Last week, news got out that the Japanese Playstation Network would soon sell a game called LSD: Dream Emulator as a "PSOne Classic." Seeing that provocative title and the psychedelic screenshots convinced me that I had to play this game. Originally released in Japan in 1998, LSD is perhaps the most avant-garde of designer Osamu Sato's bizarre titles, at least partially because it has no apparent goal. The player simply experiences new somewhat interactive and disturbing environments time and again. They are all based loosely on a dream diary a staff member took for a number of years. This bizarre interactive experience has earned the game a devoted cult following, as people one by one stumble into its world and attempt to learn what they can about it. I've been playing for a week and I feel like I don't know the first thing about how this game works and the mystery of it is perhaps the most rewarding part.
LSD's gameplay simply consists of first-person environment exploration. You walk around whatever area you're put in, usually until you run into something, which will take you to a new environment. There are only so many environments you may end up in — an old Japanese town, a dark and frightening "violence district," a completely bizarre toy world of sorts — and these worlds are empty of moving life about 70% of the time. That last fact makes it quite shocking and disturbing during the times when a man dressed all in grey floats toward you, or you find a Japanese cat sculpture submerged in a usually empty pond, or you see a spaceship blasting off to nowhere in the middle of a grassy plain. The ratio of desolation to bizarre action is almost perfectly calibrated to get you to jump in shock if playing at 3:00am. It's just never predictable.
Each dream ends after about ten minutes, or sometimes when you fall off a cliff or experience something else potentially deadly. Additionally, sometimes the dream will just end at a totally random time. Regardless, the dream is always ranked on a graph afterwards with the Y-axis representing if it was an "upper" or "downer" and the X-axis going from "static" to "dynamic," which probably represents how many rare objects you encountered in that dream. The graph doesn't seem to have any effect on anything, but it does give some sense of progression as you fill in points over time. In fact, filling in every spot on the graph is perhaps the only conceivable goal in the game, though that would take extraordinary effort to complete.
Article comments
1 - lolrust
I still have no idea why that game is rated 17+
2 - nonalined
its probably 17+ because its based on lsd, so drug reference
and its also pretty scary
3 - iipartychairs
wtf? D-DAY?!
4 - minty
uhhh no...YES LSD is a "drug name" however LSD in this game stands for "Lovely Sweet Dream". Learn your facts.
5 - jeegz
It may be 17+ due to the fact that in much later stages of the gameplay, textures turn into sexually explicit images. The intro to the game has various phrases relating to the meaning of LSD according to the game developer, including "in Linking the Sapient Dream," "in Leisure, the Savage Dream," and "in Lunacy, the Sonorous Dream."
6 - eldigato
It's 17+ because it's too dangerous for little kids to be playing with.