Dark Seed

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.