Tag: Dig

Completed The Dig.
Didn’t look into walkthrough once, which is a good result for the game. Although two episodes did get me stumped for quite a long time. First, I thought the lightbridges need to be activated from both sides, or in some order. Turns out, you just need to hold the mouse button while activating them, a mechanic that the game never uses again, and I haven’t seen in any other point’n’click. And second, is that in order to deactivate the forcefield, you need to talk to Maggie about a specific object in that specific location.
Initially I praised the story, but having finished it, I must say it’s a disappointment. I remember how confused I was while reading about the game that there’s an instance when you need to saw off your crew member’s hand. But it all comes quite out of the blue: Brinks, the resurrected junkie, gets his hand stuck without any good reason, and this is the only bloody violent episode in the entire game, added for pure shock value. Later he tries to kill you and falls off a cliff, but lacking an arm doesn’t have any relation to that.
Then there’re the aliens. They went to a higher plane of existence, while their bodies and planet deteriorated, and now they are bored and long to return, but they can’t. Sounds like a good story of civilization that is too evolved for its own good, and “be carefult what you wish for”. Only the protagonist manages to not only to pull them back, but return them their physical bodies, without any explanation. Also, both of his companions are miraculously resurrected, although Brink is unexplainably aged now?
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I’m surprised how much I managed to progress without a guide, considering how unhelpful the game is.
We revive Brink, the archaeologist that falls to his death early in the game, and he gets obsessed with the crystals we used to revive him, as well as some ancient machine, so he isn’t much help at all.
The only puzzle I kind of remembered from reading about the game was recreating the turtle. You have fossil in one room, and bones you can place and rotate in the other.
There is a lot of find password, go back to nexus, open new door. And at one point, you just have to try all the passwords you have acquired in order to proceed.

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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.

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