upgrade cogs and the Long Range Grappler mod for the Hookshot.
- Big Bad: Rosie turns out to be this, though it's hard to tell how much of it was really her and not Vectron. She was the one behind the tremors and Rusty's disappearance, using an earthquake generator built with Vectron's tech in an attempt to exterminate the robots while manipulating Dorothy into destroying his failsafes.
- Bittersweet Ending: Dorothy finds Rusty and saves him from Rosie... but the reactor Rosie built goes haywire and blows up the planet. Both bots manage to escape on the rocket in El Machino along with the rest of the townsfolk (and one Shiner), but Fen has to stay behind to teleport them to safety. On the bright side, the ending shows that many other Steambot towns had also built escape rockets around the same time, and SteamWorld Heist previously revealed that Fen made it out alive.
- Body Armor as Hit Points: The purchasable health extensions are armor upgrades, implying this.
- Bonus Dungeon: SteamWorld Dig 2 features the Trials of Heaven and Hell, which can be reached by equipping the Sigillum Crelum Et Infernum blueprint (obtained by showing all 42 artifacts to Davy Bitterborough) and using the maxed-out Jet Engine to fly to the entrance above Windy Plains. It's a series of new cave challenges, one after another in a randomized order, with no health or water pickups provided and no checkpoints; clearing all the sections in one go grants you another artifact, bringing the total to 43 and granting a Steam achievement.
- Bragging Rights Reward: Clearing the Trials of Heaven and Hell grants you the 43rd artifact, the Proof of Completion. It's just a certificate for completing said trials, not counting towards a full completion ranking. Its only use is showing it to Davy Bitterborough, who is initially stunned at the discovery of one final artifact only to remark that it's a pretty lame one.
- Call-Forward: Dorothy meets a sprite she names Fen, which is the name of the bot you can recruit in SteamWorld Heist's Outsider DLC. Makes sense considering their condition by the end of the game.
- Collision Damage: Touching enemies deals damage to Dorothy. She can use a blueprint to deal collision damage to enemies if they touch her.
- Dug Too Deep: Going deeper into the mines starts revealing more unsettling enemies and obstacles, such as the Shiners and a teleporter to the ruined Vectron.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Occurs at the end of the game, after Rosie's unstable reactor goes haywire and explodes. Surviving Steambots set up colonies on it's fragments.
- Evil All Along: Rosie is the real reason why Rusty went missing, having kidnapped him to use him as a power source on her mech-suit and manipulated Dorothy to deactivate the machines Rusty put to stop the Fusion Distillery she built to control all the other Moonshiners.
- Evolving Title Screen: After defeating the Final Boss by destroying Rosie's mecha and saving Rusty, the title screen changes from a shot of Dorothy in the mountains at night to a shot of Rusty and Dorothy on an asteroid looking at the remains of the exploded earth.
- Face–Heel Turn: It's implied Rosie was a fairly nice person before she found Vectron's tech.
- Falling Damage: Dorothy is vulnerable to damage from falling great distances. It's possible to get an upgrade that reduces the damage, and once Dorothy obtains an upgraded jet pack it effectively ceases to be a problem.
- Foreshadowing: Dorothy wonders how a shiner from Oasis could possibly wander into Yarrow, which is miles away. Turns out there is a sewer connecting Oasis and Yarrow. It comes handy when Dorothy needs to confront Rosie but the entrance of Oasis is blocked.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: The Great Prophet. He's the only boss in either game who is always vulnerable, so his strategy is to teleport to different chambers in the arena and target Dorothy with fireball spells. His warping produces movement lines indicating which direction he went in.
- Goggles Do Nothing: The moulding of Dorothy's head resembles an aviator helmet with a pair of goggles pushed up her forehead. There is never any indication that the goggles are functional.
- Ground-Shattering Landing: Fall from a great height onto soil, and you'll crack the ground. Also happens when you dig under a boulder trap.
- Hearts Are Health: Dorothy's life is represented by heart symbols.
- Heroic Sacrifice: After Rosie's Mini-Mecha destroyed and her lair collapsing, Fen left behind to activate the Vectron portal to teleport Dorothy and Rusty back to El Machino. They come back in SteamWorld Heist as a DLC character.
- Hit the Ground Harder: Dorothy's grappling hook can be used to completely nullify fall damage even if shot into the floor, but her falling past the camera at terminal velocity makes this quite difficult.
- Homeworld Evacuation: There is a minor character in the Hub City building a rocket because of the ominous quakes going on. By the end of the game, Dorothy, Rusty, and the townsfolk have to board the rocket to escape the exploding planet, along with rockets built by other towns. This establishes the new status quo for SteamWorld Heist, which was released before Dig 2.
- Interquel: The game is a sequel to SteamWorld Dig but a prequel to SteamWorld Heist, with the ending setting up the latter by featuring the Earth-Shattering Kaboom that destroyed the Steambot homeworld and revealing that Rusty and Dorothy were among the refugees.
- I Will Find You: The main motivation of Dorothy, she is trying to find Rusty for saving her town from Vectron and wants to talk with him again, to which, brings her to El Machino in order to find for him.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: The sequel is this for anyone who skipped the first game, as it directly follows up on the ending of the first game and talks about its plot points at times.
- Metroidvania: At some points, you'll be faced with an obstacle that will require a specific upgrade to pass. You can get both required and optional upgrades along the way, the world is more open than in the first game since you can explore outside of the central mine (though there's still a defined path through the story), and the secrets are more important as they can hide gold cogs or artifacts.
- The Morlocks: The Shiners return but this time, a more intelligent, friendly Shiner colony shows up in the sequel, but they turn out to be the real villains of the story.
- Non-Combat EXP: The sequel includes a traditional leveling system with experience gained by killing monsters, but it only unlocks higher upgrade tiers and improves the percentage of bonus money gained by selling ores.
- Patchwork Kids: Steambot children are literally this. When two parents want a child, they gather enough parts to build one, with each parent donating one of their own parts in the construction. This is brought up with Ma Yonker who is in terrible shape due to having given her children most of her parts, children who don't appear to appreciate her at all.
- Point of No Return: Entering the ominous doorway that the Final Boss awaits behind will lead directly to the final boss battle and then the end of the game, with no further opportunities to explore for secrets or upgrade Dorothy's equipment. Because of this, any time you go to enter the door, Fen will ask Dorothy if she's sure she's ready, and give the player a chance to back out and do some more preparation.
- Promoted to Playable: Dorothy, the person who gives you money in exchange for minerals becomes the main character in the sequel.
- Rogue Protagonist: At one point Rusty is suspected to have become one in the sequel having even a temple full of creepy cultists dedicated to him... This ends up being a Red Herring.
- Sequel Hook: SteamWorld Dig 2 has a form of sequel-prequel hook. You end the game with a reactor in the core of the world going critical, and causing an Earth-Shattering Kaboom... the same one that is part of the background plot of SteamWorld Heist!
- Sequence Breaking: SteamWorld Dig 2 has an achievement for destroying all of the doomsday devices/power sappers before going into Vectron and getting the Jet Engine. In this case, you need to use the Long-Range Grappler (needed to reach the Temple of Guidance's chamber and to cross the lava pit to reach the east side of the Temple of the Destroyer) and Grenade Launcher (needed to blow up a bouncy plant blocking off the rest of Yarrow) to access the required areas without having the Jet Engine.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the Challenge Trials has you avoid fire traps, and at one point forces you through a long corridor where you face off against a Cultist summoner, *but you can't use any weapons*. The solution? Flip a lever so that he falls into the lava below.
- There's a lantern upgrade that takes the strategy and guesswork out of hunting for secret areas by highlighting the weak points of destructible walls as long as they're being illuminated; it makes secret hunting such a no-brainer that, as the upgrade's description puts it, "you don't need no education and no thought control, just look at the wall."
- One of the "treasures", "Rattus norwegicus," is a dead brown rat, with its description stating that "if you are what you eat, then I only want to eat the good stuff."
- One of the Challenge Trial caverns is a homage to Portal in miniature: a testing chamber run by a machine intelligence that shows you ASCII art of a cake and makes slighting comments about your intelligence, where the goal initially appears to involve placing weighted cubes onto buttons but real progress toward the exit can only be made by breaking out of the simulation chamber and climbing around the rusted metal superstructure.
- Springy Spores: Found in Yarrow, the area full of mysterious glowing fungi.
- Stealth-Based Mission: The Mysterious Cave aka Vectron Ruins. Full of inanimate giant Vectron bots and spirits around them. Once one spirit spots Dorothy, the alarm is sound and all of them will pilot the bots to hunt her down. The only escape from certain death is running.
- Steampunk: All technology in the world is steam-powered, including the robots. Until you get to Vectron, which has electrical machines.Fen: If you see something move, run.
- Sudden Sequel Heel Syndrome: Rusty appears to have suffered this once you reach the Temple of the Destroyer, where Rusty is apparently worshipped as a god of destruction by an insane cult. Some NPCs even think he's the one causing the earthquakes, which even Dorothy starts to believe on some level. He isn't. Rosie's machine was causing the earthquakes, and Rusty's machines were trying to stop her.
- Unobtainium: Appears as a high-end treasure, but has no other special function.
- Wall Jump: An innate ability of Dorothy, which is very useful for climbing up the mines.
- The Wild West: Keeping the Old West theme of the franchise.
