Yeah, almost all of the characterization that hit the cutting room floor wound up in the novel and the game is far richer having read the novel. The characters

Yeah, almost all of the characterization that hit the cutting room floor wound up in the novel and the game is far richer having read the novel. The characters do actually make a lot more sense given the descriptions of their thought processes in the novel. 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.