Oh no. It's The Dig! I might play this with liberal guide usage so I can enjoy the production values while bypassing all the 'it's alien tech, of course it doesn't make any sense!' puzzles.
-
I started on The Dig. The opening is actually not as strong as I remembered it! The FMV cutscenes are high-budget but are aiming for realism which unfortunately means they're hidden behind a dense layer of artefacting, and the relatively clean character close-ups are blandly designed to the point of ugliness.
Into the game, you start off placing nuclear explosives on a giant asteroid, which should be a tense, exciting start but is dragged down by player/character dissonance, where I'm having to work out stuff the character already knows, by examining and using everything in sight, and a lot of busywork. I think it's supposed to be grounded and deliberate, but instead it's just a bit frustrating. Anyway, after doing two bomb-placings, two radio calls, five diggings, three panel-pushings and a ridiculously easy alien jigsaw puzzle, we're off to the alien planet!
A couple more notes: the dialogue is clunky DTV crap (co-written by Orson Scott Card, apparently, who helped with the Monkey Island insults, and also is a massive bigot); the interface is an early example of the stripped down examine/use two-verb approach.
-
Walking around the planet is more effective. The in-engine art is a lot more attractive, even if it's not as striking as a DOTT or a BASS, and the game effectively conveys the mix of excitement and trepidation as you wander round yanking at everything you can while rat creatures scurry past, holograms crackle to life and your team-mates rumble mutinously. On the other hand, it's (intentionally) aimless, with the only goal being 'get home' and nowhere to start, and my inventory is already filling up with unidentifiable alien doodads.
Also, if you're going to have a two-verb system, at least make sure your examine dialogue is full-bodied, not just copied from the interact response or a generic "Hmmm."
-
Okay, that didn't last for long. Brink died, which is pretty cool, but then Maggie leaves and you're left in a massive hub full of alien locks and alien control panels that you're supposed to just kind of fumble your way towards a solution for. I haven't actually played Myst, but I feel like this game wants to be Myst.
-Finished it, mostly with a guide. It's a pretty terrible game. A bunch of different art styles slapped together, many of them ugly. Crappy dialogue and story. And awful puzzles - either alien tech that you have to brute force your way through, or bog-standard yet terribly signposted adventure game fare. Plus all the usual adventure design missteps like expecting the player to wander around the huge map just to spot the one thing that changed, or having the player-character (or even the UI) figure something out that the player hasn't. "Hmm, looks like a crypt", says Low as he enters a room just as random and unidentifiable as any of the others. You really can tell they were just trying to get this out of the door to save George the embarrassment of his friend's game getting cancelled.
Rating: Red.
No comments:
Post a Comment