Dark Seed

The Good
As you'd expect from a game with name of a world-renowned artist situated front and center, this game is visually wonderful. The eerie, disturbing, fascinating nature of Geiger's work is lovingly rendered despite the limitations of the PC hardware of this game's day. If this game doesn't make you think of the Alien movies, you've never seen them. It's gorgeous.

The Bad
The game play is much more problematical, in two basic ways.

First, this is a point-and-click adventure of the most frustrating kind. You will make no progress unless you patiently and painstakingly move the mouse over every pixel of every screen. If this style frustrates you, you will quickly grow to hate this game.

Second, the overall setup of the game is unusual. The game will last exactly three game days, and time is rigidly accounted for. The only way to win the game is to figure out exactly what your character must do in exactly what sequence at what times each day. If you don't realize this, or again if this is not fun for you, you will hate this game. OTOH, I must admit that the idea is very innovative, and hasn't been done many times since; the other case I can think of is a console game and nowhere near as deep.

The Bottom Line
A landmark game in many ways, and really worthy of the artist's name it bears. But for many players, it will be an exercise in frustration to actually play it.

The Good
Graphics by HR Giger, always cool. Probably one of the most challenging "puzzle adventure" games I have played. Actions and events are time sequenced, meaning that certain actions must be performed at exactly the right time. Just installed recently on an old PC, fun to go back and play the games I did when I was younger.

The Bad
Several programming glitches, game is notorious for crashing and/or restarting during certain game sequences. After installing the software on more than one machine, I have learned that the software is extremely sensitive to the setup of your computer-must almost be exactly right.-for help email me at [email protected].

The Bottom Line
If you are into early science-fiction games then this is for you. I bet you look though a walkthrough guide before solving.

The Good
The game's main inspiration, focus, and selling point is obviously H. R. Giger's surreal art. The development process was largely centered around researching the Swiss designer's library and incorporating it into a video game world, which definitely payed off. Taking advantage of the quick advancement of PC technology at the time, Cyberdreams managed to create an impressive audiovisual experience with detailed backgrounds, high resolution, and full voice acting.

The premise of a dark and intense adventure where you have to prevent some kind of mysterious creatures from a parallel universe from invading both your mind and our entire world is also very intriguing. While rooted more in the tradition of Lovecraftian horror than in Giger's unique biomechanical surrealism, it's still a really good starting point for a point-and-click adventure.

The Bad
Unfortunately, the finished story is... well, not necessarily finished. While obviously some aspects of it are purposefully left vague for the sake of mystery, some others are either too simplified or too confusing for the whole thing to really work. The ending feels rushed as well, leaving a sense of dissatisfaction.

On top of that, Dark Seed simply isn't designed too well as an adventure game. The sins of unintuitive puzzles and arbitrary solutions common in games from the late '80s and early '90s are made much, much worse by both adding a time limit and allowing the players to softlock themselves in some situations. As a result, the overall experience is more repetitive and frustrating than in other point-and-click games from the time.

The Bottom Line
Playing Dark Seed definitely feels as if the designers were so focused on their overall concept, technical aspects of the game, and getting the permission to use Giger's brilliant artwork that they simply forgot to make a properly developed, well-rounded adventure game. 4/10

The Good
Some of the graphics were nice. The story was great. I liked the fact that the horror revealed itself over several days of game time (like Infogrames' excellent horror adventure, Shadow of the Comet). There were some atmospheric custscenes involving horrific dreams. Alien embryos being implanted in human heads. That kind of thing. I liked the way the game's title melted into being on the opening screen.

The Bad
The game design was awful. You remember those old games where, if you didn't pick up a certain object early on in the game, you'd be screwed later on, stuck in some location where you needed it, and unable to get back? Future Wars did that in 1989, but managed to get away with it (just about) because there weren't many 3rd-person-perspective point-and-click adventures at the time, and it actually was a good game (apart from that). Games over the next couple of years learned from these mistakes. LucasArts, through clever design of their games, totally did away with any kind of horrible flaw like that.

Have you guessed it yet? Darkseed suffers from this problem. Only worse than in any other game I've ever seen. Here's a good example. This example also includes disappearing objects!:
If you don't buy a bottle of whisky from the local store, the first time you go in there, then the item disappears. That's right - No more whisky. What happened to it? Did someone buy it? I guess so. You may have gone in the store and not even seen the whisky. Too bad, sucker! And you don't even need the whisky until right near the end of the game. If you didn't pick it up, you are seriously screwed. If you're lucky, you might have an old savegame left to go back to. If not, then you have no option but to restart the game. It doesn't even make much difference, because it was one of the first things you had to do.

Here's another example. This example also includes insane pixel hunting!:
This is the now infamous 'bobby pin' situation, a perfect example to game designers of how not to do things. There is a location in the game. It is the library. Lying on the floor, somewhere on its checkered, moodily reduced-palette surface, is a bobby pin. You don't know that. You have no reason to suspect that it is there. But it is there. And it's about 3 pixels long! Without intensive mouse-scraping of every milimetre of the screen, you won't find it. And without it, you'll find yourself (much later in the game) stuck in an alien prison cell, with no way of getting out. Lame does not even begin to describe this.

For my third and final example, I will use a situation that also includes Time!:
As I said, I liked the way the game was set over several days. That's nice, plotwise. But Darkseed also has a clock running. And certain things have to be done at certain times. Otherwise (guess what?) you're screwed! On the first day of the game, you meet some guy in town who says something about meeting him later for some friendly chat. If you're not there at the exact right time to play catch with his dog, then you miss out on getting his stupid dog's stupid stick, so you can chuck it to the big mutant dog, later in the game, so the big mutant dog will jump down into the big stupid abyss, so you can pass through, into another stupid location.

Get the picture? Good. Darkseed is one of the worst adventure games ever made.

Add to this some other facts: Like the way H.R. Giger's much talked about artwork is used in a really stupid way. You see, the Giger-y world is a mirror of our own world. A dark, twisted parallel version, actually accessed through a mirror in your character's old Gothic mansion. Every real-world location has a dark world equivalent. So a real tree has its equivalent stupid-mutant-head-on-a-biomechanical-stick. Giger's work looks good at times, but also really dumb at other times. Some of it looks pitifully cut-and-paste, composed as it is of bits of existing Giger pictures. The real-world section of the game is actually a lot more atmospheric and much better looking.

The 'characters' in the game have no character, and only have a couple of lines to say. The music is bad and the few lines of digitised speech are woodenly delivered and poorly recorded. I can't believe there's a section in the hint guide (which I am so glad was included free with my copy of the game) which has more info on the 'personalities' of these non-entities.

It also seems astonishingly egotistical that the game's lead designer (Mike Dawson) has allowed himself to be digitised and placed in the game as the player character (Mike Dawson). As if it wasn't torture enough to play this guy's game, I now also have to play him. The only consolation is that if you lose, then an alien pops out of his head, and he dies. But it's not much of a consolation. You're even forced to adopt Mr. Dawson's horrendous 'mullet' haircut.

The Bottom Line
This game is complete crap.

The Good
Firstly, I liked the games story and idea: You are writer named Mike Dawson, who have just purchased old Victorian house from Woodland Hills. Mike just wants peace and quiet, for writing. But first day in the new house something happens; Mike dreams that aliens are implanting something to his head. And on next morning, he wakes up with terrible headache. You have 3 days to solve mystery. Also, graphics are good for old game like this. Sounds are excellent. There is also excellent voice actors! And i cant say anything bad about playing. You gonna enjoy this game!!! Game is not hard, but puzzle game, that needs a bit a skill<br><br>**The Bad**<br>If you do something wrong, or miss something, the game could require you to start game from beginning.<br><br>**The Bottom Line**<br>Its great fun for hours!!!