SteamWorld Dig tunnelling its way to Xbox One

Following the revelation that an Xbox One port of SteamWorld Dig has been rated by PEGI, Image & Form CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson has confirmed to GamesRadar+ that their critically-acclaimed Metroid/Mr Driller hybrid is indeed coming to the console. The company doesn't have a firm release date yet, but they expect it to arrive on the Xbox Store by late May at the very latest.

SteamWorld Dig began life on 3DS, but has since burrowed its way to Vita, Wii U, PS4 and PC. The Xbox One version will largely be a straight port, but with a few small differences. Sigurgeirsson says of the port: “There's a quite elaborate Easter Egg for the Xbox version - a gaming thing that we really wanted to reference. And a number of tweaks to make it overall better, although they may not stand out as giant differences. Overall we prefer to keep our versions similar to each other, it keeps everybody happy.”

While I had Sigurgeirsson's ear, I asked him how difficult it had been to take a game that began life on the dinky 3DS, and upscale it to HD. “One of the guys was sitting testing the near-complete HD version when I stepped into the "living room" at work just in time to see one of the new close-up animations of one of the steam-driven robots talking. I noticed there was something wrong with the character's eyes and pointed it out - they seemed a bit 'swimming'”, he remembers.

“But when I looked closely I saw tiny, tiny cogs moving behind the eyes, and was blown away by the attention to detail. I mentioned it to our art director afterwards, and he told me those cogs were actually there also in the 3DS version. Which amazed me and put me off at the same time: apparently we were stuffing really detailed graphics into a 3DS game, where it was certain to be invisible.”