GAMES BEATEN IN 2025

We're back again for another year of this! And this time it's NOT even five months late! Wow! So yeah, last year I started a lot of different games and finished very few of them, so I did not actually write about the majority of what I played. This year I'd like to actually finish playing those, ideally? Pretty please? AND I have money now, so I can actually buy new games again. Anyway, instead of any of those, this year we're starting off with...

If you are familiar with the scene of weird, offbeat video games, there's a solid chance you've heard of an outstandingly strange little game for the PS1 called LSD: Dream Emulator. (No relation to the drug, though the assumption is understandable given its aesthetics; the game's title reportedly stands for "Link Speed Dream".) LSD was in many ways a sort of predecessor to RPGMaker darling Yume Nikki, with both sharing the central gameplay concept of wandering aimlessly through surreal dream-worlds and being transported to new locations by touching points of interest, exploring until something forces you to wake up. It was only released in Japan and eventually found a cult following in the west as it was discovered by niche internet gaming circles, where the lack of easily available English-language information around it made it the basis of a variety of rumors about its production. The truth is that it is perhaps the best-known work of artist and musician Osamu Sato, who in fact made several games throughout the 90s, a few of which spent a considerable amount of time as lost media.

His first video game release, Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou (released as simply Tong-Nou in Japan), was also the only one to ever receive an official English release and lands at a rather distant second in terms of fame. The premise follows thusly: our protagonist Rin has their soul stolen by the living island of Tong-Nou, and so goes to get a temporary replacement soul from an old man at a shrine and then heads off to the island in order to retrieve their real soul. Unfortunately for Rin, they meet an abrupt and untimely demise as they explore, and the conceit reveals itself: Rin must reincarnate as eight different creatures and fulfil each one's purpose in life to claim their nameplates and unlock the path up the central mountain, where their stolen soul lies. This game was met with mixed reception on its release because, as one might guess from the precedent set by Sato's other work, it is incredibly weird in a way that some random game reviewer of the era might find kind of creepy and offputting. This is because they weren't cool enough to get it. It took general gaming culture far too long to be able to appreciate this type of game.

Tong-Nou is a point-and-click adventure game that just sort of drops you into the titular island (which, for the record, is depicted as a floating green head portrayed by Sato himself) and lets you have at it, and only actually starts giving you objectives once you've wandered around enough to stumble across some way to die. Once Rin has died, you're given a choice of facial features you must take to determine your next life, told what your mission is, and left to figure out how to get where you need to be. (For half of them, at least; the other half are functionally small vignettes where you just wait around for something to come along and kill you. Most of the time this is one of the other player characters.) Its structure is very open-ended, most things can be done in any order, and the vast majority of exploration progress is simply knowledge-gated. While a lot of the things you can encounter are in some way meaningful, the way it's all presented with little context very much gives this game a chaotic feeling where things just sort of happen with no rhyme or reason.

Honestly, despite the fact that this game is not presented as a dream the way LSD is, it still absolutely feels like one. The obvious point of interest is the character designs: all constructed out of abstract shapes in the rudimentary 3D of 1994, with their most detailed features consistently being their eyes and lips, and animated with a frenetic and jittery speed that often makes their designs difficult to fully parse. Things will occasionally just zoom by in-frame too fast for you to even tell what they are. The logic needed for puzzles is thankfully fairly straightforward when it's not just "guess and get lucky", but is pretty abstract everywhere else, most of all in the worldbuilding. ...On the subject of the guess and get lucky puzzles though, one of them is tied to the only true Game Over in the game, and it's such a unique idea for a failstate that I didn't even care that it lost me like an hour of progress. It's the kind of bad ending you only get when a game isn't afraid to eschew the rules of game design for the sake of art and I love it. It has you achieve immortality and softlocks you on purpose in a screen that just vomits random assets and screenshots and lines of text at you over and over as you experience the totality of existence forever. Apparently this was originally meant to be a screensaver? It's genuinely so cool.

This game's old enough that it has to be emulated through DOSbox nowadays, but luckily the Osamu Sato fan wiki has a download link with everything already set up for you (the first on this list), and it's also compiled with the fan translation of its sequel Chu-Teng (which you can also expect to see here at some point) and the formerly-lost Rolypolys no Nanakorobi Yaoki. I highly recommend giving it a shot if you care at all about video games as artistic expression. I've barely scratched the surface here, but this game was really before its time in terms of not being afraid to just be unabashedly itself, and it'd be right at home among the scores of "weird indies" that have the opportunity to shine now. We should all play weirder games. It's good for the soul.

Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show, Ga-show...