Dark Seed II (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
659A complete playthrough of Cyberdreams' 1995 horror graphic adventure for the PC, Dark Seed II.
The gameplay itself isn't really the focus of this game - the focus is more on creating an unsettling feeling deep-down. Unlike Phantasmagoria, Harvester, Sanitarium and other somewhat similar titles, this uses some pretty brilliantly dark art to evoke its sense of horror rather than lurid scenes filled with buckets of CG blood. Of course, that makes sense, given that H. R. Giger's work was used for all the Dark World backdrops. For those that like the graphic stuff, there is some of that too.
It did amuse me that some of the imagery seemed to be directly lifted from Alien (the first area you see in the Dark World where you enter the pillar through the alien's mouth looks almost exactly like the external shots of the derelict craft that the Nostromo crew stumbles into on their way back to Earth in the classic Ridley Scott film), but I'm fine with that - Alien is a visually phenomenal film, and its assets certainly contribute meaningfully here.
The storyline is pretty braindead, despite being penned by an author that would become somewhat successful in the years following. The major plot twist is pretty clearly telegraphed from almost the beginning, and the plot lacks any real narrative substance, and the main character is as unlikable and stagnant an avatar as I've ever experienced in a game. These things don't really hurt the game that much, in my opinion, though - the game was posed to live or die on its visual design, and the presentation conveys the horror more than most modern games could dream of. Somehow it's enough to offset the insipid dialogue, the sheer banality of Mike's whiny delivery of the same dialogue, and the unnecessarily cumbersome mirror mazes.
If anything, the sheer corruption of sexuality incorporated in the art, a Giger hallmark, does wonders for making you cringe in ways that PC games usually can't provoke, let alone a game that was, in all honesty, hopelessly outclassed on a technical level by its peers at its time of release.
In short, I love this game, glaring flaws and all. It's a celebration of the twisted and the macabre, and if you let yourself go with it, you'll find yourself far more absorbed than you thought possible. With Halloween being less than a week away, it's hard to imagine a better game to celebrate :) Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
One side note, apologies for the editing snafu around the 3hr 40min mark. There's about a minute of the video that loops before continuing on that I didn't catch when I originally check the file before uploading. Nothing was lost in the edit, just a mere annoyance :)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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