LSD, the Dream Emulator

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has anyone heard of this game? and no, for you comedians out there, i’m not talking about the drug.

it’s a playstation game (and a book and a cd, I think) that was developed by ‘asmik ace entertainment’ in 1998, and it’s all based on the dreams of one of the staff members, which he wrote in a diary for ten years or so apparently. but anyway, basically what you do in the game is walk around, and every time you hit into something you get transported to a different area - there are no goals or objectives (though there is what could be considered an antagonist – the man in a suit and a hat – as he erases the memory of the dream); you just wander about for five or ten minutes (dreams only tend to last that long). sounds boring, yeah? it’s really not – the areas are just so interesting and creepy really that you just want to keep going. for example, you may start your dream in a square field with a giant hole in the middle, from which an elephant is slowing floating upwards. from here, you jump in the hole, and end up in something that could be an intestine. you continue moving forward until you come across what looks to be an intestine room (whatever that is), and there are a bunch of weird babies dancing on chairs. you walk into one of them and you teleport to what looks like the inside of a traditional japanese house (true story) – you get the idea. it’s fun because it’s so random and unpredictable. also, a pretty cool thing about this game is that the more dreams you have, the more intense and unnerving the textures seem to get; the first time you see the walls of that japanese house they may look normal, but ten dreams later they could be bright red with some random kanji on them. the soundtrack is pretty good too: it’s pretty much the same melody played over and over in different tones, but it sets the mood well. the only annoying thing is the footstep sound, which is way too loud and sound like coconuts hitting each other. ):

after you finished dreaming you dream gets rated on a upper – downer, static – dynamic scale. sometimes though you get upper dreams even though you just witnessed a car crash or something equally distressing, so it’s pretty trippy. but yeah, if you want something a little more surreal than you average game, then this is really worth your time. if you don’t have a playstation or a playstation emulator but want to play something like this anyway, try the freeware game yume nikki (dream diary) for the PC. it’s made with rpg maker, but don’t let the deter you – it really is pretty good. it’s actually darker and more creepy than LSD (but less trippy), so.

INB4 TL;DR