The story goes, apocryphically, that a lot of the reason games in the NES era had their difficulty jacked up so high was to try and pad out the runtime — and to make sure the game couldn’t be beaten in any sort of rental period. These things were expensive to create and mass-produce, so why not make sure the audience gets their money’s worth by making sure the process of beating the game takes as long as possible? Early adventure games, in particular, feel like they took that idea and fucking ran with it: not only using its trial and error to make the game longer, but by burying every process within several layers of esotericism, writing the margin for error in invisible ink so it can take several hours before you realize you’ve made the game unwinnable, that (in an era before the internet was super widespread/commercially available) you basically needed to also buy the strategy guide if you actually wanted to beat the game. It’s kind of incredible to see it in motion, honestly, some of the straight-up dickish things done in this vein. Having to set things up several hours in advance so that you’re ready once those chickens come home to roost. Needing to go so far off the beaten track to figure out what path you’re even meant to be going down that most walkthroughs will often skip that step and start with the part where you actually progress with the game. Stuff that comes with very little warning, where, if you don’t have the exact answer at that exact moment, you get a game over, and have to go back to a previous save to get the means to prevent that from happening. That is, if you even know what it was that fucked you over in the first place.
Dark Seed, debut effort from developer/publisher Cyberdreams, is rife with this shit. The moment you start the game — after a quick bathroom break to shower and get rid of your monster headache — you must go down to your study, look at the building plans, then knock on the wall to find your house has a secret room which contains… nothing but a rope. You then must take this rope to the attic, push a chest out of the way to access a balcony, tie that rope around the balcony to then… access your own backyard. Pointless now, but two in-game days later you’ll get arrested and game overed if you attempt to leave your house by the front door. You might think you could just wait until the requisite time to do it, but, however, halfway through the game, you get forcibly arrested and sent to jail. You can get out easily, and keep your items along the way, but about 20~ mins later when you’re sent to jail again you’ll lose every item… except for three items you’re allowed to hide under your pillow the first time you’re jailed. You have to pick three specific items: one because it lets you escape the cell, the other two because they’re items you explicitly need to use both before and after you go to jail. If you don’t bring any one of these three items, you get softlocked. If something you still need later gets taken away from you during that moment, you don’t get it back, you get softlocked when you suddenly need it. And you won’t know messed up until it comes time for the reaper to collect. It’s genuinely kinda insidious. You could just wait to pick up that rope until after your adventures in jail, but you do have to go through that room to arbitrarily affect something else later on in the game, and how are you meant to know that ahead of time?
Oh, by the way, the game runs on real-time, a-la a Dead Rising or a Majora’s Mask. You wake up in the morning, and if you’re in the wrong place by bedtime, you fall asleep on the spot and get a game over. You’ve got three days to beat the game. You get to check the time by checking your watch, but, oops, that gets taken away when you go to jail. You will have to meet certain appointments by being in certain places at certain times, lest you miss it, and by doing so miss the related item, and by doing so inevitably resulting in a softlock. Going in, hearing about it, I was like "oh, so I have a set amount of time to beat the game? I hope it shows a bit of mercy about that." As it turns out, that was the least of my problems.
Which, by the way, one last puzzle I just have to talk about: on the second day, you encounter a monster on a bridge you need to cross. The only way to get him out of the way is to throw a stick off the bridge, as — much like a dog — this will cause him to rush for the stick, leaping off the bridge into the abyss. How do you get said stick, by the way? Well, on the first day, you have to buy some scotch at the store, which will then prompt your neighbour to enter the store, giving you his business card and inviting you over to his house tomorrow at six PM. When you make the appointment (which, by the way, if you assume he’ll meet you in your front yard, as opposed to your backyard? he doesn’t come, softlock) you’ll find that his idea of entertainment is making you watch him play fetch with his dog over and over again. This’ll repeat endlessly until you give him the scotch, after which he’ll down the whole bottle in one go and go to bed, leaving you free to grab the one thing (or, well, two: you also need his business card to avoid a softlock) you needed out of all of this. And then you have to do a bunch of shit right after this: getting arrested again, getting out of jail, doing a bunch of things afterwards all while the threat of Mike conking out for the day looms over your head. Legitimately the whole game is just a matter of hitting softlocks, trying to figure out what exactly caused said softlock, then keeping that in your memory bank as you run up against all the other softlocks. Which, admittedly, is a bit typical for the era, but at least its contemporaries are a little less all about that.
And usually, other adventure games from this era have something going on narratively which makes a lot of the… walkthrough-heavy gameplay worth it. Dark Seed... is a bit more give and take. There’s a non-zero amount here that I’m down with: I’m into how generally sparse and empty the areas and atmosphere are, and I also like the general horror concept of the Light World/Dark World — and how, physically, the latter counterparts the former, invoking a little bit of a guessing game as to what’s supposed to be what. I love the H.R Giger artwork, how well it characterizes the Dark World as this unnatural, abberative place that’s almost human yet at the same time absolutely not, the ways this influence seeps and infects parts of the comparatively normal Light World and in general how unsettling it feels to have it all around you: even beyond the time limit, the vibes were so off that whenever I was in the dark world I wanted to speed through what I was doing and get out as soon as possible. Other than that… there doesn’t feel like there’s much here, at least storywise. I like the idea of moving into a seemingly haunted house, discovering notes left by the previous owner and trying to find out what happened to him before it happens to you… but in practice it’s rather undone by the adventure game logic and how much of an idiot you come off as: having bought a completely dilapidated home, with broken windows, drafts in every room, a kitchen you can’t even use... yet is totally surprised at this being the case, apparently never even looking at said house before buying it. He expresses more of a reaction at finding the garage rather messy than he does at going through his living room mirror and entering a H.R Giger nightmare dimension. Barely anything about him is expounded in game — why he’s moved in, what he even does for a living, who he even is besides the fact that the game’s plot is happening to him. Most of his descriptions of what’s happening around him take me out of the experience rather than immerse me further in it, and for a game that’s as heavy on setting a tone, story-wise, as Dark Seed, that’s not particularly amazing. I feel like this game loosely… min-maxed a little, with its style and substance. While it makes good on its promise to let you play around in a H.R Giger artscape, what surrounds this is rather little, and in the end mostly feels rather lacking.
Which, among other problems, ultimately results in Dark Seed... not quite feeling up to par. On the art design side, it’s by and large well done. On most of its other sides, it struggles: gameplay wise it’s an experience in trying to find the one sequence of events that doesn’t end with a softlock/game over, and narratively there isn’t nearly enough there to make up for what you need to do to progress through it. While noteworthy in the context of Cyberdreams’ short stint — this not being their final attempt to bring the work of another artist into the medium of video games — in the broader context of 90s adventure games, Dark Seed... isn’t quite able to compete with some of its counterparts. 3/10.
Dark Seed, debut effort from developer/publisher Cyberdreams, is rife with this shit. The moment you start the game — after a quick bathroom break to shower and get rid of your monster headache — you must go down to your study, look at the building plans, then knock on the wall to find your house has a secret room which contains… nothing but a rope. You then must take this rope to the attic, push a chest out of the way to access a balcony, tie that rope around the balcony to then… access your own backyard. Pointless now, but two in-game days later you’ll get arrested and game overed if you attempt to leave your house by the front door. You might think you could just wait until the requisite time to do it, but, however, halfway through the game, you get forcibly arrested and sent to jail. You can get out easily, and keep your items along the way, but about 20~ mins later when you’re sent to jail again you’ll lose every item… except for three items you’re allowed to hide under your pillow the first time you’re jailed. You have to pick three specific items: one because it lets you escape the cell, the other two because they’re items you explicitly need to use both before and after you go to jail. If you don’t bring any one of these three items, you get softlocked. If something you still need later gets taken away from you during that moment, you don’t get it back, you get softlocked when you suddenly need it. And you won’t know messed up until it comes time for the reaper to collect. It’s genuinely kinda insidious. You could just wait to pick up that rope until after your adventures in jail, but you do have to go through that room to arbitrarily affect something else later on in the game, and how are you meant to know that ahead of time?
Oh, by the way, the game runs on real-time, a-la a Dead Rising or a Majora’s Mask. You wake up in the morning, and if you’re in the wrong place by bedtime, you fall asleep on the spot and get a game over. You’ve got three days to beat the game. You get to check the time by checking your watch, but, oops, that gets taken away when you go to jail. You will have to meet certain appointments by being in certain places at certain times, lest you miss it, and by doing so miss the related item, and by doing so inevitably resulting in a softlock. Going in, hearing about it, I was like "oh, so I have a set amount of time to beat the game? I hope it shows a bit of mercy about that." As it turns out, that was the least of my problems.
Which, by the way, one last puzzle I just have to talk about: on the second day, you encounter a monster on a bridge you need to cross. The only way to get him out of the way is to throw a stick off the bridge, as — much like a dog — this will cause him to rush for the stick, leaping off the bridge into the abyss. How do you get said stick, by the way? Well, on the first day, you have to buy some scotch at the store, which will then prompt your neighbour to enter the store, giving you his business card and inviting you over to his house tomorrow at six PM. When you make the appointment (which, by the way, if you assume he’ll meet you in your front yard, as opposed to your backyard? he doesn’t come, softlock) you’ll find that his idea of entertainment is making you watch him play fetch with his dog over and over again. This’ll repeat endlessly until you give him the scotch, after which he’ll down the whole bottle in one go and go to bed, leaving you free to grab the one thing (or, well, two: you also need his business card to avoid a softlock) you needed out of all of this. And then you have to do a bunch of shit right after this: getting arrested again, getting out of jail, doing a bunch of things afterwards all while the threat of Mike conking out for the day looms over your head. Legitimately the whole game is just a matter of hitting softlocks, trying to figure out what exactly caused said softlock, then keeping that in your memory bank as you run up against all the other softlocks. Which, admittedly, is a bit typical for the era, but at least its contemporaries are a little less all about that.
And usually, other adventure games from this era have something going on narratively which makes a lot of the… walkthrough-heavy gameplay worth it. Dark Seed... is a bit more give and take. There’s a non-zero amount here that I’m down with: I’m into how generally sparse and empty the areas and atmosphere are, and I also like the general horror concept of the Light World/Dark World — and how, physically, the latter counterparts the former, invoking a little bit of a guessing game as to what’s supposed to be what. I love the H.R Giger artwork, how well it characterizes the Dark World as this unnatural, abberative place that’s almost human yet at the same time absolutely not, the ways this influence seeps and infects parts of the comparatively normal Light World and in general how unsettling it feels to have it all around you: even beyond the time limit, the vibes were so off that whenever I was in the dark world I wanted to speed through what I was doing and get out as soon as possible. Other than that… there doesn’t feel like there’s much here, at least storywise. I like the idea of moving into a seemingly haunted house, discovering notes left by the previous owner and trying to find out what happened to him before it happens to you… but in practice it’s rather undone by the adventure game logic and how much of an idiot you come off as: having bought a completely dilapidated home, with broken windows, drafts in every room, a kitchen you can’t even use... yet is totally surprised at this being the case, apparently never even looking at said house before buying it. He expresses more of a reaction at finding the garage rather messy than he does at going through his living room mirror and entering a H.R Giger nightmare dimension. Barely anything about him is expounded in game — why he’s moved in, what he even does for a living, who he even is besides the fact that the game’s plot is happening to him. Most of his descriptions of what’s happening around him take me out of the experience rather than immerse me further in it, and for a game that’s as heavy on setting a tone, story-wise, as Dark Seed, that’s not particularly amazing. I feel like this game loosely… min-maxed a little, with its style and substance. While it makes good on its promise to let you play around in a H.R Giger artscape, what surrounds this is rather little, and in the end mostly feels rather lacking.
Which, among other problems, ultimately results in Dark Seed... not quite feeling up to par. On the art design side, it’s by and large well done. On most of its other sides, it struggles: gameplay wise it’s an experience in trying to find the one sequence of events that doesn’t end with a softlock/game over, and narratively there isn’t nearly enough there to make up for what you need to do to progress through it. While noteworthy in the context of Cyberdreams’ short stint — this not being their final attempt to bring the work of another artist into the medium of video games — in the broader context of 90s adventure games, Dark Seed... isn’t quite able to compete with some of its counterparts. 3/10.