Holes

Holes is a homebrew minigame by Team Strawberry Bytes, released on 13 December 2024. It’s a clone of hole.io made for the Nintendo 64, where you have to grow your hole by eating bigger and bigger things until you can eat anything on the map.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password minigamemadness and the source can be found here. Note that this is the same ROM that includes all the other minigames released for the 2024 N64brew Game Jam competition.

About Holes

The instructions are a bit unclear at first, they only say that the game is based off of holes.io but if you’ve never played that game before this doesn’t make much sense. The objective is to move your hole under objects which will make it grow to the point where it can eat larger objects. Eventually you get big enough that you can absorb in the other players. The game ends when there is only one player left.

There are just a few objects that you can grab, in order of smallest to largest (besides players, which can be any size):

• Signs
• Cars
• Houses

That’s really all there is to it. Eat faster than your opponents to win.

Credits

Unlike the other games by Strawberry Bytes, this was made just by S4ys. This means that we have a record holder for the most games submitted in one game jam set to three now.

Review and conclusion

Once you realise what the game is about, it become a lot clearer and quite a fun game. The process of growing more powerful and gaining the ability to grab larger and larger objects reminds me of The Swoop from a few years earlier, just that this game works on a 2D plane.

There are two main gripes that I have with Holes, the first of which is the lack of variety. There is only one object of each tier so there really isn’t much of a sense of exploration or trial and error trying to find out what can be eaten at each size and what cannot.

The other issue is the lack of randomisation. Each match has identical object placement so once you figure out an optimised route, the challenge becomes trivial.

While the game could be expanded on to give it a little bit more ‘oomph’, it works perfectly fine. It follows the gameplay of hole.io well, and it is particularly impressive that S4ys managed to complete all these games for the game jam at a record pace.