I do not understand the appeal of this game. It is tedious. It is annoying. It asks me to do too much while offering me too little in return, and I do not understand how this is supposed to be fun.

I am genuinely baffled at what is frankly one of the more irritating games I have played in a while.

My eyes hurt just looking at it.

Berry Bury Berry is an incremental horror game about throwing things into a hole and watching what comes out. This hole fodder is generally (but not always) berries of varying shapes and flavours, with the potential to also feed the hole the various props strewn throughout the room. In exchange for berries, the hole spews stars and coins, which are in turn used to buy upgrades to improve the hole-feeding experience. Along the way, players can solve puzzles to learn more about the hole, where they are, and the mysteries of the excessively colourful garden.

And I will be honest. I do not care about this garden’s mysteries. I do not care about why I am trapped here or what the point of the hole is. I do not care about why the walls are the way they are or what garden gnome leads to what unlock. The game assumes that because it says there is a mystery, that ought to be enough reason for me to care. It is not. Without some context, some reason, some motivation of any kind, I do not give a single good goddamn about this hole. None of it is enough to overcome the fundamentally annoying and irredeemably tedious gameplay or the reality of actually having to engage with this game to make any kind of forward progress.

This speaks to the greater problem with arguably this entire genre. It is the idea that because there is a mystery - or, more specifically, that because I’m told there is a mystery - that ought to be enough of a reason for me to be engaged and to overlook the obnoxiousness that’s required for that engagement. Perhaps I’m too much of a cynic, or perhaps my patience is too thin, but the existence of something I’m told is mysterious is not reason enough for me to care. There’s nothing there for me to sink my claws into, no curiosity worth sating, especially when the process of doing so is such a mind-numbing one.

The point of solving the mystery is the journey. When the journey is a muddled fever dream, the destination will rarely be worth it.

Fuck off, piggy bank.

Like many incremental games, Berry Bury Berry’s gameplay focuses on the player gradually building up a money engine. Each initial berry dropped in the hole provides the player with a coin, with these coins being used to buy upgrades. Upgrades range from better berry generation to more efficient berry hauling to tools used to explore the world, but crucially, none of it ever allows for an automated system. There never comes a point where I can abandon the tedious exercise of schlepping berries from point a to point b. All I can do is make it nominally more efficient.

The fact that there is no getting away from manually moving berries from the ground to the hole suggests this is a core gameplay feature, that, more than anything else, this is a game about putting things in a hole. It would be reasonable to assume, then, that this mechanic is good or sound or engaging in some way. You would be wrong. This is a gameplay loop that requires picking up berries, dropping them in a hole, and repeating, over and over, ad infinitum, until the melted remains of your brain dribble down the sides of your head, seeking a desperate and impossible escape from the absolute tedium that is this game.

I want to punt the berry buddy into the hole. I want to punt myself into the hole. None of this will offer an escape. What horror there is isn’t in the creepypasta-esque “look at the spooky hole, how spooky, ooo” story the game is trying to tell. The horror is in the idea of picking up berries, over and over, for literal hours of my life, over and over and over and over.

I am aware there are puzzles in this game. I am aware there is ostensibly more to this game than the berries. I know all of this. That doesn’t change that the berries, the act of picking them up, is how this game works. There is an expectation that I will engage in this madcap act of chasing down a raspberry, and in so doing, derive some sense of joy, but I will not. I do not understand how anyone does. The mechanics for doing so are obnoxious, sticky, and annoying, and I do not enjoy them.

The sledgehammer will not smash the game as a hole. I tried.

There clearly is an audience for this game. I am happy for them. I do not understand what it is they see in this game, if there’s something about the absolute mindlessness that’s somehow appealing, or something about its frenetic energy that is a delight. I do not and suspect I will never understand. For me, though, the knowledge that the best reward the game can offer from the tedium of chasing down berries is the answer to a question no one asked isn’t enough to let me derive any joy from this game whatsoever.

The only thing I want to bury is the game itself.

Developer: Get(Color) Games
Genre: Incremental, Horror
Year: 2026
Country: United States
Language: English
Time to complete: 5-7 hours
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/rEZU3EKVltM