Hey everyone, PushingUpRoses here, and today we are talking about Dark Seed!
Ooh yes, we are talkin' Mike Dawson, HR Giger, phalluses and mean headaches!
I don't know how we got to this point.
I vaguely remember... a video?
Yes, I watched a video as a younger Roses! And it was on GameTrailers!
Ah, it's all coming back to me now!
I found Dark Seed on a Top Ten Scariest Games of All Time list. It placed at #7!
That's how Dark Seed came into my life...
... through a lie! This game isn't scary at all, what were you thinking GameTrailers?!
Dark Seed is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Cyberdreams
and released in 1992 on an abundance of platforms,
but of course I played the DOS version because DOS is BOSS.
Let's get the good stuff out of the way first, shall we?
The artwork for this game was done by HR Giger, whose designs can be seen in the Alien films,
and also has inspired many, many tattoo artists everywhere with his biomechanical art style.
It was also one of the first adventure games to utilize high-resolution graphics,
which apparently was demanded by Giger himself.
Hey, I don't blame him there, it's his artwork on display for everyone to see
and he doesn't want it to look like dogshit. I gotcha.
And also, would you really wanna piss off the person who created this? That's fucked up.
Alright, that's all the good stuff, now we'll move on to everything else.
You play as average guy Mike Dawson, based off the game's designer... Mike Dawson.
Middle name "Humble".
He decided to purchase this mansion which resides in a relatively secluded area next to a small town,
and of course he never took the time to explore it!
What is up with these video game characters buying mansions without even looking at them first?!
The same thing happened in Phantasmagoria, and look how well that turned out.
Anyway, on his first night of staying in this shithole of a bad investment,
Mike has a nightmare in which a weird looking apparatus shoots an alien embryo into his brain.
Yep, it's aliens.
I like how excruciating this looks, you can almost hear Mike yelling:
"FUUUUUCCCKK!!"
Mike wakes up the next morning with a... MIKE: "... monster headache!"
and that is when you take control of this mustachioed stud.
You cannot do ANYTHING until you fix this headache.
He will just keep talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking,
until you go to the bathroom and take a painkiller.
You see, that nightmare you had? Not just a nightmare, my friend.
You have actually been injected with an alien embryo.
It's in your head, growing, developing,
evolving into a cute lil' alien bebeh!
And the only thing that can combat the pain of brain pregnancy is apparently aspirin.
After taking a steamy shower...
[ 🎜 Saxophone music 🎝 ]
Mike dons his one and only piece of clothing: A mustard-colored suit jacket with some jeans.
And then you are free to explore your new home.
The gameplay consists of finding information about the mansion's former owner,
because apparently something had happened to him and he had left clues all over the estate.
The plot can be a little difficult to understand, especially when you're on an extremely challenging time restraint,
and there's this horrible music buzzing in your ear the whole time.
[ 🎜 Constant high-pitched dinging 🎝 ]
I can see why Mike Dawson needed an aspirin now.
Alien-like beings known as the Ancients live in a parallel universe called the Dark World,
accessible through this mirror in your living room.
While in the Dark World, you meet a friendly alien who tells you that
yes, your brain has been infected by what they call the Dark Seed,
and if it continues to develop, it will kill you and basically the entire world along with it!
I have no idea how it will kill all of humanity, but y'know... aliens.
She advises you to cut the aliens' power source, which is the only way to stop them.
Again, I have no idea why this is the only way to stop them, but y'know... aliens!
You have three days to figure out how to do this,
and each day requires very precise choice making to move the game along.
It is relentless and shows no mercy,
there are so many ways to fuck up or find yourself in an unwinnable state,
and you know what, there's really no way to know what to do!
To beat this without a walkthrough, you would just need to keep playing over...
and over, and over... and over again!
This is a game that requires you to be in certain places at certain times,
and if you aren't, there's no way to correct it.
And there's really no way to know what you missed or what you did wrong.
There are some minor hints given to you throughout the game if you pay attention.
Sometimes the friendly Dark Worlder, also known as the Keeper of the Scrolls,
will drop you cryptic hints to the best of her ability.
For example, here she is sending you a message from the Dark World through a car radio.
There are not many characters in this game.
There's the librarian who helps you check out a book, and...
I am sorry, what is wrong with her jaw?!
I'm not trying to be rude here, but her mouth is all wonky!
And also, am I to believe that this person is the same as this person?
I'm not buyin' it, game! I'm not buyin' it.
There's also your neighbor, Delbert - no, not Dilbert, Delbert.
He really only wants scotch though, and he doesn't offer much interaction.
Okay, well, thanks for letting me watch you toss a stick to your dog, it was a great 10 seconds, see ya later.
Other than those two characters, it's pretty lonely.
You're telling me this hunk o' burning love doesn't have a girlfriend? The hell you say!
There also isn't a lot of setting, there's really only a few places of interest.
Even the mansion isn't that big in terms of number of rooms or things you can do.
There's a barbershop in the middle of town that you can't go in,
there's Klug's market where the clerk is washing the same spot on the counter for all eternity,
(I think he might be an alien.)
the library, and the cemetery where you get to do some body snatchin'.
But seriously, remember I said that the previous owner dropped clues around the estate?
Well he took one of the clues to be buried with his body, and he did it on purpose!
Does that mean he expected someone to dig up his grave to find it, or...
It's, uh, it's a little weird, buddy. It's a little weird.
The most hoppin' spot is of course the Dark World, which, as I said before, is a parallel universe.
The map of the Dark World is almost the same as the real world, except there are way more pulsing penises.
There's also this cute lil' guy! Aw, lookit him, lookit the lil' cutie!
Good boy! Good boy! Go fetch the stick!
[slide whistle]
[ SPLAT! ]
Shit.
My favorite thing about this game is Mike Dawson's insanely simple observations about his surroundings.
What a quaint little barbershop that I'll never be able to go into!
What a quaint little bathroom, where I keep my alien embryo narcotics!
What a quaint little prison with a little bit of everything for horrible living conditions!
He doesn't even mention anything about the Dark World, or the alien embryo in his head,
or being in a crazy amount of danger!
He just... does whatever he does, with the most nonchalant attitude.
Welp, this looks incredibly dangerous and I may die, but you can't make an omelette without breakin' some eggs.
Brain eggs...
This game had such potential, it's a very intriguing-looking game,
it does have a wonderfully creepy atmosphere and I like the concept of the parallel universe and the evil aliens,
but there's barely any story here! There's a main idea, but there is no narrative!
You know literally nothing about the aliens or why they're evil, or why they chose you to destroy humanity...
Hell, even Mike himself is way underdeveloped!
It just comes off as elementary, and the puzzles are so unrelenting it's a challenge to be engaged.
The game is extremely short if you play it with a walkthrough, about an hour,
and that's because there just isn't any dialogue or story to listen to.
You just... do stuff!
As I said earlier, GameTrailers named Dark Seed as one of the Top 10 Scariest Games of All Time back in 2006,
and that just baffles me! This is NOT a frightening game.
It's at most a little eerie, but I never felt scared playing it.
The only scary thing about this game is the potential to go batshit crazy after playing it for too long!
[ 🎜 The dinging does not stop 🎝 ]
There was actually a rumor that designer Mike Dawson did have a mental breakdown after the completion of this game,
but that is just an urban legend. The real Mike Dawson is actually really cool!
After Dark Seed he did some television work, including writing a few episodes of Family Matters,
and went on to write programming books.
He currently teaches game design classes and programming classes at Stanford and UCLA.
Not bad, Dawson! Not bad at all.
Now, even though I did rag on this game pretty heavily, and I do stand by my convictions,
there is still something extremely appealing about Dark Seed.
Just something about the artwork and the concept... I just like it!
My affections for this game may be seeded - SEEDED! - in pop culture, though.
Dark Seed has definitely become prime riffing fodder, and has been let's played by many gamers on Youtube,
including me! Yep, I played through this game with PeanutButterGamer a couple years ago.
So despite this game being overly difficult and not the most engaging,
there's still something about it that draws people in.
We wouldn't be talking about it if the game was just not worth it,
and at the very least, it isn't Dark Seed 2! That's a topic for another day.
With a little more finesse this game could have been way more enchanting,
but at the same time, I wouldn't change it.
Keep on keepin' on, Dark Seed. You just do you.
Hey everyone, thanks for watching my video on Dark Seed,
hopefully it didn't leave you with a monster headache!
If you want to see a playthrough on this game, I linked one I did with PBG in the annotations,
and if you wanna keep up with me on social media, you know the drill, you see the buttons there.
I hope you enjoyed the last two months of spooky games for Halloween,
check those out if you haven't seen them, and as always, I'll see you guys in the next one!