Absolutely classic flash game that gets pretty shockingly grueling if you actually try to beat it.
Full disclosure, after one-hit dying to my first invisible gas pocket and losing over an hour of work (after having already lost an hour previously on testing how much lava damaged you), I used cheats to get back to where I was, no further.
If you truly want to see the end this is what I'd recommend--going the true, genuine, "restart from nothing when you die" way to the end is interesting in a masochistic, fighting the game/devs on their own terms in nerd rage sort of sense, but all this really does is just place hour-long gaps between when you make a small mistake or are killed by something you didn't know enough about, and the gameplay is too simple (both mechanically and dexterously) to bear the load of more than a couple hours in total. You still have to dig back to where you were when doing this which can in extreme cases take as much as 15 or so minutes, so you're not completely spared.
But the gameplay isn't complex because it doesn't need to be. It's an upgrade game, in the same vein as DuckLife, or Learn to Fly, or the aptly named Upgrade Complete; it's just one of the most succinct and canonical expressions of it. And it expressed this better than most of its contemporaries, and half a decade before almost all of its contemporaries and was pretty clearly directly responsible for all of them existing in the first place (and also indirectly pretty much the whole modern clicker/idle genre, lol). Pretty crazy to do this in 2004's all I'm saying!
Full disclosure, after one-hit dying to my first invisible gas pocket and losing over an hour of work (after having already lost an hour previously on testing how much lava damaged you), I used cheats to get back to where I was, no further.
If you truly want to see the end this is what I'd recommend--going the true, genuine, "restart from nothing when you die" way to the end is interesting in a masochistic, fighting the game/devs on their own terms in nerd rage sort of sense, but all this really does is just place hour-long gaps between when you make a small mistake or are killed by something you didn't know enough about, and the gameplay is too simple (both mechanically and dexterously) to bear the load of more than a couple hours in total. You still have to dig back to where you were when doing this which can in extreme cases take as much as 15 or so minutes, so you're not completely spared.
But the gameplay isn't complex because it doesn't need to be. It's an upgrade game, in the same vein as DuckLife, or Learn to Fly, or the aptly named Upgrade Complete; it's just one of the most succinct and canonical expressions of it. And it expressed this better than most of its contemporaries, and half a decade before almost all of its contemporaries and was pretty clearly directly responsible for all of them existing in the first place (and also indirectly pretty much the whole modern clicker/idle genre, lol). Pretty crazy to do this in 2004's all I'm saying!