You have to feel that if a version of yourself from 1991 was warped through a wormhole to the land of today (young tikes can substitute in their dads in this scenario) and shown Child of Eden being played with Kinect, they'd nod knowingly. If there's one feeling Tetsuya Miziguchi's most recent offering elicits, it's that this is The Future, or certainly a 'Lawnmower Man'/Jeff Minter hybrid vision of such- a first person view of surreal radiant landscapes with visuals far beyond what any of us back then could have considered possible- all controlled by mystical sweeping gestures and aggressive flicks of the wrist.
Beyond its motion control, however, this is fundamentally Rez, which was fundamentally Panzer Dragoon before it. Envisage that twenty years younger version of yourself taking in this technological wonder, and you can't help but think what they'd say about it once they'd returned to their own time.
Assuming you were a videogame journalist back then however, it'd be pretty easy to predict what the headline of Computer and Video Games (or, EGM, I suppose. If you must) would be:
'Child of Eden- It's like Space Harrier- but on ACID!!!'
The 'Thing X Is Like Thing Y But On Drug Z' line is a cliche that defined 1990s entertainment journalism in general, and videogames writers were equally guilty of it. Sensible Soccer was Kick Off on Speed. Mario Kart was any other racing game you could think of, but, of course, on mushrooms. Hulk Hogan on steroids (in any early 90s wrestling game) was like Hulk Hogan not on steroids (in Thunder in Paradise) but on steroids. Along with other great canned lines from the past (take your pick from 'if you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you'll like', 'fans of the genre should snap this one up' or '73 percent') it got tiresome, retooled into its more contemporary cousin of 'what were they smoking when they came up with that, eh? EH?' and then consigned to the level of witticism reserved for Youtube video comments.
Deservedly so, not just because of its hackneyed nature, but because of its inauthenticity (it's unlikely the writer spewing this garbage was familiar with drug culture enough to really know what NFL Quarterback Club '95 would be like having taken a fistful of uppers- full disclosure here, and an apology for the possibly misleading title- I am similarly clean living).
That, and because on October 22nd 1998, and again more recently thanks to the mercifully finally restored Japanese PSN shop, something came along to make the line completely moot. A game that was not any and every game ever- but On LSD. A game that literally was LSD.
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LSD describes itself a s a 'dream simulator' and not a drug one, which is possibly how it managed to find its way onto store shelves originally (though understandably not in the West). Its opening video makes various plays on the acronym with the 'D' always standing for 'Dream'. It's how the game takes its structure too- you play LSD through 365 chunks- in game 'days' – and are unceremoniously dumped to the main menu after each one as if abruptly awakening. If you ever start to think the title was just an innocent misunderstanding, however, the ranking system at the end of each session brings you back to ('enhanced') reality- charting as it does not only how dynamic or passive you are by how much you move around in the world, but also whether you're on an 'upper' or a 'downer' based on the experiences you're subjected to.
LSD is a bizarre, disjointed experience, as you might expect. Played from a first person perspective, you're charged with exploring the world around you, your only means of interaction with your environment being to bump into something interesting looking, at which point you are warped to another surreal space. You may start in a field under a blazing sun, chasing horses galloping across the plains, before bumping into a crystal which… teleports you to a psychedelic theme park, where you are hit by a train with a maliciously grinning Thomas the Tank Engine face, the screen fading to red and coming back up with you in a deserted bar.
Desertion is a common theme throughout the game, with recurring non player characters rarely seen and silent. Combined with a discordant techno soundtrack (Ken Ishii helped work on the music here, and also produced a track for Rez– a small world indeed), and graphics perhaps slightly sub par for the era, makes for a disconcerting experience, where friendly Buddha statues become pointy faced objects of fear.
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LSD is well aware of all this, and for every 'upper' moment of gleefully running through a desert at top speed, there are downers. You may be thrown into an environment familiar to you from previous 'days' but subtly changed, with a darkened sky and altered textures. You may see a faceless girl near some subway tracks- approach her and her head falls off.
There is no success or failure in the game- even playing through all 365 days gives you no reward other than a brief video clip- but rather than making it a relaxing, pressure- free trip (pardon the pun), this only adds to making LSD feel distinctly unnerving- especially as so much of the game consists of random events and navigation is intentionally impossible. At times, pressing start may not even take you to the game itself, but to a thirty second short film, sometimes a soothing animation with flowers and relaxing electronic music, and others monochrome shots of retro TVs blaring static in a scene straight from any J-horror film. You never know what you're going to get, which makes LSD uniquely terrifying in my eyes- real life is unpredictable enough.
What of the legacy of LSD? In some ways, it's not hard to imagine a game like it appearing now. The player is 'woken up' after ten minutes at most of play, making it easy to conceive as a handheld experience, and thirteen years on, you have to imagine what kind of imagery Osamu Sato, the game's director, could come up with on today's platforms.
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Sadly though, an internet search reveals a disappointingly slim softography for Sato. While he also lead the similarly abstract point and click adventure Eastern Mind: Lost souls of Tong Nou, his other credits range from work on the wonderfully different Jet Set Radio games, to more recently the much more mainstream modern Sonic titles and Super Smash Brothers Brawl. While I'd be glad (if slightly nervous) about ever seeing a follow up to LSD though, maybe its roots of not failing or succeeding, but simply being can be seen in thatgamecompany's imminent Journey.
That Jenova Chen, eh? He's like Osamu Sato- but probably not on acid.