I wasn't sure what I was expecting from LucasArts's The Dig. Well, before I played it I wasn't sure; by the time I'd left you all at the conclusion of the Intro blog, I had a much better of how the rest of the game would play out. The Dig has an eventful opening chapter, as Cmdr. Boston Low, Dr. Ludger Brink and Maggie Robbins are thrown halfway across the galaxy in a probe masquerading as an asteroid and left to pick through the desiccated remains of a highly advanced alien civilization in order to find answers, the most pressing of which is how to return back home to Earth. Immediately, their paths split: Brink is killed by an unfortunate accident, Robbins decides to put her linguistics expertise to good use in the aliens' archival room, and Low - as the protagonist - is left to wander the sub-aquatic alien complex for more information.

When the Intro blog went up, I got a few horror stories in the comments and on Steam from those who had already played it. They pointed to the game's Myst-style puzzles as being their personal bugbears, which I (mostly) pretended to freak out about towards the end of that piece. In truth, those puzzles - which I tend to refer to as "instance puzzles", since they're usually self-contained - were my favorite part of The Dig. There were no tutorials for these puzzles, no quick side-bar that explained the rules if not how to beat it, but they made enough sense that I could figure them out. Even the dreaded "turtle bone puzzle", where the player has to reconstruct the skeleton of a deceased turtle alien before it could be resurrected with the game's "life crystals" McGuffin, was actually kind of fun to figure out once I'd determined a few crucial rules. It's the other type of puzzle that often gave me pause: what I might call the traditional graphic adventure game puzzle, where you're not sure where to go next or if you're missing an item to proceed that you'd have to pixel hunt around for in previous areas. The Dig does this a lot, and it's an issue that continues to exacerbate as you increase the amount of territory to cover by opening new doors in the hub area. I'll come clean about getting stuck a few times simply because the game gave me no idea of where to try next. Some of that's my own fault: for the most part, you'd reach a new area, be presented with one of the above self-contained puzzles or a traditional adventure game puzzle - like building a trap out of random objects to capture a rodent-like creature which ran off with a key item - and then at the end you'd find a new engraved rod (which reveal door combinations for the hub exits) and perhaps a bit of lore or some other useful items.

At times, The Dig felt like an episode of Stargate SG-1: often when the titular squad reached a new planet, the scientist types would wander off and do their own thing, leaving the show's protagonist - the pragmatic and military-minded Colonel Jack O'Neill who, like Low, also has a touch of gray going on upstairs - to sit around making "I don't understand any of this" quips and occasionally solving incredibly tough puzzles through dumb luck. It specifically reminded me of one episode in particular where the team had the opportunity to decode an alien archive of knowledge while sitting on an unstable island slowly dropping into the ocean, presenting a risk vs. reward scenario of either being around when the island finally collapsed and killed them all or leaving behind an invaluable treasure trove of discoveries. The setting for that episode looked eerily identical to this one, which now makes me wonder if someone on the production team was a fan. Enjoying that show's quieter episodes when it was more explicitly biting on Star Trek's steez probably helped me tolerate The Dig's slow-paced second half a little better also, and I'll admit to getting swept along in the sense of discovery and solving problems through critical thinking. I prefer my sci-fi to be on the contemplative side, after all.

Overall, I'm not sure The Dig is necessarily the best game LucasArts has ever made - the competition's fierce, in fairness, and I didn't do The Dig any favors playing Day of the Tentacle a few days prior - but I really enjoyed it and think it works well as an integral part that developer's body of work; where so many other LucasArts games go for laughs or surreal silliness, The Dig is happy to just give you a chill alien mystery to suss out at your own pace. Glad to have marked it off my bucket list, at the very least.

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