Berry Bury Berry review – The most bizarre game you’ll ever play?

Help, I’m seeing berries in my sleep! That’s the effect of getting utterly hooked on Berry Bury Berry, a bizarre game about throwing berries and fruit down a hole. No, really: that’s what you do. Pick up a berry, toss it in a hole, and get a coin for your troubles. Repeat ad infinitum.

Okay, that’s not quite all that Berry Bury Berry has to offer, but that is the core gist of it. Starting off in a small garden with a tiny hole, you’ll gain only a handful of coins for your troubles. But as you progress through the game, you’ll be able to upgrade your fruit, making it worth more coins. And with those coins, you can buy other types of upgrades, ultimately expanding the size of your hole, the amount of fruit you amass and the size of the garden you inhabit.

You have the bizarre ability to move your hole around, too, allowing you to swallow up various garden ornaments like gnomes and lawn chairs. By guzzling down these random objects, you’ll generate stars – and it’s by spending these stars that you can upgrade your fruit. Starting out with a cheap old blueberry, you’ll eventually unlock strawberries, kiwis, bananas, melons and more, all offering significantly more coins than the fruit that came before.

And so, your main hook here is the incremental upgrades that come each time you play. One in-game day of Berry Bury Berry initially lasts around a minute, and once you’re done, any coins you’ve earned can be spent on upgrades. Each day, you can expect to earn a little more, gradually improving your situation, constantly unlocking a new upgrade or two.

One such upgrade you can buy is a sledgehammer that allows you to knock down the walls of your garden, not only making it grow in size but uncovering various new objects that you can eventually pop down your hole. There are multiple layers of walls to knock down, and it’s by uncovering what lies beyond that you can really upgrade Berry Bury Berry to the next level. From earning four or five coins in one in-game day, you’ll eventually be earning millions.

But the real beauty of Berry Bury Berry are the secrets hidden under the surface. You can play and ignore them all, sure. But by finding hidden cassettes, solving hidden puzzles in the environment and poking your nose where it probably shouldn’t be, you’ll uncover a surreal and foreboding narrative that gives the game a very welcome layer of depth. It pays to dig around and uncover these secrets, because you’ll get so much more out of the game by doing so.

Berry Bury Berry is repetitive, but it’s brutally moreish, and before you know it, you’ve spent five solid hours simply dropping fruit down a hole. It will make you question your life choices, that’s for sure. But there’s no denying it’s a (w)hole lot of fun – even more so if you pay attention to the hidden secrets of this bizarre little game.

This review of Berry Bury Berry is based on the PS5 version of the game, with a code provided by the publisher. It’s available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch and PC.