The Dig (1995) Retrospective
The Dig (1995) Retrospective
I recently played The Dig for the first time, which passed me by when I was younger. I had heard of it I didn't realise it was another Lucas/Spielberg game. I'd just come off a couple of other Lucasarts games and it was quite different.
Looking back it seems quite divisive, I think because it was so different to the comedy Lucasarts adventures, but there's still a lot of love for it floating around the internet, and now I've added to it here if you fancy a long read: https://p7uen.neocities.org/posts/2023-06-23-The-Dig
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I really loved this game but having played it again not too many years ago, it does have several “sins” of the genre like overly cryptic puzzles and pixel hunting.
But the atmosphere is really top notch.
I don't think the sins were that bad (I've played far worse), I thought it was one of the easier games of the genre. I didn't quite like the ending though, it felt a bit anticlimactic and that the heroes didn't really earn it. It was like they decided to rush the ending and just wrapped it up.
They literally did have to rush the ending. It's why the German guy looks like an old man in one of the last cinematics. There was supposed to be more with him going into the weird dimension and something about that caused him to age a lot.
I don't recall exactly what but I believe there was an final act that got cut.
Damn! So it was indeed rushed. That explains so much. Do you have a source link on hand? If not I'll just go search it up later.
Sorry, I took a look and unfortunately I couldn't find anything so it is possible I'm misremembering things. In fact, the stuff about Brink becoming an old man might have been something to do with eliminating his addiction to the life crystals - I think that is a detail that was in the novelization?
It did have a chaotic development that had to be restarted a few times. There's info about that in the IMDB page for the game. There's a neat tidbit in that there was originally supposed to be a fourth astronaut who had cofunded the mission but they were ultimately cut from the game (though supposedly early artwork still featured 4 sets of footprints)
Yes, I recall Brian Moriatry was attached to the project at the start. No worries, I'll go... dig up the Internet on this. :P
Sure, had plenty worse but I feel by modern standards it can be quite frustrating at times.
Maybe years of playing adventure games has warped my mind. XD