FREE: The Dark Eye (Rare classic CD-ROM adventure game)

The listing, The Dark Eye (Rare classic CD-ROM adventure game) has ended.

An amazing, innovative early PC adventure game, unjustly overlooked by critics and players; has since achieved cult status. A copy is currently selling on eBay for $25, and I've seen it listed for as much as $50 in the past.

Wikipedia's description:

The Dark Eye is a computer game of the horror genre, released in 1995 for the PC by now-defunct software company inSCAPE. Upon its release the game attracted little attention from either critics or consumers, though it has received some attention since and, arguably, cult status.

The game featured combined 3-D graphics, clay animation (claymation) and video segments. With its unconventional interface, storyline, and characters, the game's peculiarity became its selling point. The characters are largely lifelike in appearance except for their clay-modeled faces, which are often distorted or feature grotesquely exaggerated features. This near-realism, sometimes referred to as the uncanny valley, contributed to the game's ambience of unease and anxiety.

The character animation is stop-motion. inSCAPE did the art design of the puppets (lead artist Bruce Heavin) and had a Hollywood house actually make them. inSCAPE then hired two stop-motion animators and Russell Lees spent many, many hours in a hot, dark warehouse directing the animations. The working hours were from 7 am to 7 pm for about a month. They created computer-generated screenshots of the environments and shot against blue-screen, and they had a Director of Photography light them to match the environment.

Also notable was the use of author William S. Burroughs as a voice actor: Burroughs provided not only the voice for the character of Edwin, but also voiceovers of a short slide-show sequences illustrating "The Masque of the Red Death". There is a fifth story, which is not easily noticeable, which can be found while reading the newspaper during "The Tell-Tale Heart", the story is called "The Premature Burial". Thomas Dolby composed the game's music.