Dark Seed

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