What Lies Beyond ・・・ Fear in Mundane Games

I come back to Demo 1 a lot. I think about the games I was exposed to through that single demo disc, and it’s pretty incredible. There was one game, however, that really stuck with me for all the wrong reasons. But you never killed anyone. There was no visible antagonist.

Intelligent Qube is a 3D puzzle game. You take control of a faceless man, dropped in a black void with a single task. Clear the cubes heading your way. You can clear normal cubes one at a time, and advantage cubes can clear all adjacent spaces. If you clear a forbidden cube, you’ll lose a row of the stage. Oh yeah, the stage will continuously crumble if you make mistakes or if you get trampled by the cubes. Then a booming voice will sound out from the void – ‘AGAIN.’ Continue reading

Lovely Sweet Nightmare ・・・ LSD Dream Emulator (1998)

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. Continue reading