Dark Seed


Title		Dark Seed
Game Type	Adventure
Publisher	Cyberdreams
Players		1
Compatibility	All (May require degrader)
HD Installable	Yes
Submission	Kostas

Review
Dark Seed... a unique science fiction horror adventure inspired by H.R
Gigger's work (www.giger.com) the man who also created the series of
Alien, Poltergeist, etc. The game's amazing atmosphere set the standards
for later adventure games and I believe that it's a game worth playing
even in this day and age.

You are Mike Dawson who has a dull job with a company, but his great hope
is to become a successful science fiction author. One day he notices an
advertisement in a newspaper about an old Victorian house being sold. He
buys it believing that it would be the ideal place to write his stories.
But while Mike is asleep some aliens that want to take over the world put
a seed in Mike's head. Mike has 3 days, the length of the seed's
incubation, to save his life and the whole earth from the invaders. He has
to find a way to get to the aliens' world and stop their evil plans.

Dark Seed is a point and click adventure. By pressing the right mouse you
can cycle through your options such as examine, pick up, or use items.
A vital characteristic of the game is that times passes while you
walk,talk, even when you are doing nothing! So, you must hurry a bit if
you want to do all the things that are to be done (you see, Mike wants to
go to bed early). And also the point that makes dark seed a very difficult
game is that you must be at specific places at a specific time. E.g. at
some time you receive an important phone call. If you aren't at home at
that time, you miss the call and you simply can't finish the game!

From the technological point of view the game was a miracle for those
days. Cyberdreams used a real man to perform all Mike's actions and they
put his digitized silhouette in the game!The man that was Mike in game was
named Mike Dawson in real life too, and was the producer of the game! The
game was running in 640X400 resolution(the highest possible for A500) and
for that reason it had only 16 colors. Its package contained 7 disks.

Dark Seed has many locations to explore, and lots of characters to talk
to. You can visit the town and go to the library or the police station,
you can have a look at  your new house (it has secret passages also), go
to the cemetery (one of the best designed locations in my opinion and
quite frightening) and also you have to visit the aliens' world.

I won't reveal the plot and tell you how it is achieved but sooner or
later you will enter the dark world. There you will see Giger's artwork
in drawings of the aliens and their environment. As you keep exploring
you'll notice that the dark world is similar to yours: For each location
and room in your world there is a corresponding one in the other world.

I personally found this game very enjoyable but also very difficult. And
remember when the game was released there wasn't today's access to the
Internet, where you can find a solution whenever you want, only if a
magazine decided to print one. You had to try again and again on your own to
complete it. For the last time I'll mention the game's atmosphere: Dark
and gloomy and no blood and guts. Just like the novels of H. P. Lovecraft.
A must game :)

NOTE
There is also a CD32 version of Dark Seed, but it does not use the
interlace graphics of the original, nor does it work with a mouse, it's
joypad only. There is 'Talkie' dailogue however.




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