The Dark Eye: No, you've never played it.

Edgar Allan Poe was a sick fuck. He married his cousin and his stories dealt with extremely macabre subject matter, especially for his time. But more importantly, he married his cousin. But seriously, he's generally regarded as one of the greatest American writers ever, even though he looks like the lovechild of Hitler and my uncle Ralph. A great deal of his stories are widely known by just about everyone, and to my knowledge most schools thrust at least a few of his stories on kids. I'd much rather them force Poe upon our youth than that bastard Shakespeare, but I'll save that for William Shakespeare Hates You Part 2: Annihilation. Anyway, The Dark Eye is an obscure PC game released in 1995, one that god knows how I ended up owning. That being said, it's amazing, and if you offer me your ears I'll tell you why, kid! Well, eyes, but fuck you.

Dark Eye is a first person adventure game where you, essentially, end up playing out some Edgar Allan Poe stories. The basic premise of the game is that you're visiting your uncle Edwin, hilariously voiced by William S. Burroughs and sounding like he'll die at any moment, along with your brother Henry. Henry, like ol' Poe himself, is an incest enthusiast who, too, wants to marry his cousin, causing a conflict with old uncle Edwin. There's also a bald assistant whose sole purpose is to stand there menacingly and scare the tits off of you at inopportune moments with his stupid bald head.

The first thing you'll notice is the terrifying graphics. No, they're not bad, they're literally terrifying. All the characters are of the clay animation kin, and they all have huge noses and sunken eyes, rendering you virtually walking around with a bunch of differently proportioned Jeff Goldblums harassing you. Gameplay can get a little confusing, though basically it's a point and click adventure where you do more exploring than anything else. The 'main' story of the game, while not any particular Poe story, is very Poe-ish in execution and kind of reminds me of Fall of the House of Usher and a fictionalization of Poe's own life combined. Along the way your character gets exposed to fumes or some shit and becomes a pussy, halluncinating Poe stories. You activate a Poe story in a 'nightmare' rendering of the house; you walk around until you see a particular object and rub it, entering a Poe story.

The interesting thing is that you can play both victim and murderer in all of the playable stories. That's right; you, too, can become a retarded old man who doesn't realize some asshole's standing in his doorway for hours every night. You, too, can lead a man in a jester's outfit to his walled-in death, hiding him behind an obviously out of place wall. They're all obviously linear and if you've read the stories you know what's going down, but it's still interesting.

Unfortunately, there's not many of them. The Tell Tale Heart, the Cask of Amontillado, and Berenice are the only stories you 'play' through. The Masque of the Red Death ends up being read to you, and you can't fucking skip it, which pisses me off everytime because I don't feel like sitting through it. I would have liked to see The Black Cat and -- dare I say -- Hop-Frog as playable stories. Alas, they're not.

The main story ends in a very Poe-esque fashion, though it seems very abrupt. On the whole, the game will take maybe 2 hours to beat if you know exactly what you're doing; another hour or two if you don't. High school teachers should sit their students down and force them to play through this fucking game whenever Poe curriculum time comes. I sure know that nothing would get me excited in high school more than being made to play an obscure PC game from 1995.