Dark Eye, The

[Discoalucard]

www.hardcoregaming101.net/darkeye/darkeye.htm

This adventure game focuses on the re-telling of a number of Edgar Allen Poe stories. This in itself is pretty cool, but it's got a totally unique, incredibly creepy visual style - most of the characters are puppets, and look pretty damn freaky.

[Warchief Onyx]

"Considered by many to be the first great American writer"

Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper might have a bone to pick with that. Well, if they were still alive.

[Discoalucard]

Those guys were jerks.

[jorpho]

I think this is another one of those troublesome old games that requires some 16-bit version of Quicktime to get running. Why can't everything get the Bad Mojo Redux treatment?

Grammarbitz:
an interview), which is very
an interview), is very

progresses, your characters
progresses, your character

triggers a new story to begin
triggers the beginning of a new story

Red Death," "The Tell-Tale Heart."
Red Death," and "The Tell-Tale Heart."

that involved examine the shape
that involved examining the shape

to replay completed level
to replay completed levels

The game's biggest faults has to do
The game's biggest faults have to do

and the makers of The Dark Eye does an expert
and the makers of The Dark Eye do an expert

[Deleted]

... this has made me lose at least two hours of sleep, guaranteed. Holy christ.

[impr3ssion]

Maybe when I review a Rip Van Winkle game, I'll say that many consider Irving the first great American writer. Still totally true.

Thanks for finding the typos--I pride myself on catching my mistakes, but something always slip by me.

On that screenshot--it's one of the opportunities to soul jump, so her eyes are actually flickering with your reflection, making it even worse. That scenario is among the creepiest in the game, with quite a bit of environmental eeriness.

And I didn't need to do anything special to get the game to run. It ran in a smaller window, but if memory serves it did the same thing 15 years ago when I played it the first time.

[jorpho]

Jan 17, 2011 2:10:35 GMT -5 impr3ssion said:

And I didn't need to do anything special to get the game to run. It ran in a smaller window, but if memory serves it did the same thing 15 years ago when I played it the first time.

Oh. Maybe it's just the ripped versions floating about the Internet that have problems.

You're running XP 32-bit, I suppose?

[impr3ssion]

Jan 17, 2011 9:52:27 GMT -5 jorpho said:

Jan 17, 2011 2:10:35 GMT -5 impr3ssion said:

And I didn't need to do anything special to get the game to run. It ran in a smaller window, but if memory serves it did the same thing 15 years ago when I played it the first time.

Oh. Maybe it's just the ripped versions floating about the Internet that have problems.

You're running XP 32-bit, I suppose?

I tested a copy of the ripped version from Home of the Underdogs in Vista (I know, I know). I don't think I even had to run it in compatibility mode.

[ReyVGM]

I LOOOOVEEE weird art like that. I saw some youtube videos of the game and the wonderful scariness was broken when the characters spoke

[Deleted]

Jan 17, 2011 2:10:35 GMT -5 impr3ssion said:

On that screenshot--it's one of the opportunities to soul jump, so her eyes are actually flickering with your reflection, making it even worse. That scenario is among the creepiest in the game, with quite a bit of environmental eeriness.

I take it that's from the Berenice segment? I saw a vid of it on YT but this part specifically hasn't popped up. Am I looking in the wrong place?



I gotta say, though, that horrible scream at the end really made me jump. :x

[impr3ssion]

It's definitely the Berenice segment, from the killer's point of view. I'd have trouble identifying the individual freaky puppet, but that's definitely the background.

I'm not sure zooming in on her face is necessary to advance, so it may not be in a video.

As for the voice work, I understand not liking it. I thought Burroughs did a great job, but I'm a fan. I thought everyone did at least okay, and for the most part they did very well. I thought the guy doing Montresor was great, and the haunting voices in the Berenice segments... shudder.

[kal]

It's rather sad reading about a game of this calibre and understanding how stagnant the gaming industry is at the moment. I miss games not just in this genre but with decent budgets and amazing creativity in esoteric fields of interest. Indie stuff like The Dream Machine are still pushing it but it's slow going.

God I miss the FMV years no matter how much crap was made there was this huge surge of investment and wonder.

[personman]

This is the kind of stuff that makes me love the adventure genre so much, for the same reasons Kal has already said.

Good stuff.

[Gendo Ikari]

Played it a few years ago. Fantastic atmosphere and design, but as a game... well, it's not even that good if you want to consider it as just an interactive story, what with the confusion of some locations where you don't know where you should face? While the short poem is perfect for a non-interactive scene, the Red Death segment could at least have used some interactivity; as it is, even with those superb drawings, I was tempted to just skip it at some point. Also, the scene transitions and even the puppets' animation in most scenes are often done poorly: along with the pre-rendered backgrounds, I see it as a possibile sign that the developers didn't have so much of a budget and had to resort to cheaper solutions here and there during production.

Still, it is an experiment the likes of which you don't see often.

[spirasen]

The link at the bottom for Gadget: Past as Future is broken.