The linear story and lack of difficulty did not put me off as the experience is one that is so rare in video games - scary in a hugely intelligent in a downright disturbing way. Whether or not this is a bad thing all depends on the player and his expectations, but I found it to be completely absorbing and well put together. Instead, The Dark Eye perhaps most closely resembles an interactive media disc that was very common in the early years of CD-Rom.
There are very few moments that could even be considered as puzzles. The horror is not caused by monsters in the literal sense but in the mental.Īs a game, the interaction is very minimal. Then you transfer into the consciousness of the victim, witnessing every moment, every panicked thought as you are buried alive or worse.
These thoughts attempt to rationalise the nasty things you are about to do. Much like the internal monologues that are very much a part of Poe's prose, you are forced into the shoes of a killer and the paranoid consequences of it. You go through each tale twice, once as the villain and again as the victim, changing characters at by gazing into the eyes of your antagonist. The graphics are mostly rendered in some freakish stop-motion (although some may argue the use of marionettes), their expressionless faces adding to the otherworldly feel. It also takes the time to recite some of his more famous prose and poems in some beautifully realised hidden scenes. Although the wraparound story is a heavily fictionalised biographical account of Poe's life, the main bulk re-tells three of Poe's stories in adventure form The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart and Berenice.
The Dark Eye, thanks in part to the rich source material, is not like this. Even the more subtle of survival horrors rarely delves deeper than what's lurking in the darkness. The skin-crawling psychological horror missing in those 60s B-movies are here in full force with The Dark Eye, a 1995 adventure by Inscape.Ī lot can be said about the history of horror in gaming, but one thing that seems to be universal is that the monstrous jump scare is primarily used to incite fear in the player. While the series of films directed by Roger Corman were pretty good, they are questionable as adaptations. The works of Edgar Allen Poe has never really been translated successfully to other mediums.
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