(This is the 114th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
I enjoy LucasArts adventure games and I've played lots of them as part of this challenge. Loom, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Full Throttle, Indiana Jones and now The Dig, which had been recommended to me a few times when I reviewed the others. Straight off the bat, it's easy to see why. It's an incredibly atmospheric adventure with a more serious tone than usual for LucasArts, though not bereft of their trademark witty and dad joke loving characters.
It's about a 5-person group assigned to plant nuclear bombs on an asteroid that is on collision course with the earth to basically make it securely orbit around Earth. The group that is assigned for the job is an interesting mix, as you got one journalist, a technician who is also running for congress, an archeologist, a pilot and the main character, the Commander.
The Commander, Boston Low, the journalist, Maggie Robbins, and the archeologist, Ludger Brink, enter the inside of the asteroid after blowing it open, stumble upon an odd puzzle within and are teleported into deep space. When they come to, they are on an alien planet that seems to no longer have any sentient life on it. Based on what is left behind on this planet though, it seems clear that there WAS sentient life here at least. So you start solving these mysteries to figure out a way back to Earth.
Unfortunately, for such a great setup for its story, a big issue with The Dig is that its puzzles are maddening. I'm OK with a few obtuse puzzles, they are practically unavoidable in LucasArts adventures, but The Dig puts a new meaning to it. There is one puzzle in particular, where some sort of fish / turtle is eaten in front of you and its remains are spit back on land. Interacting with it opens a window where you see about 15-20 pieces of this fish in disarray. The goal is to reassemble everything into the correct order. How are you supposed to do this? Well, there are the really conveniently placed remains of the same type of fish on the next screen. So go there, remember how ALL these pieces are set up, go back to the fish in disarray, and try to place everything in the same way.
EXCEPT. You have to place it EXACTLY in one specific way and every item has to be in EXACT order, otherwise you didn't do it right. After spending way too long on this dumb puzzle, I looked up online how to set it up. After setting it up exactly that way, the game said I STILL did it wrong, meaning something was probably an inch off or something. I couldn't be bothered to find out, so I called it quits there.
There are more bad puzzles in the game up to that point, and most definitely after I'm sure, but the problem with these puzzles is that 1) they're bad, obviously but 2) they ruin an otherwise incredible atmosphere set up by a very well paced first act, the great visuals (for its time), the cinematics and the sound design.
The game feels much more big budget than prior LucasArts adventures, and it has some cool ideas, like talking to your crew members and regularly being able to ask them about clues you find as well as just engaging in optional conversation and getting to know them better, but the puzzle difficulty ruined it for me. Only play this if you're a more hardcore point & click adventure fan, because you're gonna be at some of these puzzles for a long while without a guide and even with one, some of them are just tiring.
I enjoy LucasArts adventure games and I've played lots of them as part of this challenge. Loom, Monkey Island 1 and 2, Full Throttle, Indiana Jones and now The Dig, which had been recommended to me a few times when I reviewed the others. Straight off the bat, it's easy to see why. It's an incredibly atmospheric adventure with a more serious tone than usual for LucasArts, though not bereft of their trademark witty and dad joke loving characters.
It's about a 5-person group assigned to plant nuclear bombs on an asteroid that is on collision course with the earth to basically make it securely orbit around Earth. The group that is assigned for the job is an interesting mix, as you got one journalist, a technician who is also running for congress, an archeologist, a pilot and the main character, the Commander.
The Commander, Boston Low, the journalist, Maggie Robbins, and the archeologist, Ludger Brink, enter the inside of the asteroid after blowing it open, stumble upon an odd puzzle within and are teleported into deep space. When they come to, they are on an alien planet that seems to no longer have any sentient life on it. Based on what is left behind on this planet though, it seems clear that there WAS sentient life here at least. So you start solving these mysteries to figure out a way back to Earth.
Unfortunately, for such a great setup for its story, a big issue with The Dig is that its puzzles are maddening. I'm OK with a few obtuse puzzles, they are practically unavoidable in LucasArts adventures, but The Dig puts a new meaning to it. There is one puzzle in particular, where some sort of fish / turtle is eaten in front of you and its remains are spit back on land. Interacting with it opens a window where you see about 15-20 pieces of this fish in disarray. The goal is to reassemble everything into the correct order. How are you supposed to do this? Well, there are the really conveniently placed remains of the same type of fish on the next screen. So go there, remember how ALL these pieces are set up, go back to the fish in disarray, and try to place everything in the same way.
EXCEPT. You have to place it EXACTLY in one specific way and every item has to be in EXACT order, otherwise you didn't do it right. After spending way too long on this dumb puzzle, I looked up online how to set it up. After setting it up exactly that way, the game said I STILL did it wrong, meaning something was probably an inch off or something. I couldn't be bothered to find out, so I called it quits there.
There are more bad puzzles in the game up to that point, and most definitely after I'm sure, but the problem with these puzzles is that 1) they're bad, obviously but 2) they ruin an otherwise incredible atmosphere set up by a very well paced first act, the great visuals (for its time), the cinematics and the sound design.
The game feels much more big budget than prior LucasArts adventures, and it has some cool ideas, like talking to your crew members and regularly being able to ask them about clues you find as well as just engaging in optional conversation and getting to know them better, but the puzzle difficulty ruined it for me. Only play this if you're a more hardcore point & click adventure fan, because you're gonna be at some of these puzzles for a long while without a guide and even with one, some of them are just tiring.