Dark Seed

One of the better known Adventures from the early 90s, Darkseed features classic horror with the help of well-known Swiss artist H.R. Giger who also designed the monsters for 'Alien' (the movie). Your alter ego has just moved in an old villa in a small village. It was a real bargain! Suddenly, he gets this strange headache which is unbearable without the help of a lot of pills and from the first night in the house on, he gets weird nightmares about..... alien-like creatures.

Of course there's something wrong with this house, but what exactly, you have to uncover yourself. I'll just say that this component of the game (the thrill and the horror-stuff) is its biggest plus! Sure, sometimes it's a bit overdone, but if you don't take it all too seriously, it's really great!

There are quite a lot weaker points in the story though. Why does the protagonist already live in this house which has a severely damaged roof, in which the kitchen is unusable and he apparantely didn't even check out all rooms yet? Why does he always run around naked and why does his skin look like clothes? Or maybe he sleeps in his cloths and also doesn't take them off taking a shower? Why doesn't he talk to people in the village (apart from business-like "I want to buy this")? You have to stand quite a lot of this ridiculous stuff and it sometimes get hard not to get oneself the whole game spoiled!

The game is running with a very typical engine for graphical Adventures. Completely mouse-driven, the cursor alerts the player of important objects, easy choosing of actions - overall very well! Unfortunately, there is one downpoint about this again: Sometimes, you have to search for objects which are no bigger than 2 pixels. How could they??? Is that Sierra or what?

Darkseed is certainly not something for people who want hard, but fair puzzles. There are just too few puzzles on the whole for that, and those aren't too imaginative. What it gets its (limited) difficulty from is the real time. Yes, another of those Adventures in which your time is limited. It's a fair amount of time you have each day (you have to sleep at night, that structures the game), so you don't have to save and restore too much.

On the whole, Darkseed just doesn't make it as a true classic. The game part is simply too weak for that. The horror athmosphere balances some of it out, but again, it's not enough for being really very good for the logical holes mentioned above. Remaining is a decent Adventure with some nice scenes.