The Dig® Reviews

It's difficult and tough to figure out without a guide, but the story alone is amazing and I cannot recommend this game enough just for that fact.

When i played this back in the stone age with my potato pc. The whole play through didn't feel like 10 hours. It felt like a year or so... but man this game brought back so much memories. Weirdly i remember the graphics were like 4k. Not sure why they looked so pixelated now.

This is one of the lesser known, but still equally impressive LucasArts point-and-click adventures. I may have a little bit of bias here as I played this when I was young and impressionable, but it stood for many years as my favorite game of all time. If you're even remotely interested, dive in and you won't be disappointed.

Growing up I played pretty much any Point & Click adventure game I could get my hands on, so I'm not sure how The Dig managed to slip under my radar. I've been hearing about it for years now as something many P&C fans put in the top of their nostalgia lists so, I finally decided to give it a try. I enjoyed playing it, but I'd rank it more mid list, personally. The game does have a lot of good points. It certainly hit a lot of nostalgic notes being very visually appealing as a a great representation of 90's pixel graphics. Many of the backgrounds are gorgeous and detailed. They bring a very alien other worldly aesthetic to life. I thought the 90's cartoon animation cut scenes were charming and at times the game feels more like an interactive movie experience than a game. They also give you plenty of spaces to explore which I really appreciate. It plays like a true P&C adventure with an inventory you can interact with and dialogue based clues you have to pay attention to if you want to understand what needs to be done. The games mechanics are about as simple as you can get with clicking on a hotspot pretty much being the only interaction you need. The story was good, but maybe not as engaging and interesting as some of the other games at the time. The voice overs and acting were excellent as well. The game does have the cursor change color and display text description when mousing over a hot spot and there are quick skip options when double clicking exits or skip dialogue options when pressing ".", all of which make for a more enjoyable experience. I wouldn't say the game really has many "bad" aspects, but it does have some mediocre points and places where there could have been a little improvement. I'm aware that at this time, the game is 30 years old and so there can be different expectations for modern games. I'm trying to keep a balanced view of good/bad for it's time and good/bad compared to modern standards. Overall, I think the game holds up pretty well. You might have to fiddle with some display and compatibility settings to play it full screen, but other than that it's still very playable, offers challenging puzzles, and feels like the story could be taking place now and not limited to the past or in an unrelateable future. So what are the things I thought made it more mediocre? Well, looking at it compared to other games of it's time (1995) we have games like Beneath A Steel Sky and King's Quest VII: The Princeless Bride which came out a year before in 1994. Both had far more interesting and engaging stories. Like by the end of this game l didn't have a strong feeling of closure or completion and I didn't really care much about the characters, which are feelings I got from both those other games. I also felt that the animated cut scenes from say KQ7 were more polished and consistent than The Dig. The characters look vastly different in quality and don't always even look like the same character in one scene to another. The same could be said for Space Quest 6 which released the same year as this game, far more polished animation. All of those also had better controls. The Dig, for example, still requires use of "F1" to access menu options for save/load, quit and settings as opposed to mouse-over, on-screen buttons, or what had already become more popular "Q" or "esc" buttons. It's not a huge issue, but feels particularly dated now and the menu option control is unintuitive. Most modern PCs you also have to press "fn"+"F1" to now access those menus. I also disliked that it was often difficult to tell if you could walk further to the left or right on a screen. The game features a tram system and a later unlocked light bridge system. The light bridges don't make travel that much quicker and it feels unnecessary to have put both in the game. The only thing I would actually say was bad was the dialogue menu. When you have a dialogue and exhaust the options it turns blue so you know you won't ask or hear any new things. However, each time you open a dialogue your options are reset so you never know if there's something new to hear or just a repeat of what's already been said and that wastes time. Finally, let's talk puzzles! I know moon logic puzzles and dead ends where you can't complete something because you forgot to pick up something you can go back for anymore, are among the reasons why the genre is hated by many players and bad puzzles can turn off even steadfast lifelong fans like myself. That said, the puzzles in this game were relatively easy and logical. The hard part for most of these puzzles is that there aren't many clues as to how to solve them or more obvious instructions. You get tiny tidbits if you pay attention in the conversations and things around you but it can leave you feeling like you don't know what to do which is frustrating. That said there are two puzzles that felt especially frustrating and leave you to the old try everything on everything method of progression. A puzzle to open a door by catching a critter took far longer than it should have for example. It's pretty common to have one or two difficult to solve puzzles in a P&C game but the amount of having to guess or walk back and forth trying to figure out how to do things because there weren't better clues or instruction can feel a little annoying. Despite it's flaws, The Dig is a worthwhile game that I think many people would enjoy playing. I realize that for a positive review that recommends the game, there is a disproportionate amount of my review that addresses negative aspects, but that's why I say it's mid list, not top list. It still makes the list of good Point & Click Adventure games. If you've never played it and enjoy both P&Cs and SciFi it might be time to give it a try. Without a guide, for a first time payer, it probably takes about 8-10 hours. With a guide and/or previous playthrough, probably 4-6 depending on whether you skip cutscenes or dialogues.