Cyberwave

Cyberwave is a two-person independent studio based in Essen, Germany, responsible for two games that could not be more different from each other. One is a carefully crafted Zelda-inspired action RPG with a full narrative and hand-drawn art. The other is a game about digging a hole that one developer built in 14 days during his vacation and sold 250,000 copies in its first week. That second one became one of the bigger indie viral stories of 2025.

Ocean’s Heart (2021)

Ocean’s Heart is a top-down action RPG released in 2021 and the game that established Cyberwave as a studio worth paying attention to. The protagonist Tilia searches for her missing father across a Nordic-inspired world alongside her friend Hazel, and the game wears its Zelda influence openly across its exploration, dungeon design, and puzzle structure. It was well received among fans of classic 2D action RPGs and praised for its art style, soundtrack, and dungeon quality relative to its budget. A strong debut for what was at the time a solo or very small team.

A Game About Digging a Hole (2025)

The story of how A Game About Digging a Hole came to exist is almost more interesting than the game itself. Ben, one of Cyberwave’s two developers, was testing voxel-based terraforming mechanics for the studio’s main project Solarpunk when he had a simpler idea. During his holiday break, he built a game around digging in 14 days. The concept was inspired partly by the classic Flash game Motherload. The result was published by rokaplay Boutique on February 7, 2025 for $4.99 on Steam, and within a week it had sold 250,000 copies. It went viral across TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram before the press caught up with it. A console release followed in December 2025 for Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch, and a mobile port was announced in August 2025. The game sold somewhere north of 440,000 copies on Steam alone by March 2025 according to estimates, and revenue passed the one million dollar mark while it was still in its first weeks. None of that came from Solarpunk’s development time.

Solarpunk (Upcoming)

Solarpunk is Cyberwave’s main project and the game both developers have been building throughout the success of A Game About Digging a Hole. A floating island survival crafting game, it was shown at Summer Game Fest 2026 and is among the more anticipated indie survival games in development. The voxel tech that accidentally spawned A Game About Digging a Hole was originally built for Solarpunk before the studio pivoted to a different approach.