Your objective in the game is to discover what the aliens want from you, make sure they get it, and hopefully get safely back to Earth. The aliens desperately want something from the unlucky trio, and the only way to get back to Earth is to give it to them. Everywhere they turn they find evidence of an alien species, which has apparently discovered the secret of immortality and now exists in a ghost-like state. Upon exploring their dangerous new environment, they discover they are not alone. The asteroid transforms into an alien spaceship and the team are transported to a strange and seemingly abandoned planet.

But surprise surprise, things don't quite work out as planned. Their original mission is to blast an asteroid from an unstable orbit around Earth into a stable one. The plot revolves around three characters: your alter ego Commander Boston Low, a NASA veteran in command of geologist Ludger Brink and journalist Maggie Robbins. This game oozes atmosphere from every pixel, with excellent voice-overs, colourful graphics and the promise of the kind of highly addictive gameplay we've come to expect from the ridiculously talented chaps and chapesses at LucasArts. The actual demo version of The Dig is not very extensive, with only a few locations to wander around and a couple of puzzles to solve however, even in the short time it took me to work my way through it I was hooked and got straight on the phone to Virgin demanding to know when the finished version would be ready. I've since decided that if I come across one more game that uses lots of pretty fmv to try and impress me yet fails to deliver the goods in the gameplay department, I shall phone the software house responsible and point it in the direction of the LucasArts team, who will hopefully give the culprits a good talking to and, perhaps, teach them a lesson or two about the ancient art of creating interesting, amusing and playable adventure games.

I've become so used to playing unspeakably crap interactive movies that the prospect of something which actually required me to think was very disorientating indeed. It took me a while to figure it out, but finally I realised what it was: I'd completely forgotten what it was like to play a real adventure game. Avery Strange Feeling Game Over me while I was playing the demo version of The Dig.

Download the dig