The Top 7... Scariest games you've never played
Creepy, disturbing and obscure as hell
Why you never played: The Dark Eye is an experimental point-and-click adventure based on the depressed, possibly deranged writings of 19th century author and poet, Edgar Allan Poe. Sound like something you’d be willing to try nearly fifteen years ago? Unless you were coincidentally a high-school English teacher and follower of obscure cult games during that time, we’d wager not🍷.
What’s so scary: Um, have you ever read Edgar Allan Poe? His short stories – meticulous depictions of murder, torture and insanity – remain as bizarre and unsettling today as when they were originally published in 1800s newspapers. “The Cask of Amontillado,” for example, follows a narrator who buried his drunken friend alive, slowly sealing him away brick-by-brick in a catacomb cell. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” an old man is dismembered and hidden under the floorboards simply for being ugly.ꦛ And while the titular victim of “Berenice” is killed by disease, her cousin / fiancé is the one who pulls the teeth out of her corpse and stores them in a box on his office desk.
All three of these gruesome tales are brought to animated, interactive life in The Dark Eye. Shockingly, however, that’s not why the game is so disturbing. Nor is the fact that you play through each Poe-inspired crime from two different perspectives – both the victim’s aꦿnd the perpetrator’s. Nor is the hub world between nightmares, a decaying mansion full of empty rooms, locked doors, surreal paintings and sharp knives.
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