One Small Step (again) - Initial impressions on The Dig (PC)

Last December, at Steam's Christmas sale, the Lucasarts Adventure Bundle, a collection of classic adventure games went up. It had The Dig, which was, aside from Grim Fandango, one of the last classic adventure games I've been dying to play my whole life.

I still have an issue of PC Gamer magazine somewhere in my room with a review of the game and I pored through it a thousand times, squeezing all the information out of every single word, my mind salivating for a chance to play the game. I LOVED Maniac Mansion. I ADORED Secret of Monkey Island. I was ENCHANTED with Loom.

Unfortunately, The Dig was only available in CD. Our PC then didn't have a CD-ROM drive. And that was the end of that.

For $5 with 3 other games, I grabbed the bundle without hesitation.

Due to Dragon Age and Cataclysm, I was only able to dig (hee) into The Dig a few weeks ago.

Holy Smokes! Hole? Smoke? Get it?

The atmosphere of the game is awesome so far. It's like playing through the game version of the movie Armageddon, but with the cast encountering evidence of a more advanced alien civilization upon landing on the meteor. Minus the love story, of course. At least, so far.

As much as the story is gripping, the puzzles are as mind-blowing, and not in a good way. There is a puzzle in the first half hour of the game where you press a sequence of buttons on a console to pick up a fallen lens. Sound simple right? Well, you don't know what each of the seven button does. You actually can try them out one by one and just wait for a 10-second cut-scene every time. And after that, you're on your own. You're not even told what exactly to do!

Oooh. What does this button do?

Half a lifetime ago, I used to think that getting stuck in adventure game puzzles are challenges, but now I think they're just tedious things you unfortunately have to get past to proceed with the story.

From that point in the game on, I had a walkthrough site open. Despite the story, I kinda lost interest due to MY need for one. I may have grown out of the adventure game genre, sadly. Still not closing my hatches for this one. Yet.