The Dig

So, light spoilers as I talk about a couple things. The puzzles themselves were pretty bog-standard - find a key, decrypt this, make this shape to see this, etc. A good amount of puzzles were combos of 2 or 3 things together, which I loved - and it made sense every time. However, there will be one particular thing that you will find very early on that, even though IT SHOULD BE SOLVABLE AND THE OVERALL PUZZLE NEEDS IT SOLVED, you cannot solve it. Pieces don’t move right. That was so annoying to go “I guess we just have to imagine we did this step.” I do not know if it worked at one point and just wore over age or what have you, but please fix that in the first room. Please.

Very basic set of “yeah that’s a cave alright.” Various things were just… exposed and clearly unfinished. Rocks that had places to bolt them into the floor just… weren’t. That’s literally 1-2 hours work. It’s lazy to a point of being annoying and distracting, especially when puzzles require things like that in specific places to make sense. You were always aware you were just in a basement in Philly.

Easily the standout. Maybe it’s because my group was essentially a perfect blend of queer, neurodivergent, theatre kid, and Gen Z (look we all played a murder mystery game online together - that just happens) but like genuinely Noiz and Tati were the best GMs I’ve had playing a game period. They clearly cared about us, they were funny and irreverent, and they were on it with hints and knowing where we were in the room. I genuinely cannot praise them enough.

If you can think of what might happen at a dig site that went wrong, you know how it goes.

Less of a story, more of a “here’s a list of things to do”. If we were not told the literal objective going in, I would not be able to tell you what any of it meant nor why when we finished when we finished.

This is a purely linear game. You do one thing, you get the next thing done. We might as well have had the list told to us at the start handed to us. A lot of the objectives are 2 or 3 step things where “using A and B, you can create a code C to plug into thing D”. That I did like - however, with that comes “you miss this thing? Well dang - you better figure it out!” Plus, that one puzzle I keep mentioning really feels like it was made artificially more difficult by being “not completable” vs just having it work as intended. With smart use of your hints, you’ll be fine - just maybe not a 2-3 person room for inexperienced players.

There is two elements of this game that aren’t just lock and key or paper and pencil, and it’s just a couple sensors. You are not coming here for high-tech.

You are going to have to communicate over long distances. We ended up having a chain of 2 people in each of 3 locations at various points, which I think was pretty perfect.

I can’t see anyone getting scared at any point unless you don’t like caves.

Kids at any age can definitely help… but like not really solve it. I cannot see a group of under 13’s solving various puzzles, but with an experienced teen or adult, it’ll be fine.

There’s one particular thing I keep mentioning that was MAYBE broken that was 100% required. If it wasn’t, it feels broken and unfun to play with. If it was, please fix it. Beyond that, everything else felt fine - maybe hide some of the things with completely open backs and bolt down some rocks.

If you can move between rooms, you can do everything. I’d say walking down the stairs to get to the overall place is more physically active.

One puzzle requires color. Other than that one thing, 100% fine.

There are signs leading you from outside to past reception (who will also help) to down the rainbow-lit stairs. You can’t get lost unless you’re trying to.

It’s downtown Philly. There are tons of parking garages surrounding the place within a quarter of a mile. Place itself does not have parking.

We got punk’d