Jun 2017 *
The title says it all about this game. LSD: Dream Emulator is based on a real dream journal that had been written over the course of a decade and it feels like a drug trip when you're playing. Though apparently the 'LSD' part actually stands for 'Lovely Sweet Dream', the title of the journal.
It should be no surprise either that it was only released in Japan for PlayStation. Not to say other regions never get weird games, but back then especially, I think there was no real market for it elsewhere. Certainly not one viewed as profitable by the publisher. It seems that whoever owns the rights to the game now might still feel that way because while the game's available on the digital PlayStation Store, it's again only for Japan. A shame since the game's mostly English-friendly.
The game has 14 distinct areas that you can visit within the dreams, such as Violence District (a city at nighttime where you might find things like a woman hanging from a light pole) and Happy Town (what I believe is supposed to be a trippy-colored carnival).
You can travel to these areas either by tunnel or for a more random experience, simply bumping into walls and objects. If you press against a wall or object for more than a second, you'll be taken to a new area. This can be annoying if you're trying to explore an area and you accidentally bump into something. The controls don't make it easy to look around to make sure you aren't going to unintentionally hit anything. I guess that's the nature of dreams: a lack of control.
You never know what you'll find in an area. In the 30 minutes or so that I played to gather these screenshots, I encountered a head with arms and legs, a giant fish in the sky, statues sliding down a street on their own, a pissed off peacock, the gray man (the antagonist of the game who causes you to 'forget' memories of past dreams, related to a flashback mode where you can revisit dreams), and the previously mentioned hanging woman.
It's impossible to predict what you might encounter where as they generate randomly and there's far more to see than those. That's where most of my enjoyment playing the game comes from, just looking for weird shit I haven't seen before. It's almost like playing out a David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky movie.
The dreams usually end when you die (such as falling into a bottomless pit) or after a random amount of time. One time it might last only about two or three minutes. The next time, closer to 10. However, sometimes you'll start a new dream and only receive text in Japanese or a short video. I'm not sure what the ultimate goal of the game is and I'm not sure anyone else knows either. After you play through a year's worth of days, you apparently see an ending video and the game starts over.
You view a chart after each dream with four areas labeled 'upper', 'downer', 'static', and 'dynamic'. While it's obvious that it's marking what kind of dream you had, no one seems to have a clear grasp on what most interactions in the game actually affect the chart, only speculation. Sometimes, the textures in the game will change, but that's another area of the game with a lot of unknown factors.
That's about it when it comes to the game itself. As I said, it's based on a dream journal, which was turned into an actual book and can be downloaded from the game's wiki https://dreamemulator.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dream_Journal . Each entry is in both Japanese and English. I read through some of it and a few entries definitely reminded me of moments within the game.
There was also music released with the game. I know even less about that besides that it's not music actually heard in the game. It's not a good game in the conventional sense, but as a 'dream emulator', there will probably never be another game quite like it. I can think of a couple other surreal games. However, none feature the variety and mystery that LSD: Dream Emulator is capable of offering.
While the game was only ever released in Japan and is around $300 on Ebay, it's pretty easy to find a rom for it. I tried to run it on a PlayStation emulator called ePSXe. That fucker refuses to run though, both the current version and older versions. A lot of people like the emulator, so maybe it's just my computer being a piece of shit. Fortunately, I found a torrent containing the game with another emulator already set up to run it. It functioned enough to do what I needed to do.
If you don't want to bother with emulators, there's also a fan remake https://www.lsdrevamped.net/ in the works. I played it and while the layout of the areas is accurate, it's incredibly lacking when it comes to random encounters. In what must have been an hour, I only encountered the gray man once and nothing else. In all fairness, the remake's only in alpha and the guy working on it talks about it frequently on his blog, as recently as earlier this month. Hopefully the finished product has a lot more to it.
The title says it all about this game. LSD: Dream Emulator is based on a real dream journal that had been written over the course of a decade and it feels like a drug trip when you're playing. Though apparently the 'LSD' part actually stands for 'Lovely Sweet Dream', the title of the journal.It should be no surprise either that it was only released in Japan for PlayStation. Not to say other regions never get weird games, but back then especially, I think there was no real market for it elsewhere. Certainly not one viewed as profitable by the publisher. It seems that whoever owns the rights to the game now might still feel that way because while the game's available on the digital PlayStation Store, it's again only for Japan. A shame since the game's mostly English-friendly.
The game has 14 distinct areas that you can visit within the dreams, such as Violence District (a city at nighttime where you might find things like a woman hanging from a light pole) and Happy Town (what I believe is supposed to be a trippy-colored carnival).You can travel to these areas either by tunnel or for a more random experience, simply bumping into walls and objects. If you press against a wall or object for more than a second, you'll be taken to a new area. This can be annoying if you're trying to explore an area and you accidentally bump into something. The controls don't make it easy to look around to make sure you aren't going to unintentionally hit anything. I guess that's the nature of dreams: a lack of control.
You never know what you'll find in an area. In the 30 minutes or so that I played to gather these screenshots, I encountered a head with arms and legs, a giant fish in the sky, statues sliding down a street on their own, a pissed off peacock, the gray man (the antagonist of the game who causes you to 'forget' memories of past dreams, related to a flashback mode where you can revisit dreams), and the previously mentioned hanging woman.It's impossible to predict what you might encounter where as they generate randomly and there's far more to see than those. That's where most of my enjoyment playing the game comes from, just looking for weird shit I haven't seen before. It's almost like playing out a David Lynch or Alejandro Jodorowsky movie.
The dreams usually end when you die (such as falling into a bottomless pit) or after a random amount of time. One time it might last only about two or three minutes. The next time, closer to 10. However, sometimes you'll start a new dream and only receive text in Japanese or a short video. I'm not sure what the ultimate goal of the game is and I'm not sure anyone else knows either. After you play through a year's worth of days, you apparently see an ending video and the game starts over.You view a chart after each dream with four areas labeled 'upper', 'downer', 'static', and 'dynamic'. While it's obvious that it's marking what kind of dream you had, no one seems to have a clear grasp on what most interactions in the game actually affect the chart, only speculation. Sometimes, the textures in the game will change, but that's another area of the game with a lot of unknown factors.
That's about it when it comes to the game itself. As I said, it's based on a dream journal, which was turned into an actual book and can be downloaded from the game's wiki https://dreamemulator.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dream_Journal . Each entry is in both Japanese and English. I read through some of it and a few entries definitely reminded me of moments within the game.There was also music released with the game. I know even less about that besides that it's not music actually heard in the game. It's not a good game in the conventional sense, but as a 'dream emulator', there will probably never be another game quite like it. I can think of a couple other surreal games. However, none feature the variety and mystery that LSD: Dream Emulator is capable of offering.
While the game was only ever released in Japan and is around $300 on Ebay, it's pretty easy to find a rom for it. I tried to run it on a PlayStation emulator called ePSXe. That fucker refuses to run though, both the current version and older versions. A lot of people like the emulator, so maybe it's just my computer being a piece of shit. Fortunately, I found a torrent containing the game with another emulator already set up to run it. It functioned enough to do what I needed to do.If you don't want to bother with emulators, there's also a fan remake https://www.lsdrevamped.net/ in the works. I played it and while the layout of the areas is accurate, it's incredibly lacking when it comes to random encounters. In what must have been an hour, I only encountered the gray man once and nothing else. In all fairness, the remake's only in alpha and the guy working on it talks about it frequently on his blog, as recently as earlier this month. Hopefully the finished product has a lot more to it.
