• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Darkseed (or: my head hurts)

Tain

Member
Long story short, I got around to starting this game today.

It's an old PC/Amiga/whatever else (Saturn, in Japan, at least) point and click adventure game with art by (or based on concepts of) H. R. Giger.

So far, as an adventure game, it isn't the greatest. The puzzles are dull, the characters are dull, things move along too slowly. Granted, I don't think the shit has even hit the fan yet, and my headache was pretty strong earlier today.

But then we get around to the presentation of the game. God DAMN. It's more than disturbing. Again, it might be the headache talking from earlier, but... The art, the pallette, the mullet protagonist... It feels like this damn game is REAMING MY SOUL.

ds01.png

ds09.png

ds03.png


More pictures: http://www.aitpast.com/games/ds/ds.htm
 
This is an awesome and terrifying game. It has a very neat 'alternate reality' very similar to Silent Hill. And it doesn't just throw away all its secrets and cool stuff at you, you have to look for it. Very hard game because of the time limit, never finished it...

Has anyone played the sequel? Released for PC and PSX in Japan..
 
I played the Mac version of this about a dozen times in college, but I can't find the disc these days. Great game. I wish more people would use Giger for their art design. There was a sequel made, but I never got around to playing it.
 
"Has anyone played the sequel? Released for PC and PSX in Japan.."

and Saturn

I have it lying around somewhere.

Loved the Amiga version , but it hasn't aged well...

totally f*cked up.

Geiger provided the art - that's probably why it looks familiar to a few.
 
I remember being amazed of this game some years ago. Yeah, Giger put the art and the game looked stunning (for me at least).

It was really hard and scary, I wasn´t able to finish it.
 
Tain said:
But then we get around to the presentation of the game. God DAMN. It's more than disturbing. Again, it might be the headache talking from earlier, but... The art, the pallette, the mullet protagonist... It feels like this damn game is REAMING MY SOUL.
Don't worry, I felt the same when the game came out like twelve years ago. Soon you'll have an irresistible urge to take a pocket knife and remove that little, god-awful looking alien that's living inside your brain, but there is nothing wrong with that. I did it and I am posting here.

Oh, and when you finish with that old masterpiece I recomend you to jump straight to play Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Then, come here and talk us about how do you manage to sleep (providing that you haven't died from brain damage or heart attack)
 
This was my first free game (I won it after submitting a character sketch to a local gaming magazine)...came on 5 3'5" floppy disks for the PC, and used a horrid digitised-speech-on-a-pc-without-a-sound-card technique to deliver the speech.

Big thanks to Ozisoft for removing the copy protection on it so they could add their names to the intro! </fuck you Ozisoft>

The only point I wanted to add was that the main character was modelled on the game's programmer. I always like it when people put themselves in their games, as dorky as it may be.
 
There was also a Sega CD version in the works iirc, but it got canned...

Darkseed
-PC/DOS (Cyberdreams) 1992
-Amiga CD-32 (Cyberdreams) 1993
-Sega CD (Vic Tokai) canceled (planned for 1993)
-Mac OS (Cyberdreams) 1995
-Sega Saturn (Gaga) 1995
-PlayStation (Gaga) 1995

Darkseed II
-PC/DOS (Cyberdreams) 1995
-Sega Saturn (Bandai Visual) 1997
-PlayStation (B-Factory) 1997
 
Oh, and when you finish with that old masterpiece I recomend you to jump straight to play Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Then, come here and talk us about how do you manage to sleep (providing that you haven't died from brain damage or heart attack)

Ready and waiting, hah. I might actually finish that one, first. Something about the pallette in Darkseed really gets to me, whereas what I've seen of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (screenshots) seems almost colorful.

Funny thing is, I did wake up at 5 AM today when painkillers wore off, complete with a throbbing headache. Guess what the first thing on my mind was?

Ung.
 
Top Bottom