This is a public service announcement: if you find yourself on the western edge of the Ll n Peninsula in Wales anytime soon on the hunt for blackberries, don t bother – I ve picked them all. Turns out there s a twofold satisfaction to foraging that makes it difficult to stop. First there s the search: looking high and low for collectibles, pushing your body further into the thicket, gently squeezing the fruit to test whether it s ready. Then there s the count: two foragers competing to fill their tupperware boxes to the top with ripe goods. Does the berry belong to the spotter, or the forager who could reach it? The debate ends only when there are no berries left to argue over.

Forager, the game, knows the lure of both the search and the count, and is built to exploit both. It blends together idle game mechanics with active exploration, farming, crafting and combat, and has a dangerous advantage over the Welsh coast: everything in Forager grows back fast. Not just the plants, but the cows, the gold deposits, and the gravestones that house the living dead – all renewed within a matter of minutes.

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After half an hour with Forager, I can already feel its compulsion loops getting their hooks into my brain. Developed by HopFrog and released today, it’s a cute single-player game about a little pixel-person mining and crafting and looting in perpetuity, continually escalating spirals of numbers, equipment and levels. There’s land to buy (full of resources), dungeons to delve (full of gold to buy land) and monsters to blat (full of components to craft into other things to make things faster). If the launch trailer (and free demo) below is any indication, those loops stretch on a long way.

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