DESCENT
Fact Sheet
- Developer
- Lloyd Humphreys · Cartographer ApS
- Based in
- Denmark
- Released
- July 22, 2026
- Price
- $1.99 (US) or local equivalent — one payment, everything included
- Platforms
- iPhone · iPad · Apple silicon Mac — tvOS coming soon
- Controls
- Touch · game controllers · hardware keyboards
- Playtime
- A couple of hours to complete the game · a couple of days to collect all 14 achievements
- Download size
- < 7 MB
- Languages
- 24 languages — including Welsh
- Age rating
- 4+
- Press contact
- lloyd@lloydhumphreys.com
Watch the Trailer
Logo & Artwork
About the Game
Drill through six strata to the magma margin, haul back richer ore, and outfit the rig until the launch pad opens. Manage your fuel and dodge the obstacles to fly home.
Descent is an old-school mining game, made for iPhone.
- Six strata with unique characteristics
- Ore gets richer with depth: iron, copper, silver, gold, platinum — and Descentium, the rare guidance ore that opens the way home
- Five rig systems to upgrade: drill, fuel tank, cargo bay, hull, engine
- Dynamite... for when the rock disagrees with you
- Insurance: rescues aren't free!
- Buried bones scattered in the deep: assemble the whole skeleton for a payout
- Bring 3 Descentium and $150,000 to the launch pad, to complete the game
- Autosaves constantly; pick any run back up where you left it
- Fully offline. No ads. No in-app purchases. No accounts.
The ore gets richer the deeper you go. So does everything trying to stop you!
The pricing is old school too
No ads, no in-app purchases, no accounts, no tracking, no exploitative mechanics — safe to hand to a kid. Fully playable offline.
A World of Generative UI
The download contains no assets — no image files, no audio files, no level data. Every sprite is pixel art the game draws for itself at boot, every sound comes out of a tiny synth, and every run digs into a freshly generated world: ore seams, caves, lava pools and hazards laid down anew each time, with exactly six Descentium crystals and twelve meteorites hidden in it. That's how the whole game fits in under 7 MB.
What Players Say
Every App Store rating so far: five stars. Quoted verbatim, in their original English.
"Old school fun" — Fun and really addictive! No ads (child-friendly) and fun side-missions
"Retro throwback" — Just like the kinds of games I used to play as a kid! Really fun, there are lots of things to discover beyond just trying to launch the rocket.
I also like that there are no ads or exploitative mechanics - I would feel comfortable giving this to my kids to play.
"Very time-consuming" — Much more fun and time-consuming than I originally thought 😂 can I please get a feature to name and customize my digger?
"Very addictive!" — Nice indie game, quite intuitive
Screenshots
iPhone screenshots in English — click any for the full-resolution PNG (1320×2868).
iPad versions: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 · Every sprite in the game, rendered live: the asset vault →
About the Creator
DESCENT is made by Lloyd Humphreys, an indie hacker based in Denmark. He built the game over the summer of 2026, with family and friends as the playtest crew. It grew out of the games he kept coming back to — Dig Dug, Factorio, and the old arcade rule that the best loop is dig, haul, upgrade, repeat.
What's Next
More levels, deeper systems: smelting the ore you haul into metal, and building a factory on the other side of the world you dug through.