The Dark Eye (1995)
Genres:Adventure, Puzzle, Point-and-click
Themes:Horror
Game modes:Single player
Story:The Dark Eye is a computer game of the horror genre, released in 1995 for the PC by the now-defunct software company Inscape. Upon its release the game attracted little attention from either critics or consumers, though it has received some attention since and, arguably, cult status.
The game featured combined 3-D graphics, stop motion animation and video segments. With its unconventional interface, storyline, and characters, the game's peculiarity became its selling point. The characters are largely lifelike in appearance except for their clay-modeled faces, which are often distorted or feature grotesquely exaggerated features. This near-realism, sometimes referred to as the uncanny valley, contributed to the game's ambience of unease and anxiety.
The character animation is stop-motion. Inscape did the art design of the puppets (lead artist Bruce Heavin) and had a Hollywood house actually make them. Inscape then hired two stop-motion animators and Russell Lees spent many, many hours in a hot, dark warehouse directing the animations. The working hours were from 7 am to 7 pm for about a month. They created computer-generated screenshots of the environments and shot against blue-screen, and they had a director of photography light them to match the environment.
Also notable was the use of author William S. Burroughs as a voice actor: Burroughs provided not only the voice for the character of Edwin, but also voiceovers of two slide-show sequences illustrating the short story "The Masque of the Red Death" and the poem "Annabel Lee". Another story, "The Premature Burial", can be found while reading the newspaper during "The Tell-Tale Heart", and the poem "To Helen" can be read while playing the victim in "Berenice".
Thomas Dolby composed the game's music.
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Structurally, the game was a point-and-click adventure fueled by the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The player could experience three of the stories ("The Cask of Amontillado", "The Tell-Tale Heart", and "Berenice") from the perspectives of both murderer and victim.
The game presented no choices to make, no life-or-death decisions, and no points; similar to other point-and-click adventures like Myst, the game simply waited for the player to find the next hotspot or location, at which point another video would play to advance the plot. During the portions that were direct interpretations of Poe's stories, the player was constrained to follow the actions of the stories' characters. The player could carry only one item at a time. Much of the animation in The Dark Eye consisted of QuickTime movies, either full-screen or smaller looping segments framed by a static background.
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Vote to bring this game to GOG and help preserve it.1 925
One of my favorite point and clicks of all time. Its Beautiful and strange collection of Edgar Allen Poe short stories. Of all the games on this wishlist I think this one deserves the love of a gog fix up. About the only way I've found to get my original disc copy running is through pcem running windows 3.1 The 98 version has strange bugs and issues. All this to say its a hard game to get running and it deserves a second chance at life for a new generation. You explore a dark and gritty claymation world of short stories held together with a simple but interesting overarching plot in a pseudo hub manor. Is it a perfect game? Far from it. But it inspired me at a young age with rich textures pulled from the master himself Poe. One of the great heart breaks of growing up was realizing my copy no longer worked when we updated pcs. I held onto my copy in hopes it would one day return. I figured out how to play it again but no rereleases or remasters ever came.
If this game gets a gog release I'm shelling out for 4-10 copies to force my friends and family to experience this rough and tumble master piece. I will always love this game and will carry its influences with me. So please gog. If you are able to secure the rights to this little game and perform your pc magic, I will be eternally grateful.
This game has such a wonderful style to it, you really can't go wrong with claymation, and is such a detailed and eerie love letter to Edgar Allen Poe and his works. It's a real treat for fans of one of the spookiest authors of all time, and it had so much love and time poured into it that it's just tragic how hard it is to get nowadays. This game absolutely needs a new light shined on it.
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