If you live in Charlottesville, Virginia for a long time, like I have (yeah, the city where that happened), you get to know Edgar Allen Poe. It goes beyond just reading his stories and knowing what The Raven is. You can go to the University of Virginia campus and visit the dorm room he briefly stayed in, door wide open (the yearly trick-or-treat event is always held right in front of it), preserved and cheekily decorated with raven-themed pictures and tchotchkes. Drive south an hour to Richmond and you’ll find The Poe Museum, a long-standing tribute to one of America’s legendary horror writers. I see the man’s name and think of home. So when a game called Edgar Allen Poe’s Interactive Horror pops up in my inbox, I have to take a look. William Burroughs, whose words I have tattooed on my arm, is here too. It’s like the most pretentious parts of myself were directly targeted by this release. Go figure.
Poe x Burroughs, an iconic crossover for English majors
Edgar Allen Poe’s Interactive Horror: 1995 Edition was not this game’s original title. Released in 1995 (natch) as The Dark Eye, this FMV/adventure game uses stop-motion animation and an original framing to house, anthology style, adaptations of several Poe short stories. By the end you’ll experience macabre “cartoons” of The Cask of Amontillado, Berenice, The Tell-Tale Heart, Annabel Lee, and Masque of the Red Death. To Helen and The Premature Burial are also tucked into the experience in written form. The Dark Eye heavily leans on discomfort, leading you along with surreal music punctuated by wails and moans, grotesque character models, and slow, almost DRPG-like movement from screen to screen.
The framing story is interesting; it’s an earnest attempt to mirror Poe’s voice and vibes a bit, with your nameless protagonist (the game’s in first-person) visiting his weird, reclusive painter uncle (voiced by Burroughs) with his brother in a strange old house set cliffside overlooking the sea. The brother falls in love with the uncle’s daughter (uhhhhh), and you get caught in the middle of the conflict. A creepy butler-type character is also involved. Every time something weird happens, which may or may not be influenced by toxic paint thinner, the world’s colors distort, the sound of moans and otherworldly droning fills your ears, and looking at your reflection in certain objects teleports you into an Edgar Allen Poe story.
Twists and turns
An odd twist here is you experience each story twice. The stories inevitably end in murder, and you see them play out from both the victims’ and killers’ perspectives. Sometimes this is really cool, such as in the case of Berenice in which each side is very different. Other times the gimmick tremendously backfires, such as in The Cask of Amontillado, in which you have to navigate an annoyingly obtuse dungeon-like space twice. And both times are exactly the same! Either way it’s an interesting experiment as an interactive adaptation of short fiction, so it doesn’t just feel like a game is reading stories to you. You get the spooky vibes, the unsettling animations, and alternating perspectives all in one. Sometimes the game proceeds awkwardly as you’re expected to activate certain flags in specific orders (or navigate said absurd dungeon), but you only have so much to worry about. It’s practically a visual novel here, with some 90s FMV game quirks on top.
Oh hey, it’s that thing I used to play Monkey Island 20 years ago
Speaking of quirks, the “1995 Edition” part of the title is kind of a funny bit of hedging. See, this isn’t a fancy remaster of The Dark Eye, with new adjustments to resolution, options like subtitles, or remappable controls. It’s the original software running via SCUMMVM, a popular open source emulator folks mostly use to play old LucasArts adventure games. You have no menu access to the emulator, so you can’t even use save states or anything like that. You’re actually greeted with a tooltip when you launch the game, telling you to press the Esc key twice in order to save. It’s rickety, to say the least. I had the software lock up on me a couple times, and had no choice but to just shut it down and lose the time since my last save to the darkness. It’s a bummer, but to publisher GMedia’s credit, its whole mission statement is preserving underserved, older games for current platforms. There probably isn’t profit in remastering The Dark Eye, but getting it re-licensed and available for purchase is pretty cool. Not being able to just access SCUMMVM’s regular menu to save is an odd move, but perhaps it was necessary to avoid other functions, such as loading other, unlicensed games. Who knows!
