Reminds me of the game Clonk, a german Indie game before there even was the term "Indie game". It also had a pixel based engine, explosions, liquid etc. You could dig tunnels, mine for ressources and have you (or your enemies) tunnels flodded by rain or oil (which in turn could be ignited).
Sadly the developers never had a real breaktrhrough and stopped working on new versions some time before the whole indie game craze (Minecraft, Terraria, Steam Greenlight, etc.) started.
There is also LegacyClonk project which improves the original Clonk Rage. I myself don't enjoy OpenClonk at all even though I've spent probably over thousand hours with clonk starting from Clonk Planet
I spent hundreds of hours with this game back in the 90s. I even went to a local internet shop to download mods, vehicles, maps and other stuff to floppy disks. Good times.
Yees we had a "modding community" in our small village exchanging mods via floppy disc, the "clonk script" language was my first programming experience.
Playing this game in local coop was probably the best way to use your family pc.
Am still impressed by how well the voxel based physics are performing (water flowing, earthquakes, sand) compared to modern 2d games, which often can't handle stuff like that even on multicore systems.
Always felt a little sad for this legendary shareware dev to have missed the era of the early indie-games boom on steam.
I didn’t have many friends who played this game. Sometimes, my brother would play with me, but he wasn’t into it like me.
Yeah the physics were pretty interesting, although a tiny speck of concrete was super annoying :)
Have a look at the indie game King Arthur’s Gold. Played this a few years ago for 500 hours or so. Online, faster, more interesting gameplay. But might be addictive for a former Clonk player.
I think if there was one game you could single out as the best computer game ever, it would be Minecraft. Out of the box, there are several ways to play it: creative mode where you cannot die and have all the resources you need to build whatever you can imagine, and survival where you need to mine and gather your resources before you can build anything and at night monsters come out to kill you. Then in survival you can just keep collecting resources and build whatever you can imagine, or you can try to finish the game by killing the Ender Dragon, which involves travelling to two different worlds and surviving some pretty tough challenges. Speedrunners can do it in 20 minutes, I cannot do it at all.
Then there is a whole community of online servers which can run a variety of plugins that completely change the game, from a wide variety of minigames that may not involve any mining or crafting at all, to a game where you're resource-starved on a floating island, to a game where the resources available are totally different.
I rarely play it, but I can totally see why my son, nephew and all their friends are addicted.
There's RPG-ish & enchantment mechanics to build up better tools & armor, different biomes to get different resources from, NPC villages to trade/upgrade/protect, and various enemies with varying drops, including in bases/dungeons/strongholds.
The common game loops are "I want to build X, so I need to find area Y to defeat mob Z to get the resources", and "I need to mine resource X, so I need to get resource Y to build tool Z to be able to do so", as well as building resource farms and some rudimentary automation.
So there is enough structured activity to drive actual gameplay beyond just having a pile of virtual blocks to stack, but it contains an additional unrestricted sandbox mode as well.
For some people, the sandbox mode is where the fun is. They ditch entirely the survival part of the game and simply like to build things in creative mode. Some people build houses and voxel art, others create complex mechanisms up to functionnal logic gates and computers, and others just like to explore the fractal world.
Sadly the developers never had a real breaktrhrough and stopped working on new versions some time before the whole indie game craze (Minecraft, Terraria, Steam Greenlight, etc.) started.
If you want to have a look: http://clonk.de/?lng=en