itch.io

Yeah we were planning to add mouse support, but just didn't have the time so deprioritized it :/

The theme/story reason is that in the miner role you move vertically and gather valuables, and in the other half you move horizontally and give things away. (If we had a lot more time, the horizontal section would have some separate interactive gameplay as well, and might then have had a different story to match that gameplay.)

Great to hear!

For the ladder upgrade: if you move upwards in the mine, you have to place a ladder under you so you have something to stand on and don't just float in the air. Without the ladder upgrade, whenever you place a ladder it takes 1 day extra day in addition to the normal time for moving and mining the square if needed. With the upgrade bought, placing ladders is free (doesn't take any additional time).

It's not a very useful upgrade, since moving upwards is rarely the best action to take. E.g. if you're trying to beat the hard challenge mode, you probably never want to move up.

Oh, that's unfortunate! It looks like only a few images are loading, and neither the tileset nor the font. What OS and browser are you using?

Yeah, being unable to progress is how you "lose" the game. However you shouldn't be hard-forced to softlock immediately since levels generate with some space at the top.

(There's no "winning", it just goes on as long as you can make it for the highest score. My personal best is level 33, after being saved 110 times.)