The Dig



The Dig is a Science Fiction graphical Adventure Game developed by Lucas Arts, released in 1995 and based on an idea originally pitched by Steven Spielberg. Unlike other wackier adventure games by Lucas Arts, this one had a much more serious tone, in addition to fitting in the "Hard" category of the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.

The game starts when an asteroid appears, seemingly out of nowhere, on a collision course with Earth. NASA sends a shuttle mission to the asteroid to plant nuclear charges in the hopes of deflecting it into a more stable orbit. The mission is an apparent success, but on a standard EVA to survey the "new moon", the astronauts discover that in reality, the asteroid is an artifact manufactured by intelligent beings, and inadvertently activate a device that transforms it into a starship, whisking them off to a distant star system in the blink of an eye.

The three astronauts who make the journey: The Stoic Commander Boston Low, Omnidisciplinary Scientist Dr. Ludger Brink and Investigative Journalist Maggie Robbins, find themselves on an alien planet, littered with the ruins of an ancient civilization, with no apparent way to get back home. They must find a way to survive both the hostile alien environment and their own interpersonal conflicts while searching for a clue to the fate of the planet's original inhabitants.

There is a novelization, written by Alan Dean Foster, which was included in the box with some releases of the game. However, if you're getting the game these days, it's more likely that you'll be getting the game without a box of any kind, since today it is sold by Lucas Arts on Steam.

"Cora: Yeah, yeah, Boston, I'm on you. Cora and Boston (together): You wish... in your dreams. (They laugh)"
 * Alien Geometries: Judging from their architecture and machinery design, the Cocytans are very fond of the 5 Platonic solids, see Sinister Geometry below.
 * Alien Sky: The planet's two suns and two moons.
 * Aliens Speaking English: First averted, later Translation Convention is used and then played straight.
 * All There in the Manual: The novelization provides a ton of background information, to the point where it's required reading to really understand everything that's going on in the game, despite occasional minor inconsistencies. One of the more obvious ones is the name that Brink gives to the planet, "Cocytus", which is never mentioned in the game.
 * Almost-Dead Guy:
 * Already Undone for You: Averted at first with Maggie in the library, then later played straight with Brink.
 * Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: What happened to the original inhabitants of Cocytus.
 * Beautiful Void
 * Bittersweet Ending: Depending on the choices you make. The best ending baits the player with this before flipping it over to Happily Ever After.
 * Broken Aesop:
 * Came Back Wrong:.
 * Call a Smeerp a Rabbit: We have "rats", "turtles", "dogs", "birds", "bats", "spiders". Low even lampshades it by remarking how the bats on Cocytus have evolved to be just as disgusting as the bats on Earth.
 * Colony Drop: The threat of this provides the initial Call to Adventure for the story. The novelization gives more information about it but leaves unanswered the question of whether the asteroid really would have hit Earth if nobody had come up to stop it. One assumes it simply moves on to the next likely planet; otherwise the Cocytans are implied genocidal mass murderers on a galactic scale.
 * Compilation Rerelease
 * Deadpan Snarker: Low, most of the time, except when his frustration boils over.
 * Death Is Cheap: Especially when you can be quickly and easily resurrected by "life crystals"...
 * Disney Death:
 * One of the earlier versions that never got released averted this hard. Instead of the first death among the astronaut crew being, it happened when a Japanese astronaut tried to cross the hard, encrusted top layer of a suspiciously steaming lake. He broke through into the acid pool below, thrashed his way to the other side while literally melting to death, and ended up a bloody skeleton on the other side of the acid lake. In full view of the other three astronauts. Naturally, this was the version that introduced the Hand in the Hole puzzle.
 * Disney Villain Death:
 * Dronejam: "Robbins: never mind."
 * Drugs Are Bad: Ludger Brink and the life crystals, 'nuff said.
 * Eldritch Abomination: The giant "spiders".
 * Fish Out of Water: Guess who?
 * Foreshadowing: During the mission to the asteroid early in the game, Low can speak to the rest of his crew and hear things like "For all we know, Attila (the asteroid) could be a giant bubble." and "It could be a trap. Why? To catch some mice?"
 * For Science!: The reason Brink gives for wanting the crystals. He explicitly with these exact words.
 * Freudian Trio: Low, of course, is the leader archetype; Robbins is the id; and Brink is the superego. Played almost perfectly straight until Brink.
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: The first time you hail Cora during the shuttle mission:


 * Helps establish that these two astronauts know each other very well, but not in that way.
 * Ghost Planet
 * Gone Horribly Right: What happened to the Cocytans.
 * Green Rocks: The "life" crystals.
 * Hand in the Hole: Yeah right. Like I'm going to stick my hand in some crack in the rock on an alien planet. ...Brink, you dope!!!
 * Hard Light: The "light" bridges. Lampshaded amid a Hurricane of Puns by Low and Maggie.
 * His Name Is: Subverted. When Maggie, she is about to reveal . However,.
 * Humans Are the Real Monsters: Played with. The Cocytans invite humans to come visit and study. Maggie warns the Cocytans that not all humans are as nice as them. The Cocytans just laugh it off, saying all young species are like that and if any human tries to pick a fight they can just squash them like bugs.
 * Humans Are Special: A strong will is apparently the defining trait of humanity. That and they lack the "blind spot" that the Cocytans have in Spacetime Six.
 * Human Popsicle: Not human but
 * Insane Equals Violent:
 * Insufferable Genius: Brink, even before.
 * I Can't Use These Things Together: Trope Namers.
 * Kill It with Water: Not so much the water itself but
 * Late to the Party: The Earth astronauts missed the Cocytans by a undefined length of time that's at least a few thousand years, and they are far from the first to judge by the collection of abandoned rusting spacecraft they encounter.
 * Let's Split Up, Gang!
 * Justified Trope by Maggie when she argues that since, sticking together isn't necessarily any safer, and that therefore logically they are twice as likely to find the answers they're looking for by splitting up. It seems to pay off at first, when Maggie discovers the Library through means which could have killed Boston had he followed along, but.
 * Lost Technology: From the protagonists' point of view, certainly. Once, everything gets fixed up pretty quickly.
 * Love Interests: Maggie and Low.
 * Mini Game: "The Eagle has landed!" Well, at least it justifies the PDA being a PDA, not just a portable videophone.
 * Mr. Exposition:
 * Multiple Endings: The game has a few extra scenes in the end depending on whether or not.
 * No Biochemical Barriers: Averted with regards to food, as the humans debate and ultimately decide against trying to eat any of the plant or animal life they encounter. Fortunately (or not), starvation ends up being the least of their worries, although the game was originally supposed to have an additional survival mechanic where the player would have to keep searching for food to stay alive. The life crystals, on the other hand, are explicitly stated to work on almost any organic—and some inorganic—systems.
 * Also played straight with Cocytus' atmosphere, although the humans first use their suits to check if the atmosphere is breathable, concluding that it's "at least as breathable as the air in L.A.". Low also mentions the possibility of airborne infectious agents, but Brink shrugs it off by assuming that they haven't evolved to take advantage of their cellular structures.
 * Novelization: There are several differences between the game and the novelization, such as the state of the alien ship. In the game, it simply disappears after bringing the trio to Cocytus (which is also only named in the book). In the novel, the ship becomes inactive. When, they . There is also considerably more going on between Low and Maggie in the book, which ends with them kissing. In the game, she either slaps or hugs Low (depending on player choices).
 * Omniglot: Maggie, with the assistance of an Upgrade Artifact (the library teaching device), manages to become passably fluent in Cocytan in a matter of hours. It's said in her Backstory that she's "good with languages", being an Intrepid Reporter. It's also justified in that the language was deliberately tailored to be easy for newcomers to learn. That Maggie learns to speak it perfectly by merely reading it for a few hours is still a stretch.
 * Our Ghosts Are Different:
 * Out of Continues: Implied; the Alien Inventor exposits that the life crystals can't be used an infinite amount of times, and their effect wears off gradually with each use, until they fail to resurrect the target at all. This is never actually seen in the game proper, however.
 * Pixel Hunt: The programmers went out of their way to make the game pretty. They were decidedly lax on making it obvious which parts were objects that can be interacted with.
 * Plotline Death:.
 * Recycled Set: Several of the cave locations reuse locations from the caves you wander in the darkness through in Loom down to the last ledge and stalagmite, just with a graphical update and in a different order.
 * Redemption Equals Death:
 * Saharan Shipwreck: Of the crashed-alien-starship kind.
 * Scenery Porn: And how! Entire gorgeous multi-screen rooms filled with... a door... or maybe that little stick that you have to pick up. And nothing else that you can even examine. But very pretty visuals nonetheless.
 * Science Is Bad:
 * Seen It All: Low is a Type 2 in the novelization, explaining why he is The Stoic.
 * Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Brink when distracting the giant "spider". Lampshaded by Low, who is briefly distracted from the rescue by trying to figure out what Brink just said.
 * Set Right What Once Went Wrong
 * Shown Their Work: You might think that all the Spacetime Six stuff is pulled straight out of the writer's ass. You'd be wrong.
 * Sinister Geometry: The starship that takes the astronauts to Cocytus is shaped as a crystal dodecahedron.
 * Starfish Aliens
 * The Stoic: Boston Low. Lampshaded several times by the other characters.
 * Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Cocytans, of course.
 * They Called Me Mad: How Mad Scientist Brink deflects the accusation.
 * Trapped in Another World: The astronauts.
 * Who Wants to Live Forever?
 * Who Wants to Live Forever?