Diamond Quest: Don't Rush!

The boulder I dropped on myself, and the dead end that followed

I went into Diamond Quest thinking it was a light gold-digging game, the kind you tap at for fun while waiting for the bus. A few minutes in, I dug a straight shaft down to grab a purple diamond, and the golden statue head sitting right above it dropped into the tunnel I had just dug, sealing off the way back.

My miner just stood there, boxed in by hard bricks he couldn't dig through, with the exit on the other side of the boulder. The game didn't kill me or show a game-over screen. It simply left me stuck in the hole I had dug myself, to work out on my own that "Don't Rush!" is not just a cute tagline.

Dig out the support and whatever sits on top comes down

You control a miner in a headlamp helmet, working his way through a temple overgrown with vines. Soft dirt you can dig through, hard brick you can't, and anything heavy sitting above will fall the moment you remove what's holding it up.

The goal sounds simple: collect diamonds and find the exit. But the bag on your back only holds 50 at the start, so you have to decide which gems are worth taking. Along the way there are chests that give you a compass, and once you have it, a small radar with a green dot appears in the right corner of the screen, pointing toward the exit.

The default control is swiping in the direction you want to go, and that's where I stumbled most, because a slightly diagonal swipe sends the miner onto the wrong tile. Under Pause, then Controls, you can switch to a round four-way pad, which is much easier when you need to move exactly one tile. In this game, one wrong tile ruins the whole level.

Reach the exit and the bag turns into a Claim button; tap it and the game tallies your score and levels you up. My first level-up gave me a pile of stuff: a hard hat, an energy drink, a bunch of bananas and a bag of gems. The bag's capacity also jumped from 50 straight to 100.

One mildly annoying thing early on: inside a level, the top bar doesn't show how many diamonds you have. You have to back out to the map screen to see them, purple gems on the left and red diamonds in the middle. In later lands that bar grows longer, adding a gold key slot, a silver key slot and two gem types counted separately. One look at it tells you what the level wants you to collect, so you're not just grabbing everything that sparkles.

The yellow button that saves you, and what it costs

In the bottom-left corner there's a yellow button. Tap it and every boulder that just fell goes back to where it was, so you get to take back your last move instead of replaying the level from the start. In a game where one wrong tile ruins the whole run, it's the button you'll press most.

Sounds handy, until I noticed the blue lightning bar at the bottom of the screen. Each undo takes 25 energy (I watched it drop from 571 to 546 right after a tap), and that bar is capped at 1,000, not unlimited.

Energy refills at 360 an hour, and the game prints that number right on the main screen, so I didn't have to guess. Do the math and every hour of waiting buys you exactly fourteen fixes. That sounds like plenty, but a hard level eating seven or eight of them is perfectly normal.

24 lands, and the miners you have to buy

Beyond the individual levels there's a bigger layer, the Journey: 24 lands running from Angkor Wat through Bavaria and Tibet to Egypt. Each land has ten main levels plus a few hidden ones, and the Score box at the top of the map counts 1,184 red diamonds scattered across the whole journey.

The further you go, the stranger the levels get. By Egypt there are scorpions crawling back and forth, blue teleport gates and scarab emblems you have to step on in the right order. There's even a lock that won't open until you've collected 30 purple gems in the level.

You're not stuck with a single miner, either. The Shop has a whole lineup of parody characters with familiar faces, like Luff, Goky or a pumpkin-headed guy called Pumpky, each one selling for exactly 1,000 diamonds.

Where the game holds out its hand

The catch is that buying a character isn't just cosmetic. After I bought Pumpky, my energy cap jumped from 1,000 to 2,000 and the refill rate rose from 360 to 420 an hour. In other words, paying players get twice as many mistakes as everyone else.

If you want to go further still, there's a VIP pack at $4.99 a month, renewing automatically. It removes ads, shows you where the diamonds and the exit are, and adds 100 percent to end-of-level rewards and 100 percent to energy.

The third route is trading ad views for energy: each video gives 90 points and the game offers nine a day. That adds up to 810 points, less than one full tank, and the price is sitting through nine videos for other games.

To be fair, Diamond Quest never walls you off, and no level demands payment before you can continue. What it sells is how many mistakes you get in one sitting. Once your 1,000 energy runs dry, you either put the phone down until tomorrow or open your wallet.

The mod removes exactly that

Install it through VipMod and a red MOD button appears in the left corner of the game; tap it to open the panel of mod switches. The first one worth turning on is "Diamond & gem top-up": flip it and both counters at the top of the main screen read 999,999.

But a pretty number on screen proves nothing, so I went straight to the Shop to spend some. I tapped Pumpky at 1,000 diamonds, the game asked me to confirm, and I said yes. The character card switched from a price button to "Owned", and the avatar on the main screen changed along with it.

The second switch worth turning on is "Unlock all maps". With it on, I opened the Journey and kept tapping the right arrow until I landed on Egypt 5, number 20 of 24. The Enter button was lit and the ten-level map inside had no locks left, but the line under the land's name still read 00/44: there are 44 diamonds in there and I hadn't picked up a single one.

The remaining switches are lighter but still worth knowing. "Reveal secret passages" lifts the fog over hidden paths, as long as you're actually inside a level. "Unlock the shop" gives you the VIP pack's perks without the monthly fee. And the "Remove ads" and "Offline play" pair wipes out the video ads while making levels load noticeably faster.

• These diamonds live on your device, so the real-money packs in the shop still need a connection and a Google account as usual.
• Unlock all maps only lets you choose levels; it doesn't play them for you, so the levels you haven't cleared still score 0.
• While "Offline play" is on, don't go looking for Facebook login, cloud sync or the leaderboards. Turn that switch off and restart the game to get them back.

The energy bar that spoils a puzzle game

What I like most is that the game lets you ruin your own run without a word of scolding. No countdown hurrying you along, no lives being taken away, just a boulder in the wrong place and the nagging knowledge that you should have dug around to the left.

What I don't like is the energy bar, because it turns a puzzle game into a waiting game. Just as you figure out how to get unstuck, you run out of energy and have to wait. The joy of a puzzle level is playing it in one go, not spreading it over three sessions.

One more thing I want to warn you about, so you don't waste time like I did. The tutorial level at Angkor Wat doesn't save progress: quit halfway and you're back on the first tile with an empty bag, 0 of 50. The "Back to map" button in the Pause menu stays grayed out for that whole level, so until you finish the tutorial there's no way back to the main screen. Sit through it in one go before doing anything else.

The game also plays fully offline. I switched on airplane mode and launched it: levels loaded normally, and I could still dig, collect and open chests for the compass without a single prompt asking me to connect.

On Google Play it holds 4.5 stars from more than 347,000 ratings and has passed 10 million downloads.

If you ever quit this game over the energy wait

If you like games that make you think before you tap, or you grew up on those old boulder-pushing cave diggers on PC, Diamond Quest hits exactly that vein. Levels are short, so they slot nicely into spare moments.

And if you downloaded it once and gave up because of the energy wait, or because all those fun characters cost 1,000 diamonds each, the mod on VipMod removes exactly those two walls. Turn on "Diamond & gem top-up" and buy Pumpky in the Shop first, because he alone lifts the energy cap to 2,000. Even with every other mod switched off, you still get twice as many mistakes as someone playing the regular version.