Looks 10, Personality 3

Playing Cyberdreams’ “Dark Seed” is like landing a date with the best-looking guy or gal in the office elevator and, once you’re out, learning that the dreamboat’s idea of a great night is dinner at the Sizzler.

“Hey,” the optimist in you might say to yourself, “at least it’s not Fatburger.”

Yeah, well, “Dark Seed” could be a lot worse, too. As it is, this new fantasy-adventure game from a new gaming company is a great looker--featuring wonderful, dark, foreboding images by noted artist and designer H.R. Giger. The game, however, is pretty standard meat-and-potatoes stuff: Move around the scenes, pick up objects and use them to get yourself in or out of assorted rooms.

In the end, if you’re incredibly lucky, you’re not dead.

But you should enjoy the sites along the way. Giger, a Swiss artist probably best known for his eerie, techno-organic designs in the original “Alien,” is a natural for this sort of spooky tale set, incongruously, in an abandoned Victorian mansion in the quaint village of Woodland Hills, Calif. You play the role of homeowner-writer Mike Dawson, who buys the place to do some serious prose. Dawson, which also happens to be the name of the principal designer of the game, has been unknowingly impregnated with an incubating alien creature that will emerge and kill him in a few days.

Without the artwork, “Dark Seed” would be an unsatisfying and very frustrating game. The puzzlemakers’ arrogance--or, perhaps more generously, inexperience--is all over the place. The designers have forgotten that most basic rule of storytelling: Lead the listeners-readers-players through the plot; engage them; help them out, and, above all, don’t force them to read your mind.

This game has so many plot subtleties it might have been called “Leave ‘em in the Dark Seed.”

Dark Seed

Rating: ***

IBM and compatibles; 640K RAM; hard drive with 11Mb free space; VGA. Mouse and sound recommended. List: $69.95.

Computer games are rated on a five-star system, from one star for poor to five for excellent.