Dig

As with Orion Conspiracy, I didn’t play The Dig when it released, only read some reviews. But I did try it maybe 10 years ago, and found it very difficult. Not so much now, for some reason. The trickiest part so far is the dialogs. You get a set of icons, but it’s not clear which are necessary to progress, and which are just flavour, so you end up listening to everything. And there is a lot of voiced dialog in this game, because besides Lucas Arts, which were at their peak, it has also Steven Spielberg and Orson Scott Card. And you can tell how bold the writing is. You have five astronauts sent on a mission to alter the course of an asteroid that’s about to collide with Earth. In half an hour, you lose contact with two of them. In another half an hour, you lose the third character.
The asteroid turns out to be an alien lift, that takes the astronauts that weren’t waiting in the shuttle to an alien planet. And that’s not the only civilization, there’s a wreck of at least other space ship that isn’t human.
There are a few mechanics that make this game difficult. First, not all objects are active. Early on you need to use an alien compass to discover a place to dig. Second, you can’t simply exhaust your options. There’s a puzzle where you need to program a probe to pick up a lense, then put it in its place. And it can take up to 50 instructions, although you need around 10. Third, you have doors with codes, but you have no idea which code fits which door, so you have to try them all out.