Retro Achievement Mastery 114 - D

Y’all want the D?

Thank you, thank you, that’s the kind of comedy you can expect here at my blog.

D is a 1995 first person point and clicky type horror game originally made for the 3DO and later ported to other consoles like the PS1 and the Saturn. I played the Saturn version, because of course I did. It was made by Warp and Kenji Eno, who was a bit of an eccentric creator. I’ll go into stories about him later cause they’re VERY funny, let’s talk about the game first.

The story follows a girl named Laura, who’s heard that her father, a reputable doctor, has snapped and barricaded himself in his hospital, killing everyone inside and keeping a few as hostages. She enters the hospital to try and stop him (I guess the police just let her, whatever), and is transported by some watery door into a spooky horror castle mansion. Her father explains, through EXTREMELY bad voice over, that she is in his mind, basically, and it’s being warped and twisted by an outside force that is changing him.

You control Laura in a first person view, quite reminiscent of something like Myst, but without clicking on specific things. Instead, if you walk up to a screen that has an item or something to interact with, and either walk into it or press A, you’ll just interact with it. It’s a lot like Lunacy, which was clearly inspired by it, and which I played last time. You must explore the mansion, solve puzzles, and reach your father before two hours elapse. IF you don’t make it in time, you immediately lose and must start over. There is no save feature, at all. The game isn’t long, you can beat it in 30-50 minutes if you know what you’re doing, but that’s a pretty fucking ballsy move, IMO.

On top of that, there’s a bit of RNG. The rotating room SEEMED like RNG when I first played it, but no, that’s just annoying in another way. No, there are beetles that appear in different areas of the castle, and most of the beetle spots are random. I found most of them, but I swear, in one of my attempts, I just could NOT find it in the 2nd area. I wandered for like 20 minutes in this three room stretch and could NOT find it, so I had to restart, cause I was going for the bonus at the end of the good ending that requires all 4 beetles and the good ending. Then, on my next attempt, the third beetle spawned in the pit near the knight. Which can be closed off to you, if you successfully beat the knight on your first try, which I ALSO had to do, so I did that, and then boom, had to just start over again. That was annoying :) Thanks for no save feature.

Eh, it was short enough it’s not a big deal. Anyways, the game is just about wandering this castle, but remember how I said it’s like Myst? Well, it kinda is, it’s first person as you move around these screens, but instead of just like, fading to the next screen ALA Myst or something, you watch an entire extremely smooth animation, as you walk from screen to screen. Laura’s walking is very slow, though it’s honestly impressive. It’s early 90s CGI, which in something like Lunacy was really offputting in a hilarious way, and it is in a lot of instances here, but some of the animations shockingly hold up, there was a lot of attention to detail put here for Laura. The little movements of her hands and wrist as she grabs things, her facial expressions turning to horror as things happen… Yeah it kinda looks awful by today’s standards, but I gotta respect it. The actual 3D environments also look pretty great still, IMO, though they’re not particularly interesting with just like, a screen shot. Here’s one.

The vibe and energy of the game is dark and uncomfortable, with themes of cannibalism and violent action. You literally watch Laura eat her mother’s arm. Uh, spoilers I guess. How the fuck did this get past the censors in 1995, an era where Night Trap got the AO rating because of a woman screaming and being grabbed by some lumbering dorks in bedsheets? Uh… it didn’t!

Introducing Kenji Eno once again. When he made this game, he was pretty sure it wouldn’t get past the conservative American censors, and uh, he was probably right. So he fucking defrauded them. He sent them a clean version of the game, and then when he went to deliver the prints (hand delivered), he covertly swapped the discs on the plane. It took months for anyone to realize what he had done, but it was far too late. The game had a T rating, and you got to watch Laura stab her mother violently over and over and rip off her arm in it. It’s AMAZING.

Kenji Eno was just a pretty eccentric dude, in general. I’ve actually already talked about him before, if you’ve been reading my stuff for a long time you may remember I talked about Kaze no Real Sound, a Sega Saturn game designed for blind people, which he designed after talking to one blind person who said he liked D, but it was difficult to play. So he just, made an entire video game for blind people. Pretty cool. He was also famous for hand delivering pre-orders from nearby his offices. Oh, and there was the Sony thing. So he ported D over to the PS1, and ordered 100k copies from Sony. Sony took the order, then went “actually no, we’re only going to make 40k, we need to use our resources on games that matter,” and then they only ended up manufacturing 28k units. This pissed off Eno SO MUCH that he went to a Sony exclusive press conference, got on stage, and announced that all of his future games would be released for Sega consoles instead, and then walked off stage.

And yeah, they were. Things like Enemy Zero, D2, and Deep Fear were all Sega exclusives. Sadly, Eno passed away in 2013 at the far too young age of 42 due to heart failure attributed to hyper tension. THIS guy was too wound up? No way.

Anyways, D is kind of maybe not that good by today’s standards, but there’s a lot to love here. And it’s also batshit, in a good way. When I found out what the D stood for I was screaming.