This game feels, plays and looks like a pay-to-win mobile crap played in f2p mode. You really expect to see a 'store' there selling potions and stuff for real money. Because the game punishes you furiously for dying and the game design is such that you simply can not avoid dying. You enter the dungeon, the door closes behind you and the ONLY way back out is through dying. So far, so good. Thing is, not only does it take all your collected stuff when you die, it also takes away a big chunk of experience - so big, in fact, that you can lose everything you gained in previous attempts. So you are forced to spend countless hours fighting the same foes in the same dull dungeons over and over again hoping to get lucky and die a little bit later than usual. And the procedurally-generated dungeons ARE dull. In fact, they are so lazy that even the dungeons in Nethack or ADOM shine in comparison. Same lame 'puzzles', lots of grey space between lame corridors, absolutely no attempt to put at least some integrity into the levels. The worst purchase on GOG in my library, Hell, most of the freebies are better, too.
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.
