Review: Escape The Room - The Dig

RATING: 3 Keys RESULT: Win REMAINING: 6:00

Put on your hard hats… it’s time to go to church.

Story

A group of 10 excavators has been called to the deep and harrowing depths of the earth where they’re left in the dark in more ways than one. The Dig is one of our most exhilarating rooms where you’ll have the opportunity to solve a mystery as you make your way to salvation and the upper surface. Can your ideas help light the way out in under 60 minutes?

Ahhh…the quintessential ancient archeological adventure full of danger, darkness, religious lore, and a waning supply of oxygen. What could possibly go wrong?

The combination of this somewhat open-ended backstory and the pictures used to tease the game set us up for what we hoped would be a beautiful story-driven adventure.

However, the actual flow of the game doesn’t end up making total sense within the storyworld.

Scenic

The Dig has three distinctly different room types, each with their own scenic qualities and faults. The adventure begins inside a church complete with a single pew, stained glass, a confessional booth, and a few other areas of interest. The quality of the set pieces here were such that everything looked good from afar but appeared cheaply done upon closer inspection. This initial room was fairly small for the ten people capacity of the game.

After the church revealed it’s much heralded secret, explorers make their way into the actual dig site. Similarly to the church, this room looks decent at first glance but the attention to detail is lacking in ways that pull you out of the experience.

This dig site has plastic rock walls and plastic boulders laying around the room. Now, we’re no experts on ancient underground Jerusalem architecture, but it’s wholly unbelievable that archaeologists would come across molded plastic walls in such a setting.

The dig site gives excavators an opportunity to play around in a little sand and manipulate some equipment that archaeologists may actually use. While the realism fades away under scrutiny, the scenic design is good enough to give a bit of that DaVinci Code feeling.

One addition small room was left to be discovered through the dig site. This room was barely big enough to fit the entire group in, but there is really no need for everyone to be in there at one time anyway.

Much of The Dig is dimly lit. Be prepared to use your phones flashlight if you have trouble seeing in dark spaces. It was a scenic design flaw to not have more built in lighting and to not provide flashlights.

Puzzles

We entered The Dig wanting epic puzzles to match a promising story. We left The Dig underwhelmed at the number, style, and quality of the puzzles we encountered.

There were not many challenges to be solved for such a large game, however several of the puzzles took a long time to complete. The Dig is designed in a way that everyone ends up working on different tasks.

It is also designed in a way that the three rooms are distinctly separated from each other via narrow, turning walkways. We found that the limited number of tasks paired with a large group size resulted in a couple people becoming disengaged with the game.

The nonlinear nature of some of this experience resulted in several members of our team spending most of their time in the Church, a few staying in the dig site, and a few roaming all around. Many of the puzzles are independent of any other task. Unfortunately this led to some people missing out on the highly rated room transition reveal that The Dig is most known for.

Our two biggest gripes revolved around one task. There is a puzzle in the first section of this game that is not needed to successfully advance through the adventure or escape. It is a time consuming slider puzzle that doesn’t really connect to the storyworld. One member of our dig team spent way too much time working on this puzzle and trying to decipher how it tied in to the rest of the game. As is often the case in mediocre games, one really bad puzzle can end up being the most memorable part of the experience.

Overall

The Dig is a fun room with an interesting take on a generic theme. Poor game flow and shoddy set design pulled the overall rating down.

Better designed puzzles that engage the entire group would go a long way here. Actual stone walls and removing cheap thematic pieces would go a VERY long way here. If you are in Philly and the story intrigues you, or were a huge fan of the unpopular “Dig” TV show, you may find some enjoyment playing this game.

Note: This is a full-length game that was born out of a mini-escape experience promoting the USA Network TV show “Dig”. Read our review of that game here: Dig – Escape The Room