Based on three stories by Edgar Allen Poe - Berenice, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Cask of Amantillado - The Dark Eye is a beautifully crafted horror game by the iconoclastic, but now defunct Infocom. Infocom were, in the mid-90s, the boldest, most inventive games company working in the adventure games genre and The Dark Eye is a perfect demonstration of Infocom at their heady mind-warped best.
The game (though "interactive experience" might be a closer description) is composed of a series of grizzly vignettes played through first as victim, then as executor.
Based on three stories by Edgar Allen Poe - Berenice, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Cask of Amantillado - The Dark Eye is a beautifully crafted horror game by the iconoclastic, but now defunct Infocom. Infocom were, in the mid-90s, the boldest, most inventive games company working in the adventure games genre and The Dark Eye is a perfect demonstration of Infocom at their heady mind-warped best.
The game (though "interactive experience" might be a closer description) is composed of a series of grizzly vignettes played through first as victim, then as executor. If you have read Poe, you might imagine this to be a truly disturbing experience and you would not be far wrong. The three episodes stick very closely to Poe's original stories and capture
perfectly the dark macabre atmosphere that pervades his writing. While I am hesitant to reveal the ghastly minutiae of the three stories, to wet your appetite I will tell you that they include nothing less than schizophrenia, dismemberment, murder, and fine wine; so gamers of a nervous disposition should proceed with caution. The game is incredibly creepy, in no small part due to Infocom's pioneering use of stop-motion animated puppetry. It is this puppetry that lends The Dark Eye its phantasmagorical charm. The puppets are mostly featureless, with grey, sunken faces. Their mouths do not move and they look dispossessed - bereft of souls. The Dark Eye's graphics are some of the most stunning I have ever seen in or outside of the adventure game genre.
Disappointingly, interaction with this incredible world is severely limited and the game is highly linear. The stories are so immersive that one hardly cares, yet it does detract from the experience, especially as the game is so short. Indeed, it is quite easily played through in one sitting. Since The Dark Eye is now only available second-hand at very high prices, I can only enthusiastically recommend it to Poe fanatics and adventure game connoisseurs.
The game also comes with an acceptable reading of two Poe stories by William S Burroughs, though one feels that he is much better at writing stories than he is at reading them. Overall, The Dark Eye is a superb (albeit short) game and a dark, surrealist gem for fans of the horror-adventure game genre.
