What you have just witnessed, is the first thirty minutes of a little cult classic known as LSD Dream Emulator. I didn’t even get to the trippy part of the game. Well…I’d be a little hard pressed to call it a game in the traditional sense, there isn’t really a fail/win condition that forms the basic foundation of what a game even is.

Multimedia used to be a real big buzzword in the 90s, but very few developers knew how to actually present dynamic content. But the basic gist of it seemed to be a combination of interactive experiences, music and (usually) pre-rendered video. The interactive Encarta encyclopaedia was pretty much king of this, I got sucked into making fractals and exploring panoramic views of Rome. I recall Creative had a pretty interesting bunch of interactive demos for their Soundblaster Live! cards towards the end of the decade too. But these are all non-games, so why am I writing about them? Because when Sony made the decision to produce a console with a CD-ROM drive, they brought about a very important shift in the kind of people who developed games. Artists, musicians and graphic designers who were becoming increasingly familiar with digital setups, were encouraged to experiment with the Playstation because the format was relatively familiar. This gave rise to the rhythm genre through games such as PaRappa the Rapper and later Vib Ribbon, and the new artist/musician involvement in turn gave way to full on experimental games like LSD.

Hiroko Nishikawa had kept a dream journal for ten years, noting reoccurring images and motifs, which formed the basis for LSD. Each entry is accompanied by a translation and a loosely related artwork. It gives the visuals, sounds and experiences a sense of legitimacy that a lot of other games would probably try to hide behind generic trippy ‘drug induced’ nonsensical art styles.

LSD starts off relatively normal, with you walking around a typical traditional Japanese house – bumping into any surface begins the dream, and is the only way to progress to a new area. From there on, you are transported from one location to another by chaining together linked surfaces. The visuals progressively warp themselves as the nights pass and your dream is charted on a scale of Upper, Downer, Static and Dynamic based on the themes of the dream you encountered.

You have music randomly generated from a bank of 500 sound samples and loops, with many tracks only appearing once. The audio ranges from eerily calm chirping birds, to frantic electronic loops that often sync to flashing colours and textures in certain dreams. Not to mention the gratuitous Japanese text that begins to infiltrate the 3D textures midway through the game. All it needs is some more slowed down elevator music. If you could call any game vaporwave – it’d be this one. Or maybe that one where you fly a hot air balloon, Kaze no Notam. It’s certainly not an insult, the dreamy transition between bright toy box-like dreams to that all too familiar harbour side can definitely be seen in a lot of vaporwave visuals. The limited draw distance and constant clipping through models only adds to the bizarre feeling the game evokes.

LSD hasn’t aged well at all, but it’s a perfect relic of late 90s budget 3D games. Textures aren’t to correct scale to be considered an attempt at photo-realism, and the sound effects are too distracting in their volume. Whether or not this was intentional to drive home just how bizarre the subject matter is, or if it was just a case of ‘well it’s 1998 and we can’t do any better’ still remains a question I haven’t been able answer for quite some time.

There doesn’t seem to be any set narrative in LSD, the silent protagonist has no way of reacting to the world around them other than to wake up. The only way to force this is to fall off a cliff, reinforcing the stereotype of a falling dream never ending with your inevitable death because you’ll always wake up. Sometimes you don’t even dream, you’re just presented with a paragraph of a diary in Japanese. One such entry reveals the writer’s understanding that they will die in the next three days – of course this doesn’t happen, but it’s one of the early morbid things to show up in a seemingly pleasant game. Of course, as you progress you’ll find yourself returning to the same harbour that appears to be home to a lot of murder and guys in trench coats. Though it feels like the more sinister dreams are the ones that present themselves in a childlike way. The toy box dream is frighteningly overwhelming in its scale, and brings back nightmares I used to have as a kid about being shrunk down to ant size amongst all my toys. In dreams like these, it definitely gives the impression that someone is controlling the scenes you traverse, and that you could link touched objects/surfaces is only a coincidence – and your only sense of control in an unpredictable world.

As I mentioned earlier, there really isn’t a way to win or lose in LSD. Sure, you can fall off a cliff or blackout when you approach the trench coat man – but those dreams end the same way every other ‘successful’ dream does. There isn’t any punishment for failing to follow a set pattern of movement, nor is there any inherent incentive to follow any particular pattern. You’re just expected to experience the game for what it is, an experimental adventure.

LSD has reached cult status among niche gamers with a penchant for avant-garde design, and gamers who ironically love rudimentary 3D games. I’m in both camps, and although I couldn’t tell you what this game’s message is in the slightest…I love it for being so bold and not holding back during one of the few times in game development history that actually applauded experimentation. It would be impossible for a game like LSD to be released in today’s harsh ‘indie or AAA’ climate, where this game would be far too ambitious for an independent developer…yet too risky for an established developer to publish.