Are video games art? Well yes, obviously. But they are usually entertainment and money-makers first and foremost. That’s almost exclusively their purpose. But what if it wasn’t? What if ART was important?

Yes, this isn’t anything new. Also, “Are Video Games Art” conversations make me want to die. But even though there are a LOT of artsy games out there, and most of them you’ve never heard of, but they’re all tryin’ something. And this one here may be one of the only ones that’s really MADE it. I’m really cutting this one tight, because I THOUGHT this was a huge cult classic that everyone’s heard of. But also I’m a weirdo who likes these kinda games, and when I was playing this and telling my friends “I’ve been playing LSD” they all responded with “fucking what”

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For the record, it has nothing to do with drugs. Though it is very trippy. Yes, this is LSD Dream Emulator, for the PS1.

LSD Dream Emulator is the brain child of artist Osamu Sato, who is not a gamer, and seems to not really like them very much. Instead, he thought the PS1 could be used to create contemporary art. This is actually his SECOND game he made, the first is called “Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou”, it somehow came out here in the West, and I HAVE to play it. Anyways, this game. The entire game is based on a dream diary that a dev of the game (maybe Sato, maybe not, I’m getting conflicted reports) kept for over a decade. The entire game is about dreams, and the dreamlike, and the fact it’s based in actual real dreams makes it even weirder.

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Now, is this obscure? It’s certainly a cult classic. It flopped really, REALLY hard when it released only in Japan in late 1998. It had a limited release, bundled with a soundtrack composed by Sato and the dream diary as a little add-on book. It kinda wallowed in obscurity for years until the late 2000s and early 2010s, when Let’s Play culture picked it up as a Lol Those Wacky Japanese game. It’s way more than that though. Also I fucking hate that kind of thing, it makes my skin crawl. Anyways, let’s talk about it.

In the game, you play as someone who is not important. We don’t know anything about this individual. They are PROBABLY Japanese. But we don’t know their gender, their age, anything. Every day they get up and do some shit we never hear about. And then they go to bed. And that’s where the magic happens. Each night, you dream, and you… experience your dreams.

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This might be the first true “walking simulator”. It’s really just that. You walk around and experience things. There’s no goal, really. The game is “beaten” after 365 nights, but that’s it. And that can be accomplished by abruptly waking yourself up every night, by walking off cliffs and shit. The actual “goal” is to just experience what the game has to offer. It’s a solid, stable world, the same map every time, though you spawn all over the place, and are often teleported around.

The idea of dream geography is something I love because it’s VERY common in my dreams, my dreams all take place in a space that is vaguely based on reality, but is consistent between dreams. Though the locales in this game are… very, very odd, and as you play, they change ever so slightly, like the textures get swapped out for others all the time.

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You’ve got the place you first spawn in, the Bright Moon Apartment, a traditional Japanese apartment complex. And it’s filled with things like a dying woman (who becomes a rotting corpse, before her bed disappears forever), flickering television sets, an astronaut on the roof, walking teddy bears, and two faces people manning the bar downstairs. You’ve got the big area that kinda links most of the areas together, the Natural World, filled with animals and natural cliff formations and rivers and such. You’ve got Happy Town, a kid-like place filled with cute pleasant imagery (though we’ll… get to it). And you’ve got, uh, the Violence District. Which is filled with corpses and shit. Lovely :D

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There’s a few other places too, that are a little more minor. A park filled with monuments. A tower under the moon. What I can only describe as “a vagina tunnel”, which has a really fascinating thing in the front of it: a paper sumo match. The paper sumo thing was a popular game with Japanese kids, and there’s also a thing in Japan, where if a kid walks in on their parents having sex, they’re told “oh, we were just practicing Sumo”. Yeah. Now, this is SPECULATION about the thought process behind these two things going together, but I kinda love it. And that’s also kinda like, the POINT of this. The speculation and thinking about what’s here is the POINT.

Depending on how your dream goes, it actually gets graded in the end, on a chart. A bit dystopian to grade my dreams, but okay. You’ve got two axis: Upper, and Downer. These are effected by what you saw. See a bunch of cute penguins and a prince and princess dancing? Upper dream! Walk into a warehouse and find a chalk outline, only to turn around and be shot by a gunman? That’s a downer, my friend. Then you’ve got Static and Dynamic, which is a bit more tricky. Basically, how many cool events did you see.

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This chart is going at all times, actually, and depending on where you are on it, some events may or may not happen. This means everything is deterministic, in a way, but it’s so fucking hard to figure out what where and why, so really, it feels like you’re experiencing something new every time. And there are TONS of events and things you can see. This game world is rather large and expansive.

It’s actually interesting. Years ago when this game first became big and I played it, I was curious WHY things were happening, but the argument was just “I dunno it just does, the game can’t be explained”. Now we know exactly why, and it’s…. kinda cool to see and know the inner workings of something that was once so esoteric.

And yeah, that’s LSD Dream Emulator. I don’t have much more to add. It’s a really fascinating experience, a cool art piece. Not really a “game”. And I think the creator likes it that way. Apparently he’s been contacted by people who learned about him through this game and he’s kind of fucking baffled by it. It reminds me of the guy who made Earthbound, where like, if you called him just “The Guy Who Made Earthbound” to his face, he’d probably get annoyed. Osamu Sato is WAY more than just the guy who made LSD. But he did, in fact, make LSD. And I’m glad he did. It’s pretty neat.