DARK SEED - Cyberdreams - RRP œ34.95 (Amiga) - œ39.99 (PC)

(Icon-driven graphic adventure)

Reviewed on the PC by Neil Shipman

I first appreciated the macabre artwork of H. R. Giger when I saw

the movie Alien way back in the late seventies. This was followed

by a pictorial interview in an early issue of Omni magazine from

which it was possible to take a rather more leisurely look at the

artist's esoteric style. Now comes the chance to view some of his

work from another perspective by way of the game Dark Seed.

Mike Dawson (coincidentally one of the adventure's creators) has

earned enough from his years as Chairman of a large agency to

take time out and do what he has always wanted to do - write. So

that he can concentrate he looks for, and finds, a secluded old

house. But all is obviously not well when, in the introductory

sequence, you see the gruesome sight of an alien embryo being

implanted into his brain!

When the game begins you (playing the part of Mike) have no

knowledge of this and wonder why you wake up from your first

sleep with a splitting headache. You take something for it and

decide upon a bit of exploration before you settle down to put

pen to paper.

You don't get far before the front doorbell rings and you are

presented with a package bearing a doll. Briefly, and to the

accompaniment of wonderfully atmospheric music (which plays

throughout the adventure as do other sound effects and speech),

this takes on an alien appearance. Wandering round the house

reveals a number of interesting things. What, for example, is the

significance of the mirror in the living room and why did the

previous owner appear to have drunk the cellar dry?

Out of doors you can travel as far afield as a cemetery in one

direction and wonder at all the graves and the Tuttle mausoleum.

The local town with its police station, food store and library

can be found in the opposite direction. These locations will give

you some ideas as well as pose further problems.

So far all the action will have taken place in the Normal World

which is displayed in high resolution 16 colour VGA graphics. It

is not until the next day that you are able to view the Dark

World with its equally hi-res, more monochromatic renderings of

Giger's vivid imagery. The contrast between the two distinct

worlds is striking.

All movement takes place in the graphics window which occupies

the top two-thirds of the screen. This is bordered in the Normal

World by heavy Victorian drapes and in the Dark World by

Giger-esque necks and mouths. The bottom third is reserved for

the somewhat stark text output in response to your actions and

other happenings.

Moving the cursor (which can be controlled by mouse, joystick or

keyboard) to the top of the screen shows your inventory and this

always contains a disk icon for accessing the game's controls.

The cursor is intelligent and will change its display when you

cycle through a number of options with the right mouse button.

The interface is intuitive and you will quickly have Mike moving

around, examining and manipulating things.

The adventure takes place against the clock but there is usually

plenty of time to get everything done. Time can be advanced

quickly by pressing the 'T' key and you will almost certainly

want to make use of this feature over the game's three days'

duration.

While much of the gameplay is fairly open it is still essential

to carry out certain tasks on certain days else you will be in

for a particularly gruesome ending without knowing why. It is

useful to save your position before going to bed each night just

in case there is something that you could go back and do on that

day which would allow you to make progress on the next. The

adventure is far too linear in this respect.

A lot of the animation like Mike's climbing, drinking and so on

is very fluid and this has been achieved by using videotape of

live actors. Regrettably, though, the central character needs to

approach some things from just the right direction otherwise he

will spin round on the spot like a whirling dervish or, in

extreme circumstances, take a walk across the other side of a

room and return to his original position! Cyberdreams must

address this problem before their next release.

System requirements on the PC are 14Mb free on your hard disk and

VGA graphics running on a 12MHz 286 at the very least. The game

is also memory hungry and needs 640K RAM with 596K free for AdLib

or Sound Blaster modes or 583K free for PC speaker mode which

doesn't support music. Consequently you may have to eliminate all

memory resident programs. The easiest way of doing so temporarily

is to create a special floppy boot disk with changes made to the

AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files. For this you are referred to

your DOS Manual although fortunately there is excellent customer

support from Cyberdreams.

Even so, it took ages to install and, when playing, to load in

new screens on my 20MHz 386SX. I would put this down to the fact

that there are some 650 separate files and these can get placed

in any clear space on the hard disk during the installation

process. Picking up what is needed to make up a fresh picture can

leave you staring at a blank screen for some time. The secret

would seem to be to play from a newly-compressed or defragmented

hard disk but I must admit to not having tried this. Cyberdreams

tell me this delay is something they have gone some way to

improving in the Amiga version.

But even with its faults, Dark Seed is well worth taking a look

at if only to see some of Giger's work. The artist himself was

consulted during the game's creation and he made many useful

suggestions. His brilliant synthesis between flesh and machine,

producing his well known, unique, biomechanical style, is

wondrously disturbing. The mere thought of it is enough to send

shivers down your spine long after you've finished playing the

adventure.