You’ve picked a bad day to start sniffing thinner. Exploring the dream world, you find that catching glimpses of your own hideous reflection now transports you across time and space into the souls of other characters, and (conveniently enough) into other storylines. Your relatives live in this insane asylum… you first find your uncle gleefully engaged in his oil painting, when, inhaling too much of his paint thinner, you fall into a trance and enter a dreamlike state. There seems to be no furniture here, and the walls are scribbled everywhere with nondescript handwriting. As a nameless gentlemen out in a field, you find yourself entering a drafty old house. The game doesn’t treat Poe’s stories in an episodic manner, but rather involves a little backdrop narrative weaving his unrelated short works together (quite ingeniously, in fact). The animation is competent but most of it is woefully undone, as evidenced by character movements (or lack thereof) and cemented facial features – even when a pleading Fortunato is entombed alive, he still keeps his petrified grimace on. The voice acting is quite professional but the real chills come from the morbid clay puppets themselves – looking at their dark, hollow, eye-gauged stares it’s easy to see why. Characters in The Dark Eye are hideous, distorted caricatures rendered in stop-motion, an artistic choice that helps push that surreal atmosphere. Familiarizing yourself with these works beforehand can be effective, not only because Poe’s narrative is bone-chilling but also since it helps you understand what the game wants you to do.įirst thing to notice is the visual style. Several of his finest short stories were meaningfully stitched into the game – The Tell-Tale Heart, Berenice and The Cask of Amontillado, and the game plot tying it all borrows elements from such works as The Fall of the House of Usher.
Part of why the drama is so hauntingly effective has to do with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most prolific and wretchedly unfortunate gothic horror writers there ever was. In a certain sense it’s like walking through a dark, twisted version of a Dali or Picasso painting – the imagery is so surreal, the narrative so dreamlike and the characters so twisted that you can’t help but be fascinated by the weirdness around you.
Nothing will jump out of the bushes and scream in your face here, but instead the game panders its more subtle chills through story, evolving characters and a continuous morbid feel.
The Dark Eye isn’t what you might call frightening – nor is it really trying to be – but it most definitely strikes a sensitive chord and instills a sense of dread within the player. Faulty as a game, wonderfully surreal as a story.
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