I had no idea this game wasn't beloved. I played it at about the age of 9 and was obsessed. Above all I remember the strangeness of the alien world - for a kid it was incredible.
I furthermore think he's taking that approach because he himself doesn't like the game, which, if you know his tastes, should come as no surprise.
The author's aesthetic for adventure games is that the puzzles have to be fair and solvable without hints. https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/the-14-deadly-sins-of-graphic...
I've argued with him in the past that this attitude closes him off from enjoying games that are pretty good but have a couple of unfair puzzles. (You can see the argument there in a comment thread on that 2015 article, and again recently on his Full Throttle article.)
Thus, the key paragraphs from this article are when he points out that the alien skeleton puzzle is unfair (and, isn't it??) and the "alien control panel" (where you move the lens to the light source by programming a little robot, but there's no hint/clue what you're "supposed" to make the robot do).
I think he's spot on that those puzzles are unfair, but, in his mind, that means the whole game sucks as a game.
His criticism of the acting and plot are a matter of personal aesthetic, but I think I agree with him that Dig's ending is not great, especially when you consider what happens to the NPC five minutes before the ending.
I mostly agree with you, but I would add that deeply illogical puzzles where a much much bigger issue in 1995 than today - when I played The Dig first time around I had no internet access and no means of obtaining help beyond me and a group of school friends trying everything we could think of. As such, I didn't finish The Dig until years later in ScummVM with a walkthrough.
The Dig, Full Throttle and especially Grim Fandango are adventure games I still love, but I can't honestly say I love them as "games". I love the atmosphere, setting and story telling in these LucasArts titles, but find the gameplay in Monkey Island, Day of The Tentacle etc to be much better personally. I'd love to read a Maher piece on Grim Fandango actually!
It seems to me like a lot of the people who liked it the best also had read the novelization, which makes sense -- my biggest problem with the game, and I think Jimmy's as well, is that the characters are mostly ciphers. I'm sure the supplementary material helped fill that in.
In some respects, The Digital Antiquarian's take here on The Dig actually is far weaker for mentioning the novel but not including it in the final review, especially when contrasted with the linked Loom review where the Audio Drama is lauded as being usefully central to the project and the understanding of it.
That said, I'm in the group that read the novel first and found the game worse because of it because you could directly see all the holes of "this thing the novel described is probably a puzzle that got dropped at the last minute" and "this scene in the novel of great importance probably was a cutscene that was cut for time" and so forth.
The Digital Antiquarian rightfully mocks OSC's somewhat hackneyed dialog and it is rare for anyone to wish the Alan Dean Foster dialog on a finished project that ADF did the novelization for (and I say that having loved many ADF novelizations nearly as much as the films), but The Dig is probably high on the list where the novel's dialog was far superior overall to the game's and it showed even beyond the internal monologues and characterization that couldn't make it into the game and/or were cut.
(It's also not exactly a surprise that Maher's coverage of The Dig is a little bit skewed toward the parts of it that an ex-Infocom Imp worked on.)
Agreed that the ending could have been a bit better, but overall the atmosphere and experience of the whole game from the shuttle and asteroid to the alien world were superb. I would love to see a remake of this in the vein of the Monkey Island remakes, perhaps with some tweaks to the ending if that didn't detract from the original.
the strategy guide had a "making of The Dig" section at the end, and now I'm going to have to dig my copy out of storage and compare its portrayal of events with the likely more cohesive and truthful story told here.
I have no idea if the game holds up, but for who I was when I played it, it left a big impression. I thought the ending was really great, although maybe it'd have read as hokey if I'd've had another decade of Sci Fi under my belt.
The fate of the alien civilization revealed at the end still has resonance to me in an age where people are talking about uploading their consciousness or living out the rest of eternity in some Ready Player Two digital-ethereal realm.
It is a neat game though, I agree. It deserves props for introducing me to the word “pulchritudinous”.