Dark Seed (Amiga CD32) - A Playguide and Review - by LemonAmiga.com
82Dark Seed is a point and click adventure, produced by Cyberdreams, and converted to the Amiga from the PC in 1992. The atmosphere is rather strange and creepy, with graphics by H.R. Giger. Our main character is suffering from amnesia. But can we figure out what to do?
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Production Notes:
Captured: 24th and 25th March 2021
Narrated: 20th April 2021
Edited: 20th April - 1 Dec 2021
Dark Seed was the second game requested by Kim Lemon as a reward for being a Gold backer. I had always been rather creeped out with the thought of this game as a child, but coming back to this all these years later, it felt pretty harmless. I think the flickery OCS version is enough to put some people off, and the flickery text was definitely off putting to me. The other thing was the SLOW SLEED which this plays at on a PAL machine. Lastly, the small display window. When it came to reviewing this title, by this time I knew about PAL Vs NTSC, and sure enough, this was released as an NTSC game. I found the latest 1.5 crack of the WHDLoad installer, and put the game into NTSC - with an 030! - to hopefully no more slow downs! (I had the same idea with Powerdrome).
Before I started the review, I watched the longplay at least up to the end of the second day. How the player is supposed to figure things out by trial and error and getting stuck is definitely something which went out of fashion by the end of the 1990's. I also watched the Amigos review of the game, before I sat down to play it; where I learned about the time critical aspects of the gameplay.
When I pre-edited the footage, I put in a load of red blocks into the timeline over the bits with voice speed, so that I would be talking around the action and not over the top of it. The narration was done raw and in one take as always, but I didnt do much research on this one beforehand. The footage was recorded fairly late in the series, maybe one of the final games to be captured, so that mean't I had a lot of time to polish up the review over the weeks. Most of the facts were found on the MobyGames web site. The voice narration had two waves of balancing, and moving things around to avoid the ingame speech. The last thing to be added was the Amiga advert for the game. The PC version is online, and is much clearer PC footage, but with the wrong music. It isn't often that there is an Amiga game with an actual Amiga video advert to go along with it. Even though the advert is horrendously compressed, at least it sets up the atmosphere for the review, as without it the review feels rather jolly and not at all creepy.
Danscore:
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Dark Seed was created at a time when Point and Click Adventures were at their zenith. They tried to go the extra mile with the PC version, offering high resolution graphics inspired by artwork by H.R. Giger - something Giger insisted upon. With the Amiga version, the OCS release suffered from using interlace mode, which made the text unreadable. The CD32 version comes with speech, but with downgraded graphics down to 360 x 200, and no attempt to speed up the game on a PAL machine - making it feel sluggish and rather boring. The time critical elements rely on the player at least knowing about the watch, and that means they have to know which pixel is the watch in the first place. All very convoluted stuff. I ran into several dead ends, where you must do things in a certain order, or it's a stuck situation. Things like finding and reading the Diary have to be done on the first day, as reading the Diary triggers the postal guy to appear on day 2. No diary, no delivery.
If this was released at full price today, I'm sure it would be applauded as a great game with lots of details, imagination and depth, and a dark atmosphere. Yet, this is more frustrating than most of those types of games, as the puzzles are almost always not very logical, making quick trips back to a walkthru. There is nothing wrong with the game but it feels a bit wandering. I'd give it at 7 out of 10.