Preamble

Hello everyone, and welcome to a new blog series I plan to do in-between my usual JRPG content on Giant Bomb. In 2021 I decided to play around with an assortment of "classic" adventure games, each with a reputation for having some butt-ass puzzles. This time around, I will be looking at The Dig, a 1995 release from LucasArts. Now, I can hear a handful of you typing away already that The Dig is not nearly as bad as some of the games I will likely look at throughout this series. And while I personally am not a fan of The Dig, and more on that later, I do commend the game for its ambition and otherwise outstanding visuals and music. Some of the screens you'll find in the game are major technical achievements and simply awe-inspiring. That said, none of this is to say the game is free from a handful of genuinely bunk-ass puzzles. And boy, are there some bad puzzles in The Dig.

That last sentence might be surprising to those of you that have only experienced the high points of LucasArts' "Golden Age" of adventure games. The studio maintained a reputation for creating sweeping adventures without the punishing difficulty associated with point-and-click adventure games. That said, there are a few LucasArts games that eschew their family-friendly and "all-ages welcomed" reputation. The three titles that come to my mind are Loom, Full Throttle, and The Dig. With The Dig, the game bites off way more than it can chew as its multiple attempts at environmental storytelling butt up against the Spartan-like simplicity of the SCUMM engine. As a result, The Dig has more than a few puzzles that subject its players to massive leaps of logic as well as fiddly time-based sequences that are anachronistic to what LucasArts built its reputation on at the time. With all of that in mind, let's get into the nitty-gritty with my rankings of every puzzle in the game.

As you will see, I'm using a continuum ranging from 1 to 10. Puzzles ranging from one to four are accessible sequences or set pieces that can be solved without guides or hints, regardless of your puzzle game expertise. Puzzles ranked between five and six are ones that only intermediate puzzle game players can solve, but beginners can solve in-game through clues, hints, or significant trial-and-error. From seven and above, we get into puzzles that most players cannot solve without consulting outside resources. Also in this category are puzzles that have major accessibility issues. For reference, one thing that will crop up in this entry is how several mechanics in The Dig are not at all accessible to those that are color blind. With that in mind, let's jump into it!

The Fun & Easy Shit - (In Chronological Order)

• Stopping the Asteroid - Score: 2/10 - A very forgiving introductory set piece and a puzzle where you can't enter a fail state. The one reason why I bump it up ever so slightly is that it is easy to forget to pick up the shovel as it almost perfectly blends into the background texture.
• Opening the Entrance Puzzle & Pedestal - Score: 1/10 - This puzzle is straightforward, and I enjoy the mystery the game builds up during this sequence. The puzzle pieces all have logical positions, and I had no UI or UX issues to report.
• Exploring the Canyon - Score: 3/10 - This is the game's first open-world environment and a real visual treat. It can be played out of order, but the game does not like that. Everything you see is abstract enough that it is not difficult to get lost and using the orb compass sucks. Likewise, the rod and chest, which are necessary items to progress the story, are easy to miss.
• Door Puzzles The Use The Gems - Score: 3/10 - The lack of door color coding is infuriating. Correspondingly, the Gem Wands are not fun to use. You can accidentally skip or go over your intended shape and color, and it sucks cycling back to the correct form. Additionally, the gem wands are not accessible for the color blind. The gem wands are far from "difficult," but they are tedious even after you grasp their gimmick. You use these devices way more often than I'd prefer, and they always feel fiddly.
• Light Bridges (All of Them) - Score: 2/10 - Here's another sequence that is not accessible for the color blind. The Light Bridge puzzles are easy once you "get" their gimmick like the Gem Wands. Nonetheless, fixing a Light Bridge is never not annoying, even if they all can reasonably be solved using logic and the information the game provides.
• Jumping the Chasm - Score: 1/10 - This sequence was a fun worldbuilding moment. Even if you get it wrong the first time, you will not die, and it is easy to figure out what you need to do.
• Fixing The Green Door - Score: 2/10 - There is a visual hint from the sparks on a pillar to indicate the terminal will not work. Using a nearby wire to jumpstart the panel makes sense. Using the tusk to open the panel's front board instead of the rod or shovel is less so. However, I appreciate how the game does not tack on an additional crystal puzzle like the earlier doors.
• The Panel in the Tomb Spire - Score: 3/10 - This panel is after the green door, but you need to use the red gem rod. In practice, this means the player needs to use trial and error to figure out which rod is correct. Much like every time you need to open a door, this is not hard or impossible; it's just time-consuming.
• Fixing The Last Light Bridge - Score: 2/10 - The game hints you need to open the panel to repair the bridge. Aligning the light beams is not complicated but provides another puzzle with accessibility issues. You still need to adjust the lens, which sucks, but I genuinely enjoyed this puzzle.

• The Planetarium Puzzle - Score: 2/10 - You need to use the two bong-looking objects to create a solar eclipse. It controls like shit, but the puzzle here is clever. The game's visual input is surprisingly coherent, and the accompanying cinematic is fantastic. This is by far my favorite moment in the entire game.
• Getting "The Eye" - Score: 3/10 - First, you need to go back to the alien inventor, and that is not at all clear to you as the player. Next, you need to collect a dropped rod that almost perfectly blends into the background. As was the case before, switching the gems to the correct symbols is annoying, and there's a ton of backtracking when you need to go to a different spire to pick up the Eye. Nonetheless, it is far from impossible.
• Getting Crystals From Brink - Score: 2/10 - The cutscene when Brink dies is very silly, but it's pretty clear where you need to go. Unfortunately, the game does not warn you to have the Eye in your inventory when you interact with Brink, which can cause the player to need to backtrack, but overall it's not that hard.
• The Final Guard - Score: 1/10 - You kill a monster by briefly turning off a light bridge. It's a simple and anti-climactic end puzzle.

The Convoluted And Frustrating Shit That Is Still Fun Or Redeeming - (In Chronological Order)

• Nexus Mirror Puzzle - Score: 5.5/10 - The terminal interface is atrocious, and the lack of a reference or unit of measurement is terrible. The inclusion of an action button is also very unintuitive. How you rank this puzzle depends on how you feel about games with programmable movement. I usually enjoy programmable movement, but the lack of a grid or circuit to indicate where you can move your automaton frustrated me. Also, a level of pixel-perfect accuracy is required for this sequence which makes it way harder than it needs to be.
• Saving Maggie - Score: 4/10 - This was some sexist bullshit and very silly. This set piece is comedic when the game has not been overtly eliciting laughs thus far. I appreciate the game automatically moving characters in the right direction at various points. Forcing Brink to help you is a clever and funny bit. That said, you sure do need to jump between multiple screens way more than you feel like you should.
• Getting the 4th Metal Tablet - Score: 5/10 - I have a real hard time ranking "pixels hunts." In this case, the entrance to the beach can be hard to find. Worse, knowing to use the tablet with Maggie to unlock an island from another dimension is a MASSIVE leap of logic. This requires the player to explore the entire game looking for some glowing shit flickering in a specific background and knowing when to combine an item with Maggie. None of this is challenging per se, but it's still a convoluted pixel hunt.

THE FUCKING AWFUL SHIT THAT MAKES ME WANT TO EAT OUT MY EYEBALLS! - (In Order Of Pure Pain)

Bringing The German Dude Back To Life - Score: 7/10

I debated if I wanted to put this in the "FUCKING AWFUL" category or not. One reason against doing so is that some enjoy this sequence as it forces the player to explore the game's world for the first time. Likewise, a lot of people appreciate the mythology surrounding The Dig, even if the game doesn't entirely pull its many pieces together. That said, I'm not too fond of this set piece. The foremost issue for me is that this is the first puzzle that forces you to navigate between several different environments, and navigating the world of The Dig sucks. Whether using the tram or the Light Bridges, every path or shortcut is at least three to four screens long. And some of your exit ways or transitions are not entirely clear, which is not usually a problem with LucasArts' works. That last problem is especially the case when you're trying to find the door to the life crystals.

The actual process of reviving the dead German Scientist is entirely illogical. The cinematics the game forces you to watch all make very little sense. And for those of you who don't know what I am talking about, you need to examine a series of animated wall paintings and discern that green orbs can revive the recently deceased. With one of your companions having fallen to their death, the game wants you to use alien goo to bring them back to life. The problem is that the stone walls are monochromatic, and everything you look at is a blurry indecipherable mess. Likewise, the in-game world is already so large that knowing where the green crystals are in the first place is no easy task without a guide. The lack of an in-game map makes remembering specific tombs or rooms an uphill battle. More importantly, the concept of using goo to revive a dead person represents a "genre break." Up to this point, The Dig has been operating under a somewhat realistic veil of science-fiction, and this is the point when that suddenly stops.

The Nexus Crystal Puzzle - Score: 8/10

I HATED this puzzle when I first played The Dig as a child. Whether it is on an old CRT or modern LCD monitor, I always have had a hard time seeing if the glow on the tips of the crystals is getting brighter or not as I adjust them. As things stand, you need to alternate between three translucent crystals and illuminate them by adjusting all three at various heights. The source of frustration here comes when you accidentally change one crystal's position and undo your progress with another one. There's a specific order the game wants you to tackle the three crystals, but it at no point communicates what that order might be.

I absolutely HATE how you can fuck yourself over and turn off the other crystals and make things way harder for yourself. This puzzle is easy to solve once you figure out what you need to do, but even concluding you need to raise and lower the three smaller crystals simultaneously is not clear from the onset. Likewise, the tips of the crystals are a terrible source of input. Fun fact, this is one of those LucasArts puzzles that prevent you from looking up the answers on a guide. Whenever you start a new playthrough, the game randomizes the values for each of the crystals. This means that guides can only describe the strategy for the puzzle rather than represent a single solution.

The Tomb Puzzle - Score: 9/10

This might surprise some people, but I think the sequence in which you revive the alien architect is a moment worthy of condemnation. My reason for this is:

1. You first need to find a specific screen with an eclipse in the background that you created from a prior puzzle. The Dig's navigation issues make this a downright painful process.
2. Once you observe the eclipse, you need to place a blue crystal into a small slot, and this is an object you gathered during the first hour of the game.
3. You need to stand on a blurry stone tile with two moons, which, to activate, you need to use the red rod from the rat puzzle to turn on.
4. After you go down the elevator, you need to destroy a statue to find an entrance that has a guard. The guard, paradoxically, is killed using the green stones, which have not been used for a while.
5. You use the first gem rod to open a door before you revive an alien in a tomb.

More than any other puzzle in the game, this sequence represents The Dig's overall design pitfalls. It attempts to provide elaborate environmental storytelling using the SCUMM engine and struggles to accomplish this. This process is way too involved for the verb–object interface employed by LucasArts. Similarly, the leaps of logic you have to make are uncharacteristic of LucasArts and instead pines for the works of Sierra. For example, on FOUR OCCASIONS, you need to pull out items that have been wasting away in your inventory since the first act. One of these objects, the blue orb, has not been used FOR HOURS!

Turtle Bone Puzzle - Score: 9/10

Many who play or have played The Dig consider this to be the most challenging puzzle in the game. I'm afraid I can't agree for a handful of reasons. First, the game provides a visual reference in the form of a fossil. This reference guide is far from perfect, but it is at least a partial attempt by the game to make your experience easier. Likewise, you are stuck interacting with a single pile of bones and don't need to bother with other nearby items or devices, which is not something I can say about what I consider to be the actual hardest puzzle in The Dig. Now, don't get me wrong, I think this puzzle is still complete horseshit. It's not exactly what I would call "a good time."

Right off the bat, the fossil reference is only partially helpful. The fossil you can examine is blurry and missing some critical parts compared to the pile of bones you need to piece together. Additionally, it is not clear what you have done wrong when you have completed the fossil and have an incorrect outcome. To add insult to injury, some of the bones look exactly the same. Finally, the pieces to the fossil are more than happy to snap into incorrect positions, and this can result in you having a completed skeleton that looks right but has a single piece out of alignment. In this situation, you are better off tearing apart your completed work and trying again from scratch rather than scouring for your one or two mistakes. To call this "frustrating" is a colossal understatement.

Trapping The Rat - Score: 10/10

And now we reach The Dig's biggest puzzle-based turd. When people say they "like" The Dig, I cannot help but squint my eyes and point to this puzzle. On paper, your task seems simple enough. The panel to a door is missing an essential part thanks to an alien rat snatching it before you could stop it. Obviously, this means we need to chase after the rat and repair the door. Well... not so fast. What you are about to subject yourself to is widely considered one of the worst puzzles LucasArts designed during their "Golden Age" short of the Brick Wall Puzzle in the original release of Full Throttle. Even veterans of LucasArts games will back me up with that declaration.

Getting all of the parts needed for this puzzle is difficult because they all blend into the environment. The next issue is simply figuring out you need to create a trap to capture a rat in the first place. When I first played this game, I did not know the rat was the key to the puzzle and instead viewed it as a fun background animation. I thought it made more sense if you needed to dig directly into its nook. Assembling the trap is not intuitive, and trapping the rat requires a lot of trial and error as getting the rat in the proper position can take time. Identifying if your character is in the correct spot is a headache and knowing to use the bracelet on the rat makes no sense. Much like the Tomb Puzzle, the Rat Trap Puzzle requires you to use an assortment of items and objects you collected hours ago!

There's also an element of Broken Sword's notorious "Goat Puzzle" here as well. The only way you can get the critter in the trap is to get in position before its moving animation begins and finishes. This is a tiny window for you to fiddle with the SCUMM interface, and if you fail, you have to get the rat to pop out of its nook again. Using the blue compass device sucks because it is ambiguous enough to where you never really know where you need to use it or where it's pointing towards. Additionally, fixing the panel requires a specific part from a far-off environment you can miss. Finally, the red rod from the trap needs to be picked up after releasing the rat. Otherwise, you will not be able to complete a future puzzle.

Should You Play The Dig? (Answer: Maybe?)

Even for intermediate to expert puzzle game fans, The Dig is a tough sell. While ambitious, the game struggles to pull together its many disparate and diverging ideas into a coherent adventure game. This issue makes sense when you consider the game is an adaptation of a long scrapped Steven Spielberg movie script. Despite the game having all the world's ambition, it doesn't do much when it comes to its narrative. The characters are largely the same as when you first encountered them, and the actual plot meanders for hours upon end. Worse, the story's climax reeks of a game that didn't know how to stick its landing.

Playing The Dig is equally befuddling. If you want to see LucasArts push their SCUMM engine to a breaking point, The Dig is worth a shot. That said, you should play it with a guide, as its punishing difficulty is an anachronistic break from many of LucasArts' previous classic adventure game titles. Some of the puzzles in the game are downright atrocious, requiring the use of long-forgotten items or specific inputs in a limited time frame. If this was any other developer, I might be convinced this is not a big deal. However, knowing this is a LucasArts project, I cannot help but feel like their attempts to try something different hurt the overall experience The Dig is attempting to offer.

He's dressed like Goku.

If anyone decides to play this themselves, I would highly recommend looking through the in-game options to speed up the VO. At it's base speed, every conversation in this game has that strange lag between sentences that is so common in this medium. While increasing it to it's maximum doesn't make it as fast as say, Oxenfree, it does make every cutscene in this game infinitely more tolerable.

The chronological ordering is good, but maybe don't separate by difficulty? Good read otherwise, ZP.

@zombiepie: I won't disagree with the trapping the rat puzzle being a pain in the buttocks, but I don't agree with your general hatred of "the dig."

I could write up a long fan boy comment, but my argument really stems from the concept that every adventure game has about one puzzle that is a leap of faith and a pain to figure out. Even Monkey Island 1 and 2 which are regarded as probably two of the better adventure games (and my favorite series) have puzzles that are incredibly frustrating. Navigating the monkey Island puzzle or secret hand door puzzle in 2, and the cannon puzzle in 1.

For The Dig specifically everyone loses their shit over the turtle puzzle and it is not that hard, certainly not a 9 out of 10. Yes, you get a fossil and that should be enough to get a rough outline of the creature in place, if you need to move pieces around after that shouldn't warrant everyone losing their mind.

We also need to discuss that these games puzzles were meant to stump people. It is why adventure games died around the advent of a more accessible world wide web. You were supposed to get stumped, re-examine what's available in your inventory and in the world, take a break from the game, mull the puzzle over and come back when you get a new idea or inspiration strikes. Looking at a walkthrough makes not only the game trivial, but also makes puzzles look bad out of context. Are there some clunkers out there, certainly but I don't think Dig really cracks a top list.

Adventure games are rarely repayable because the joy is in solving the puzzles.. and if you use a guide or give up 10 minutes in, then don't bother even starting an adventure game outside pajama Sam. That isn't to say this is a critique about zombiepie specifically, because I trust they are doing due diligence in correctly assessing the puzzles, but it's just an argument I hear often from people critiquing adventure game puzzles as being too hard.

Speaking specifically about the goo and bringing people back to life, it's relatively the single most important part of the game as it is where the moral of the story lies. In short, you discover magical goo that can make death no longer important, but obviously has adverse effects ( no spoilers). You are then later given a chance to use the goo again on a different companion to bring them back to life, but you shouldn't because it is argued that it is a fate worse then death. You can in fact get a bad ending game over by reviving the companion against their wishes instead of letting them just be dead. A lot of stories have a similar crux of using or doing something unnatural to avoid death.To say that the game is somewhat grounded sci-fi until the goo, is similar to saying night of the living dead is a normal movie until they bring in the zombies. Both are vital to the whole story.

Sorry that got off the rails, I just love adventure games.. also we all know the worst puzzle of all time is in GK3.

I'm sorry but applying the B.S. "git gud" idea to adventure games of all things is both silly and ahistorical. People should play games whatever way makes them happiest and adventure games were never about skill they were about story. Telling someone to not even play these adult games if they want to use a guide is condescending and NOT NICE!

I was alive during that period and it's just not true that adventure games had broken or opaque puzzles because the designers really wanted players to think laterally etc... A few might have, but a lot of game companies sold their own walkthroughs pre-Internet so the idea that there was this pure period where everyone had to think things through themselves is just wrong. There were also game magazines that had solutions for super tough puzzles. That stuff was out there.

Adventure games had overly hard puzzles because they were made by small teams who had a really hard time figuring out what their players would intuit and what they wouldn't, and sometimes just because they wanted to artificially extend the playtime of the game. A lot of games had bad difficulty balancing back then because the medium was so new and the teams were small and everybody was trying to figure this stuff out. They often missed. Like in failing to signpost the rat puzzle properly (signposting was a common problem because team members already knew what was important because they'd helped design the thing.)

You can wax rhapsodic about the joys of coming to a breakthrough after a break but I was there too, man, and just as often you'd figure out a puzzle through random clicking and then curse it for being poorly designed or signposted, or you'd just abandon the game altogether. Adventure game puzzles were often fun but a lot of them were outright bad and were misfires and error by fledgling teams of young people.

Also adventure games didn't die because of the Internet. Hint books magazines and schoolyards already existed and people could mostly get solutions if they wanted them. There were even hotlines. Adventure games died because of Resident Evil. Not that game specifically, but the introduction of story into more action oriented games in meaningful ways. Adventure games were the only way to get real story in games for a decade and a half or so, but once other games incorporated real cinematic stories (and puzzles too sometimes, like Resident Evil) adventure games mostly died out.

But if people want to play games with a walkthrough let 'em. Who are any of us to be gatekeepers of how other people enjoy their entertainment?

I'm sorry but this is a terrible take. One the first primary issues I have with some of the puzzles in The Dig is that it are totally inaccessible to the color blind. The fact entire sequences are impossible to people with a disability is not the fault of the player, it is a fundamental failure on the design of the game. The timed nature of the rat puzzle is also problematic because it poses an issue with players that cannot react in time with the sequence. What about people with dyslexia?

Second, some of the adventure game puzzles throughout this era are not solved by using pure intuition as you suggest. They are solved using brute force and luck. What part of the brick puzzle in Full Throttle required intuition. I'm all ears.

I can spend ten minutes trying to solve the rubber ducky puzzle in The Longest Journey, but the multiple red herrings in the game make it very unlikely I will solve that puzzle through intuition alone. As @bigsocrates points out in their post, one of the reasons why this genre died is because they were being design by MIT computer science graduates who thought their line of thinking was the best and everyone had to aspire to their line of logic. It was male-oriented and sometimes Eurocentric or Western-centric. Some of the cultural lines of logic employed by LucasArts and Sierra would not make sense outside of English-speaking nations or North America and Europe.

Third, and this is my final point, people using guides to solve games are not an issue. If all people want to do is see a game's story on their own terms, who are you to make them feel bad about their decisions. It's terrible gatekeeping to suggest people need to be able to solve things within an arbitrary time constraint. More people should be able to enjoy games and this hobby gets better, not worse, when there are more stakeholders.

Yeah, I hear you. I am going to try something different with the formatting in the next episode for Atlantis: The Lost Tales. I plan to list the puzzles chronologically and then pull the top three to five for a separate section.

@bigsocrates: @bigsocrates: I re-read what I wrote, and yes it comes off sounding gate-keeper-y and that is not the intention. I went with the harsh nuclear option as a way to get my point across and clearly I went too big. As a fan of Adventure games, I want more people to play them, I want the genre to thrive, but what I see a lot from my friends, students, etc. that I expose to adventure games is a lack of patience in trying to solve a puzzle no matter how logical or illogical. We have tiny computers in our pockets at almost all times, and after trying one attempt at a solution I see a tendency that someone just gives up and results in a quick google to get the answer. Listen, I've been there and looked up answers myself and sometimes you comes across puzzles that literally require you to "try everything on everything" and those puzzles are not fun or intuitive to solve, but I will still stand by the claim that I think adventure games or puzzle games are meant to challenge you and giving in at the first step of frustration is going to rob people of the highs of solving some puzzles. Obviously every game is different and every puzzle is as well. Are you going to get the same high solving the wall kicking puzzle in Full Throttle as you might solving the mime puzzle in Gabriel Knight, no certainly not. Some moments that I still hold close to my chest are solving puzzles in Fate of Atlantis or getting my sister (who was taking French) to listen to two characters have a conversation in French and then translate for me so I could get a solution to a puzzle. I am simply trying to push what I enjoy about adventure games to a group of people I don't know. Can you play an entire game and use a walkthrough the whole time, sure.. does it impact my life at all? not in the least. Do what makes you happy!

As for the death of adventure games - yes, the internet was not the sole cause or even the deathblow that destroyed the industry, as there are a lot of contributing factors from simply a tech race and storytelling in a 3d landscape, to poorly designed adventure games with poor puzzles, to the burgeoning accessibility and viability of consoles and a changing demographic.. I overstated the importance of the internet piece, but it does stand out to me as I remember sitting in a conference where (I think it was Al Lowe) was arguing how puzzle designers now had to compete with an easily accessed solution. Yes, magazines existed as well as friends on the schoolyard, but that wasn't something everyone could easily get. I for one had no one in my class who dabbled in wanting to hear about my Day of the tentacle puzzles, or where I got stuck in Quest for Glory, my only help was relying on my mom to help me think through some puzzles. The hard, puzzles, I would wake up the next morning, learning that my mom stayed up late trying to solve the puzzle, so she could give me clues in the morning to help me get there.

For ZombiePie specifically, I didn't mean to critique your call out in terms of accessibility in games regarding color-blindness or dyslexia. More games should be accessible and I am glad that fight is happening now, but a lot of earlier games were limited in how they could create different puzzles. Visual puzzles were basically either of the shape or color variant, and I don't think very many designers paid attention to accessibility in that era, which means you are going to have a field day pointing that out in nearly every adventure game you play. Does that give them a pass? Certainly not, but we are just now getting companies to buy into it a change 20 years later from the Dig. Its the same argument for cultural and language differential when trying to solve puzzles. I can't fault a team of 5 people designing King's Quest to not take into consideration how the game they made in the nineties would play across the world. Puzzles make sense in their language and with their logic. It's goes both ways as Germany produces a lot of Adventure game content (or they did at one time) and in order to solve puzzles in Deponia or other games I can't think about my dumb American sensibilities and have to put my head elsewhere.

Regardless, I meant no offense by my previous comment.. I saw the tweet that was talking about the DIG and ran over here very excited to talk shop about adventure games, because its not a shop I think is open very often. I will now sit quietly in the corner and just enjoy the series from a safe distance without getting my rabid-adventure-game-defender-saliva on it.

I love LucasArts games and bought The Dig at launch (one of the greatest PC game boxes ever!). I think it's one of the most visually spectacular games in the catalog, and I loved the cast and story.

It is definitely a complete pain in the ass to play, even when you return to it years later and know all the main puzzles; because of those fucking terrible door key puzzles and other bullshit.

@imunbeatable80: There's a reason for the famous saying "extremism in defense of The Dig is no vice. " We all get overheated now and then.

It's fine to be a fan of and advocate for adventure games. But while a lot of these games had great puzzles and narratives some did not, and some had a mix of the ridiculous, the sublime, and the frustrating as heck. Some games and puzzles resonate with some people but not with others.

I think it's important to realize something that you yourself said in this comment. You didn't have any people on the playground to share puzzle solutions with because your friends didn't play adventure games. They were always a niche product...for a reason! Another reason they died was that the cost of game development exploded and games had to sell hundreds of thousands of copies or even millions to be profitable. You couldn't make a tidy little sum selling 50,000 copies or whatever. Myst may have broken through to 6,000,000 thanks to its stunning for the time graphics, but it was the exception.

Different people enjoy different games for different reasons. There were always people who played adventure games for the stories and characters as well as those who played for the puzzles and most fell somewhere in between. We can all enjoy games for different reasons and co-exist, with peace and love and good will towards all of humankind.

When it comes to things like accessibility I don't think intention matters all that much. The game either works for people or it doesn't. That doesn't mean we need to heap hatred on a small team that was still figuring things out, but @zombiepie didn't focus on the creators or their intent, he focused on the product and the text qua text. It is what it is and if some of it doesn't work for a lot of people that's bad, even if it was mere oversight and not malice that created the problem.

There's nothing wrong with being an advocate for adventure games or a lover of adventure game puzzles. I do not presume to speak for @zombiepie but my impression is that the thoughts of a fan of the genre would probably be welcome as long as they are phrased in a way that doesn't come off as hostile and gatekeepery. You're certainly entitled to defend The Dig's puzzles and structure, but that content gets lost when people perceive personal hostility rather than well-intentioned disagreement. My impression from you from these forums is that you are generally well-intentioned. Everyone gets heated from time to time and says things in a way they wish they hadn't.

One nice thing about modern gaming is how many genres are represented. The adventure game was more or less dead for a time but it isn't any longer. Have you tried Call of the Sea? That's a pretty decent adventure game in the classical sense with some decent puzzles (though it's more focused on exploration than pure puzzles.) Then there's stuff like Superliminal that's almost all puzzle. And hybrid adventure game platformers like Forgotton Anne. And there are an absolute ton of VR games that are more or less adventure games. The genre is flourishing in the way that all modern genres flourish; mixed and matched with other things. We may not get as many point and clicks as we once did (though there are still some of those) but the spirit of adventure games lives on in so many places that you can argue they're more popular than ever. Internet or not!

@imunbeatable80: I think I have seen Al Lowe say the same thing at a different panel. And you know what? People made online guides because at some point PC adventure games stop being fun and became pseudo-IQ tests. The next two games I have coming up are Myst clones and I think they will really make a case on why the adventure game genre experienced an existential crisis of sorts with the advent of CD-ROM technology. As other genres innovated, adventure games buckled down on making their puzzles more inscrutable.

At some point I am going to need to talk about Riven: The Sequel to Myst. Now, I love LOVE Riven, but that game complete bullshit. Riven has a beautiful world to share with its audience but that doesn't excuse the fact some of its puzzles are horseshit! AND I AM IN CAMP SIERRA! I didn't play Monkey Island until I was older, but instead grew up on King's Quest and Police Quest. And while I harbor a TON of nostalgia for both franchises, they have bullshit puzzles in them. It is in their DNA.

I liked The Neverhood but boy howdy if doesn't seem destined to show up round these parts eventually.

I might actually cover The Neverhood only because I want to cover Armikrog and spend an entire blog talking about why Armikrog is a massive bummer.

@zombiepie: you should cover Starship Titanic because it was written by Douglas Adams and has an amazing cameo by John Cleese and…that’s it really. That’s the pitch. It has some bad puzzles that require lots of trekking around back and forth though, if you find that enticing.

Funny, I just played this for the first time earlier this month and did it with a guide for this very reason. The art and Robert Patrick were my favorite things about it, though the story wasn’t awful either, even if not particularly original.

I also replayed Grim Fandango earlier this year. It’s still my favorite adventure game, but some of the puzzles in it are kinda hot bs and I wouldn’t blame anyone for playing it through with a guide, just so they can see the story.

I can’t remember if there was any particular adventure game I had real trouble with as a kid/teen. First Broken Sword might’ve had some tricky puzzles.

This is one of those "Middle school me loved this game and therefore I think it's important that I never play it again" kind of games. Adored it so much when I was younger that I read the novelization for crying out loud. I really enjoyed this blog post despite not really remembering much of the puzzles...although I DO actually remember figuring out the Brink resurrection puzzle because of the rudimentary context clues and feeling very smart about it!

Not for nothing, I found Zak McCracken to be insane at the time I played it, but I was older then and going back so I think I was out of the mindset that I was in when I was shot gunning these games like crazy.

Excellent post and a great idea for a series. I just completed my goal of having finished every Wadjet Eye game by the end of 2021, and have a great candidate for worst puzzle ever in my write up so far.

I missed The Dig at the time of release, but came to it several years later when “revisiting the classics.” And while I didn’t find it terrible, I was genuinely surprised so many people recommended it.

There was also a good episode of the Video Game History Hour about the making of The Dig recently, which I recommend.

I'm playing this right now and as @arbitrarywater can attest, I think this might be one of the worst designed adventure games I have played in a long time. Every part of this game is driving me crazy. The puzzles that require you to make massive leaps of logic. The game openly taunting you. The incredibly twee and British sense of humor.

Thank you for introducing me to this game. I hate it.

@zombiepie: Hmm. I suppose I should apologize but in my defense I feel like my description was pretty accurate. I name checked Douglas Adams and John Cleese, which should have been enough to alert you to the British humor factor, and I said it had bad puzzles that required a lot of walking around. I may have failed to express how annoying the puzzles are but I played it at my friend's house and I think the game we played before that was I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, and that game is flat out sadistic in basically every way (appropriate to the subject material.) I assume you're familiar with I Have No Mouth, but if you haven't played it hooo boy.

I'm sorry you're not finding it amusing. My friend and I were huge Hitchhikers Guide and Monty Python fans so we laughed a bunch. I still remember hearing "I suck and I blow, anything else I don't know" over and over until I wanted to turn the speakers off.

Also in my defense I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to be talked about regarding the game. I think a lot of its flaws come from Adams' experience with the old Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide games. It was almost 15 years later and adventure game design had changed a lot (including adding graphics and the slowness of the GUI) but Starship Titanic draws selectively from those advances and mixes in the ancient puzzle design in a way that doesn't really work.

I'm looking forward to the blog about it!

But still I'm sorry...I guess.

@bigsocrates: I would describe watching ZP play Starship Titanic as being akin to getting shanked by a Monty Python skit in a dark alley.

I really like this type of game, but yes, they have some truly awful puzzles. In the Curse of Monkey Island, a game I love, you have to "use cookie cutter on rubber tree" when the cookie cutter is way on the other side of the world and completely missable. On the other hand, sometimes solving these puzzles is very satisfying and the source of a lot of humor. I'd like to see more games like this but with MULTIPLE possible solutions to most puzzles so it isn't so frustrating.

@arbitrarywater: I wasn't expecting anyone to enjoy Starship Titanic in 2022 but I must confess that I did not anticipate throwing off a recommendation of an old game I remember fondly from high school with what I feel were appropriate warnings would earn me two enemies for life.

I gotta watch what I say more carefully.