Gaming archeology
The return of LucasArts adventure games fills me with joy. Like many, it’s a question of where to start, and like many, I chose The Dig. There are many things I could say about it, but then I found John Walker had said most of them already.
He chose to look at the game without its context, which is certainly a worthy thing, but it did skip over the angle I found most fascinating. Despite six years in the oven, the dish served up most closely resembles a response to Myst’s stunning success, two years prior.
The geometry focused puzzles are surely meant to give the market what it seemed to want. Yet here, they are nestled within the beautiful storytelling at which LucasArts were so very good, and for which they were so fondly loved. It’s a sharp piece of design, but I suspect that it was ultimately commercially unsuccessful, since it lacks the ultimate feature of 1995 - 3D.
