The Dig®

The Hollywood influence really shows here, with the usual nonsensical reasons for splitting up a group in a dangerous environment, overly sarcastic replies to everything mistaken for humour, huge leaps in logic and characters realising unknowable things to move the plot along. It would have worked better as another tacky movie full of unlikable characters and visual spectacle (because that’s all you get here). By the same token, you do get a nice musical score, at times worthy of a movie and some beautiful art design. The puzzles start off reasonable enough for the first 10 minutes, but soon start to take some liberties with ‘logic’. There’s a lot of large empty environments to walk through, so plenty of time to let your mind wander and think about better games as you back track to try that one new item (which may as well have been invisible as you clicked on it by accident) on that one random hole you found (which your character will know the advanced alien function of, despite talking like a stereotypical ‘yee haw’ army meat head… his stupidity is reinforced by the fact he’s often insulted by a snippy woman who uses constant sarcasm to show that she’s so much smarter than him). This is the game that really showed me I’m guided by nostalgia for point and click adventures and that with an ‘adults’ mind I can no longer look past the paper-thin plots, illogical puzzles and sloppy design. I could have forgiven a lot if the ending had been at all meaningful, but it was a let-down.

The Dig is essentially a Lucasarts version of Myst with way less logic or beauty in it. You get to an empty alien planet with some islands upon an endless ocean, you search for the keys opening ways to these islands, you build A Device. Sounds familiar? The puzzles were rather hard (for 1995), made harder by near absence of any logic. You basically had to pixel-hunt on each screen and if stuck - try to apply everything in your inventory to hot spots. There are some good tricky puzzles, but being rather hard they are made even harder by bad graphics. And yes, the graphics were dated even by the time of release. Really, this came out after Mission Critical! What worked for Full Throttle, didn't work here. And was not helped by strange mix of cartoonish characters and 3D-cutscenes. Some people praise the atmosphere, well, there is some, although in my opinion less than even in original Zork. But it gets repetitive pretty fast. But the main problem for me is the total lack of motivation in the story and infernal dialogue quality (written by Orson Scott Card!). There's a huge asteroid going to crash on Earth! Lets assemble a rag-tag team and send them out. They'll be bitching each other in space and trading inept jokes, sure, that's what you do with IMMINENT DANGER hanging over your planet. They get stuck light years from home on an empty planet without food, water nor way back - what do they do? Right, bitch each other and trade lame jokes! Seems like, as with graphics, the game tries to be both serious and funny and fails in both. You'll find yourself clicking through these dialogues just to stop them from ruining the last bits of rather thin atmosphere the game managed to create. And yes, it was made by Steven Spielberg, and it shows: he had a very vague idea of what a good game consists of. It's playable, but not on par with real Lucasarts classics like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle or even Zak McCracken. Get for collection, don't expect miracles.

When this game came out, I tried my absolute hardest to love it. It certainly sounded amazing on paper. Unfortunately it's an exercise in mediocere tedium. The oppressively "serious" atmosphere does nothing to elevate the pretentious yet still run-of-mill story - it only serves to drain away some much needed life and humor from a game that sorely needs it. Further, the puzzles often are less than logical and require lots of backtracking. Don't get me wrong, this game is not at terrible. It simply fails to live up to its own hype, and the general reputation for excellence Lucasarts adventures had at this time,

Perhaps it was a great game in 1995, but 20 years later it looks just ok. Somehow I missed the game when it was published and decided to try it when GOG made it available. I finished it over a weekend and was a little bit disappointed. The plot is ok, but has more fiction than science and the game gets very cheese by the end. Some puzzles were very annoying and unnecessary tedious (e.g. the repairment of the power plant using a service drone, putting together a carcass of a dead "turtle", figuring out the purpose of the alien device, etc). There is an element of pixel hunting, for example when an item is given to you but was put not into your inventory but on the floor of the same colour and it was very easy to miss it. And there is a lot of digging in the game, so be ready to use your shovel often (the name of the game is "The Dig" for a reason). Overall the game is ok, but nothing impressive impressive. Though, picturesque locations and good voices make the game more enjoyable. It is difficult to find a direct comparison for "The Dig", but if you want something futuristic, I would recommend "Beneath a Steel Sky" as a better alternative.

The game start intriguing, but soon it become slow and more and more cliché. The ending is just as generic and stupid at it possibly could be. (I know there's an alternative ending, but I doubt it's more satifying). The puzzles involve lots of backtracking and are incredible obscure. The interface, especially for dialogs, becomes a nuissance fast, since you'll end up with unskippable repeated dialogs over and over again. Even the presentation of the events is cringeworthy. (Slight spoilers following:) A monster-spider that is not capable of climing over a close edge, an old military who loses a fight because it starts in a cutscene where he suddenly does not pay attention anymore for the opponent who is shouting that he'll gonna kill him, a weird multidimensional space that drives people mad except the hero, because he says: "No, I have to stay clear!" – well, what a brillant idea! Besides the somewhat clunky start nothing was enjoyable in this game. I don't get the average rating. Must be insane amount of nostalgia.