The Dark Eye

The Dark Eye is a computer game from the horror genre, released in 1995 for the PC by the now-defunct software company Inscape. When it was released, the game wasn't noticed by critics or consumers, although since then it has gained some attention and probably cult status. The game combined 3D graphics, stop-motion animation and video segments. With its unconventional user interface, storyline and characters, the game's distinctiveness became its selling point. The characters look largely lifelike, except for their faces modeled from clay, which are often distorted or have grotesquely exaggerated features. This near-realism, sometimes referred to as the "uncanny valley", contributed to the game's uneasy and frightening atmosphere. The animation of the characters is stop-motion. Inscape created the design of the puppets (lead artist Bruce Heavin) and had them made by a Hollywood company. Inscape then hired two stop-motion animators and Russell Lees spent many, many hours in a hot, dark warehouse controlling the animations. They worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for a month. They created computer-generated screenshots of the environments and shot against blue-screen and had a cameraman light them to match the environment. Also notable was the use of author William S. Burroughs as a voice actor: Burroughs not only lent his voice to the character Edwin, but also voiced two slideshow sequences illustrating the short story "The Masque of the Red Death" and the poem "Annabel Lee." Another story, "The Premature Burial," can be heard while reading the newspaper in "The Tell-Tale Heart," and the poem "To Helen" can be read while playing the victim in "Berenice." Thomas Dolby composed the music for the game. ------------------- Structurally, the game was a point-and-click adventure based on 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 perspective of both murderer and victim. The game offered no choices, no life-and-death decisions, and no points. Similar to other point-and-click adventure games like Myst, the game simply waited for the player to find the next hotspot or location where another video would play to advance the plot. In the sections that were direct interpretations of Poe's stories, the player was forced to follow the actions of the characters. The player could only carry one item at a time. Much of the animation in The Dark Eye consisted of QuickTime movies that played either full screen or in smaller loops against a static background. -------------------------