What happens when you repurpose H. R. Giger art to make a game? You get Dark Seed

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett (opens in new tab) wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random games back into the light. This week, while most of the games based on the Alien series are too well known for Crapshoot, there is… another.

Dark Seed was an odd little game, and not what most people expected. Not quite. Definitely not what it seemed to be at first glance—a dark horror game that would give the world endless nightmares, which the publisher claimed at the time had caused the art team to have to seek counselling after exposure to HR Giger’s freaky biomechanics horror show. (A claim that, while possible, does rather seem to lie somewhere between ‘hyperbole’ and ‘complete balls’). Was it a good game? Not really. But it did at least turn heads, some of them covered with veins harvested from long dead science gods, so let’s pay a visit to the house that Hell made, and only an idiot named Mike Dawson would actually buy.

Dark Seed is really the story of a great estate agent more than anything else. The in-game description of the mansion Mike somehow managed to buy—on a writer’s budget incidentally—goes as follows: “Your house seems somehow out of time, a relic of a dark past, or perhaps a dark future.”