A Point-and-Click horror Adventure Game created by Cyberdreams (the same people that would eventually create the Mind Screw known as I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream) and released in 1992, Dark Seed is based on artwork created by H. R. Giger. The main plot is that of a man named Mike Dawson, a namesake and look-alike of the game's own lead designer, who has moved into a fancy estate in a small town. He soon finds out that it's not all it's cracked up to be, and he ends up trying to save the world in three days from a race of evil aliens called the Ancients. Oh yeah, did we mention he has an alien embryo in his head?

Dark Seed was followed by Dark Seed II in 1995, although this time Giger and Dawson weren't involved.

The trope list still works!

• Ambiguous Situation: Some events like Mike randomly getting arrested by the police, seem to be the result of the Ancients influencing the locals to impede Mike's progress but it's left fairly ambiguous what's going on (though in the case of the arrest, depending on what the player had been up to at that point Mike getting arrested might actually be justified).
• Ambiguous Time Period: The games are fairly vague on exactly when they take place, but II has an oddly "Fifties" vibe, with the design of Mike Dawson's mother and Jack's Fonzie-like shtick, along with the prominence of a carnival in the games plot, although pop-culture references made within the game do ground it in the early nineties.
• All Animals Are Dogs: Mike has to get past a huge quadrupedal monster on a bridge over a bottomless abyss. To get rid of the monster, he throws a stick into the abyss, and the monster jumps in to chase it.
• Alternate Self: Some of the creatures that Mike encounters in the Dark World are plainly meant to be alternate counterparts of the people Mike meets in Woodland Hills, such as the Dark World police officer (counterpart of Woodland Hills' sole police officer), the guard dog (counterpart of Delbert's dog), and most blatantly the Keeper of Scrolls (counterpart of the town librarian).
• Bittersweet Ending: If you try to use the lever in the Dark World without wearing protective gloves, the Keeper of Scrolls will remark that the embryo has been completely eradicated... at the cost of Mike's life.
• Commonplace Rare: The only place you can find a shovel or a pair of binoculars is the Dark World, and let's not even talk about what you have to do to find a stick.
• Creepy Doll: On the first day, Mike will receive a package containing a doll, which briefly takes the form of a terrifying Dark World creature (possibly its counterpart there). Oddly, it never appears again and never factors into the plot, seemingly existing only to creep out the player.
• Dramatic Shattering: After depriving the Ancients of their power supply, Mike shatters his mirror to cut off the Dark World's access to Earth.
• Dull Surprise: The CD version of the first game added voice acting, leading to Mike narrating everything in the same nonchalant voice, from washing up in the morning to wandering around a Dark World full of monsters.
• Event-Driven Clock: There's a game clock that runs independently of the player. You need to sleep at night and be on certain appointments on time. If you miss one, you're screwed. If you miss an action in a day, you're screwed. Thanks to this, the game was almost impossible to complete without a guide.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: The opening cinematic shows Mike getting an embryo implanted in his head in a very Freudian way.
• "Get Out of Jail Free" Card: A very literal one. Its use is required to win the game. Items placed in your real-world cell will transfer over to the Dark World jail's cell, and since your inventory is stripped when you're incarcerated in the latter, those items will be the only inventory you get to finish the game. However, staying in a cell overnight wastes one of your three days, so an early exit is mandatory.
• Grave Robbing: You'll do it if you want to finish the game. Twice!
• Guide Dang It!: No thanks to extreme amounts of Fake Difficulty. Good luck figuring out how to Solve the Soup Cans without consulting GameFAQs.
• Headache of Doom: Mike Dawson wakes up with a terrible headache, and discovers to his horror that the cause is an alien embryo that will burst out of his head and kill him if it's allowed to fully develop.
• High-Voltage Death: If Mike tries to use the levers in the Dark World, he'll be shocked with "millions of volts" of electricity, killing him instantly. He has to wear gardening gloves which insulate him to use the levers (even though, realistically, he would never get close enough to use the lever if there were "millions of volts" involved).
• Informed Attribute: Mike, the attic isn't full of useless items. It isn't full of anything.
• Magic Mirror: Mirrors serve as portals to the Dark World.
• The Many Deaths of You: Downplayed. Mike can get himself electrocuted, mauled by Dark World guard dogs, gunned down by the Dark World police officer, fall asleep in the Dark World, get beat up by Dark World security or just plain waste enough time and allow the Ancients' plan to succeed. But most of these deaths have the same result: Mike being put into stasis by the Ancients, or the embryo hatching out from his mouth.
• Meaningful Name: The Keeper of Scrolls' name makes a lot of sense when it's revealed that she is the Dark World counterpart of the town librarian.
• Moon Logic Puzzle: So very many.
  • Need a stick? Better go buy the last bottle of scotch from the local store, so that you can meet your neighbor, who invites you to meet up the next day at six pm, where he takes your scotch, drinks all of it, and wanders off, leaving a stick behind.
  • Did you manage to find the flagstone in the basement? Better shove that right into an alien device of uncertain use to charge it with energy, and then shove a different stick into it to make a hammer.
  • On day 3, after 10am, you can't leave your house without getting arrested (a second time). Hope you have the foresight to get the rope from the garage and use it to set up an escape from the third floor or else you're done. And you'd better not have done that before answering the front door at 10am to get a package that contains a required item.
  • How do you start an old junk car? By finding the car keys and filling the gas tank with a bottle of scotch.
  • The ultimate goal of the game is to get the alien's spaceship to take off without them. Figuring this out is, itself, difficult at best, but how do you successfully DO it? By starting the car in the normal world as mentioned above, and then quickly jumping into the Dark World, going into the spaceship, and telling it to take off. Absolutely nothing hints at this solution, and trying to do it before will get you killed.
• Old, Dark House: Mike's house. Emphasis on "dark".
• Orifice Invasion: Inverted — the alien embryo leaves Mike's head through his mouth, after being implanted directly into his forehead by a phallic-looking device.
• Pixel Hunt: Searching for a safety pin on a wooden floor, among other things. The low quality of the graphics don't help.
• Red Herring: A baby doll is delivered to your house, which turns into what is presumably its Dark World equivalent. It is never mentioned again.
• Sleepyhead: If night falls in the Dark World, Mike will automatically curl up on the floor and go to sleep. Unsurprisingly, this nets you a game over.
• Shout-Out:
  • Mike declines to touch the Librarian, saying that such behaviour is what got his old coworker Larry fired for sexual harassment.
  • The names on some of the headstones in the cemetery:
    • G. Threepwood
    • Harcourt Fenton Mudd
    • S. Nostromo
    • R. Liebowitz^note The rest of the inscription on his gravestone is "A Canticle for his deeds"
  • If it is allowed to escape from Mike, the Dark World embryo takes on a form reminiscent of H.R. Geiger's earlier work.
• Solve the Soup Cans: All over the place. For instance, to get the stick mentioned in All Animals Are Dogs above? You have to buy a bottle of scotch, so you can meet your neighbor who is throwing a stick for his dog to fetch. Give him the scotch, and he leaves with the dog, leaving the stick behind.
• Title Confusion: Both this game and its sequel are often incorrectly referred to as "Darkseed" due to how the word marks for both games are designed. It's particularly noticeable in the sequel's case, where there's a space before the number, but not in "DARKSEED"...
• Unwinnable by Design: A particularly cruel example. There's many ways to make the game impossible to beat, and most of them are not immediately obvious.
  • If you get arrested without meeting Delbert, you're forced to spend the night in jail. You can continue from this point, but you've already lost.
  • If you fail to get to the store quickly enough to buy the last bottle of scotch, Delbert will buy it instead, and you won't meet him, get an important item, and miss out on the invitation to hang out the next day.
  • If you run out of time on Day 1 and don't accomplish everything you're able to do, you'll be fine as long as you got the bottle of scotch: everything else can be accomplished on Day 2. Starting with Day 2, however, if you run out of time, you've already failed the game: things happen on Day 2 that cannot be done on Day 3.
  • If you get arrested a second time, you can't get out of jail, and you'll die.
  • When you get arrested, if you don't put three items under the pillow^note the gloves, the money, and the hairpin before leaving, then you don't have the items needed to finish the game. This is particularly cruel as the gloves aren't needed until the end of the game, so you can get all the way to the end and fail at literally the second last step.
• That Was Not a Dream: The game opens with Mike dreaming about an alien embryo being implanted in his head. Very quickly it becomes apparent that this actually happened, and Mike spends the rest of the game racing to kill the embryo before it can fully develop and kill him.
• Violation of Common Sense: To solve a puzzle, you have to steal a gun from the police station after being released from jail, then walk into the Dark World police station with the gun. If you walk in without the gun, the guard shoots you, but if you have the gun, he locks you in jail. This makes some sense, at least: if you don't have the gun, he does, and he just shoots you dead. If you have the gun, he doesn't, so he throws you in jail. Why he doesn't kill you after getting a weapon is unknown, however.
• Your Head A-Splode: Mike makes this claim in the first game if you don't get him some headache medicine (see page quote), although it never actually happens; if you waste enough time to let the embryo escape, it actually escapes through his mouth - and relatively cleanly, at that.