The Dig is one of the finest adventure games I've played. Aesthetically, the game is gorgeous. Luscious environments, hauntingly beautiful music, and a perpetual sense of tense isolation create a deliciously immersive atmosphere. Between the good-quality voice acting, snappy dialogue (balancing seriousness with humor), fluid animations, and tight pacing of the scripted sequences, the whole game has a cinematic feel. It's easy to chalk this up to the game's high-profile contributors (Steven Spielberg, Orson Scott Card, Robert Patrick), but I'd be quick to recognize the entire team for making the game so good. With few exceptions, the puzzles are excellent. Clear goals, subtle hints, useful feedback, and reasonable solutions are hallmarks of the challenges, which constantly find fresh new ways to test the player's problem-solving skills. Gameplay includes the usual point-and-click fare (eg, exploration, item use, dialogue choices), but the scope and complexity of the challenges are impressive, requiring keen observation, proper sequencing, and piecing together solutions across multiple locations. The game is satisfyingly difficult and seldom frustrating; I was (just barely) able to finish without ever consulting a walkthrough. I appreciate the clean, intuitive interface as well as the optional time-waster minigame, which offers the player an on-demand brain break. There's no way to die or dead-end the game, though one late-game decision slightly affects the ending. I only have a few complaints. At least at first, the characters uphold some tired tropes (eg, the strong woman who needs to prove she's just as capable as the men). The cutscene art has a jarringly cartoony look that doesn't mesh with everything else. A couple moments are slightly gross, but one scene is remarkably gruesome (fortunately, it's not a surprise). The ending is a bit anticlimactic. Still, I highly recommend this to any sci-fi or adventure game fan looking for an immersive challenge.
If you play adventure games for the gameplay, this is one to skip. Almost every area is a maze of empty, recycled screens with only a couple points of interest. The majority of "puzzles" are pure trial and error, because there are no hints or clues of any kind (other than the occasional NPC telling you exactly what to do). Feedback in response to your actions is often vague, if you receive any feedback at all. Limited inventory space exacerbates the problem: without clearly defined goals, it's impossible to know what's important to carry. So much blind guesswork, backtracking, and reloading to undo failed solutions. The interface is fine, with only a couple rough edges; the game automatically determines what action to take when clicking on something, and there's a concise text description of each screen and inventory object. It's usually obvious enough when something will lead to death or dead-ending the game, but saving early and often is a must. The story (most of which is given in the instruction manual) is thoroughly standard fantasy fare; the humor is sporadic and anemic. Detailed graphics, pleasant music, and competent voice acting improve the experience, but not enough to recommend the game.
As a fan of Westerns, comedy, and Sierra games, this game should've been a sure-fire hit with me. There's a lot I like about it—good atmosphere, decent story, memorable characters, solid programming, unique responses for everything you can click on, and plenty of laughs (puns, references, absurdity, innuendo, and irony). Granted, there's some adult and potty humor that may not be for everyone, and a few of the characters (eg, Hopalong Singh, the Chinese cook) straddle the line between satirical and offensive. What brings the game down is the puzzle presentation. The puzzles themselves are fine—the usual fare of inventory manipulation, doing things in sequence or at the right time, and a couple (optional) arcade sequences. However, the game is very light on in-game hints (which is surprising, given the sheer amount of flavor text) and requires the player to refer to the instruction manual (included in the GOG purchase) for multiple puzzle solutions early on. A little copy protection is one thing, but this breaks the immersion and sets false expectations about the medicine recipes in the manual being at the core of the gameplay. In fact, the game almost completely ignores the hero's laboratory in the second half, wasting some of the potential of the "frontier pharmacist" premise in the process. There's also an overabundance of timed challenges (usually with no sense of how much time you actually have) and items that are easily missed if you don't click on exactly the right spot. The entire game takes place in the same town, with practically every area accessible from the get-go, so the puzzle solution possibilities are simultaneously too broad (with so many screens to explore) and too narrow (with so many screens you've already explored thoroughly). The GOG purchase includes the original floppy and enhanced CD versions; the latter has voice acting (some of Sierra's best) instead of text boxes. If you want text AND speech, there's an imperfect workaround using ScummVM.
Poor execution of a good game. The English localization is largely to blame; the dialogue is awkward and unnatural. At best, it's worth a giggle; at worst, it interferes with the story and puzzle-solving (eg, I consulted a walkthrough because I didn't understand that "filter" actually meant "lens"). Typos are common, and the onscreen text often differs from what the voice actors are saying—sometimes because they're correcting egregious grammatical errors, and sometimes because the text is in German or Russian. The voice acting is extremely flat. A handful of characters are dynamic and convincing, but the rest sound like they've been given no direction. Consequently, several dramatic moments come across as dull or silly—though that's also because many of these moments are inherently absurd. For instance, one character suddenly conducts a perfectly normal conversation after being interrupted in the middle of a mad dash to the restroom. The last 10 minutes of the game are truly inane, with some decisions and revelations that destroy all narrative credibility. The characters are fine enough. There's a good mix of personalities and (despite the localization and voice acting) some decent chemistry; however, the villains are over the top, and the abusive relationship between one of the male characters and the lead female character is utterly appalling. What saves the game is the gameplay. Yes, the interface is a little clunky; no, the tutorial doesn't bother to tell you to hold SPACEBAR to view all the hotspots. But the puzzles are generally solid, varied, and interesting—just don't think too hard about whether the solutions would be plausible in real life. You can skip the most complicated ones, and there's almost always sufficient guidance. Graphics are clean and professional. Too much of the game is silent, but when there is music or ambient noise, it fits well. There's no fear of dying or dead-ending the game, but a glitch kept me from viewing the full credits.
I suspect that nostalgia is an important factor in enjoying this game, because there are several issues I would've overlooked if I had played it when I was younger. The tone is wildly inconsistent. Is it a serious fantasy adventure? Is it a pun-filled slapstick comedy? It's jarring to keep shifting between these two extremes. The puzzle design is also inconsistent—sometimes it's the traditional Sierra style of exploring your surroundings and finding creative solutions to your problems, but other times it reaches Myst levels of abstract thinking. There's a good variety of puzzles, but not always enough guidance to get you thinking about how you should approach them. Earlier Sierra games let you touch, taste, or look at everything around you, but Torin's Passage only lets you click on very specific objects. The type of interaction (eg, talk, operate) is predetermined, so if you need more information about your surroundings to solve a puzzle (or figure out what the puzzle is in the first place), you're out of luck. Fortunately, there's a built-in hint system that works well. I found myself using it rather often—when there's only a handful of things I can click on, I run out of patience pretty quickly. Most of the time, the hints told me to click on things I tried unsuccessfully to interact with before, because I didn't click on exactly the right spot. That's just irritating. The game offers some unique mechanics, such as being able to scroll your view when in a large area, and having an animal companion who can transform into various objects, but these mechanics (particularly the latter one) are grossly underutilized. I'm not a big fan of the art style, the soundtrack doesn't stand out to me, the humor is really hit-or-miss, and most of the characters annoy me, but your mileage may vary. It's also worth nothing that color-blind players may have trouble with one or two puzzles. If you like King's Quest VII, you might like this; otherwise, I wouldn't recommend it.
