Re-View: Dark Seed

  If there’s anything that can remain timeless throughout all creative media, it’s atmosphere. Pieces like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Edvard Munch’s The Scream can boast an ability to send shivers down your spine despite being aged, and there are several who claim that certain classic video games are capable of the same. With that in mind, I searched the internet for the scariest classics out there, and one that seemed to have a place in almost every Top Ten list was Dark Seed.

Dark Seed was a point-and-click horror game based on the art of H.R.Giger. Anyone familiar with Giger knows that there are few out there who can do creepy like him; his works often depict the binding of man and machine in a horrifying fusion of agony and malice. Plus, he made Jonathon Davis’ kickass microphone. The game depicts the story of a man who wakes up after dreaming about being the subject of a gruesome alien experiment and who, over the course of 3 days, begins finding that the world of his dream and the waking world share a number of connections. It becomes clear that he is but the final part of a plan by the ancient aliens to cross over into the real world and exterminate the human race, or at least that’s how far I got with the story before the game frustrated me into submission.

Giger’s work is omnipresent here. He worked on the dark world himself, and examples of his work are even dotted around the walls of the protagonist’s house. The issue here is that the game expects Giger’s visuals alone to scare you. One example is that at several points in the game, you see everyday objects shifting between dimensions and temporarily becoming their gruesome alien counterparts. This is good for a few chills, but afterwards your character doesn’t even acknowledge it happening. The first time you exit his house the game remarks that its present state could hint towards a ‘dark future’, and from the very start you can see a villainous alien in the pause screen. Nothing is introduced in a way that develops suspense: we are expected to be terrified by Giger’s contribution alone.

It becomes clear that he is but the final part of a plan by the ancient aliens to cross over into the real world and exterminate the human race, or at least that’s how far I got with the story before the game frustrated me into submission.

The lead character has very little presence at all. He doesn’t speak or have that much of a backstory, presumably for the sake of letting the player project themselves, but because the game’s atmosphere isn’t particularly engaging this is hard to do. Instead, we have a boring character who never reacts to anything going on around him. He’s even happy to walk around Giger’s alien world without changing his stride. In I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, the characters are there to comment on everything. Their fear and characterisation adds to the horror around them and helps to interest and invest the player not just in the storyline but in the evolving mystery at hand. If the main character in a game has no interest in uncovering a mystery involving alien invasions, mechanised monstrosities and grave robbing, then why should we have any investment in them?

One thing Dark Seed isn’t guilty of is the typical point-and-click game sin of making us try every object with every other object. In fact, item interaction is one thing that’s easy to figure out in this game, not that this makes it any less boring or confusing. At many times the game lacks a clear direction, and I often found myself with no idea where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do. I later found out that the game works on an ongoing clock over three days, and you have to tailor your adventure accordingly. Generally this isn’t very limiting: you can do get everything done in the first day with time to spare and still be wherever you need to be for time-specific occurrences. The problem is that, as I said, with little direction to follow you could miss any number of things and never know. Encouraging repeated play-throughs in order to get the best result isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but once this happens Dark Seed degenerated into an exercise in investigating every last blade of grass to see if you missed a valuable clue or item that you won’t be able to go back for, simply so you could do it faster later on.

So, is Dark Seed a timelessly atmospheric horror adventure? No. It’s a bland story with uninteresting characters and sporadically directionless gameplay that just happens to be associated with H.R.Giger. His contribution to the game shows his talents as an artist, and the game had a lot of potential to be more than what it is. But, as Dracula ceases to be scary as a low budget movie interpretation, and The Scream loses its impact after you pass it 50 times in one day, Giger’s art in Dark Seed can only accomplish so much before you realise you’ll have to look for your thrills elsewhere. No one factor can make a game truly timeless, because everything must interact: Atmosphere, writing, visuals and gameplay must go hand in hand to make a truly memorable experience. For people who are easily scared, Dark Seed may well be memorable, but not for me, and not for anyone who’s ever been truly scared by a video game.