Introduction

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You've seen Alien. You've seen Aliens. You've seen the England rugby team. All of these were inspired by the horrific monster artwork of HR Giger. Greasy cartilage, face-huggers, chest-bursters, telescopic jaws, acid blood - all by-products of HR Giger's paranormal wet dreams. Now you can play a game based completely on all this bio-mechanical codswallop, called, spookily enough, Dark Seed.

You control yuppie sci-fi writer Mike Dawson, who's bought himself a Victorian mansion in the Green Belt village. Bugged by mysterious headaches and dreams, Mike wonders whether it's a bad case of yuppie flu or the deadly alien embryo that the monsters from Gigerworld have implanted in his brain to harbour their plans for world domination. Cleverly, Mikey plumps for the latter, and goes exploring his house and its surroundings for clues on how to stop the three-day gestation period of the alien-brain-thing.

Exploration is possible via the old Sierra-style three-pronged cursor play. One click of the right mouse button gives you a Move icon, next click and it's Examine, and finally it's Manipulate. With this, you can investigate the nookiest crannies of your yuppie household, with its old furniture, wine cellars, balconies and secret passages.

Then you can mooch into town and manipulate the beautiful librarian, the barber and the local rozzers. You can even nip into the cemetery to desecrate a few graves and dig up some stiffs.

A lot of walking and digging around eventually leaves you with an array of apparently useless objects: a pair of gloves, a bottle of scotch and a crowbar. Useful for an evening of illegal sexual activities, but hardly ideal for teleporting to the "other side".

Macca

Dark Seed is a 'lovely' game - it looks great. Until you get into Gigerworld, when everything gets a bit disturbing. But let's forget that for a second. The graphics depart from the usual cartoony or comic styles, plumping for out-and-out realism. So we get pretty paintings instead of locations, a sort of cross between digitised and artworked pictures. Even Mike himself, in his bloody yuppie tweed jackets and yuppie slacks, looks like a real sci-fi Mike, and even gets bigger and smaller as he moves closer and further away. Sounds a bit rudimentary, I know, but to have your moustachioed yuppie hero do this, and to watch him di in and out of such exotic locations is almost stunning.

The danger with producing such a 'lovely' game is that you can go over the top on the 'loveliness' and forget that there has to be a game in there somewhere. Cyberdreams *has* managed to keep the game in there, even though it ends up as a fairly average adventure-puzzle thing. Try these tricky puzzles: a trunk is locked with a rusty bolt and you have a crowbar; a sturdy gargoyle and a roep; a tin of Russian sardines in a shop and some money. There aren't exactly layers of cleverness here. Annoyingly, a few of the puzzles are dependent on what time you do them, which, as Mike Gerrard will tell you, is a pain in the beard.

However, this game has a very rare quality for an adventure game - there's an actual excitement on entering a new room or finding a new object. It sounds a bit perverse, but the smart graphics, the rough realism, and the expectation that a face-hugger might leap out at any moment and suck your face off, keep you going no matter how monotonous the constant to-ing and fro-ing might get.

You can get complacent about arcade adventure games, taking all the lovely graphics for granted. Dark Seed doesn't let really let you. I sat there, blindly trying one object on every other object in every location until it was me who had the mysterious headache. Intentional or not, it's this clever atmosphere that raises it above normal adventure gameplay.

Dark Seed is a fab arcade adventure that succeeds in being both atmospheric and scary at the same time.

Hassle Factor

Occasional long disk access