When I was 15 or so and I first discovered this game by way of AzuriteReaction throwing his controller at a CRT over a low-poly dragon slowly floating towards the screen, I think it would be a while before I actually appreciated this game for what it was, an ambitious, way-ahead-of-its-time, baffling and insanely creative piece of interactive art.

LSD: Dream Emulator, to this day, is one of the most confounding and strange experiences someone can have playing a video game. It's purposefully confusing and obtuse, its a bit of a clunky mess controls wise, and the dated, low-poly, jaggy graphics might put some off, but honestly, to me, they only add to how surreal the experience of playing this thing is.

Think about it though, this is a true to form walking simulator decades before that would even become an accepted term, and a really good one too, honestly. The atmosphere ranges from chipper to darkly surreal on a whim, there are tons of random events and oddities to stumble into, the game gets more and more gleefully warped as you progress, and despite the limitations, this game is graphically speaking, perfectly ugly-beautiful.

Did I mention the soundtrack? Not even joking when I say the LSD and Remixes CD that originally came with the game might be one of the best IDM albums of all time. Banger after banger.

If you ever get the chance to play it on an actual PS1 or decide to set up an emulator for it, I think it's a game that everyone into more experimental games should experience at least once, it's perhaps the first example of its kind and it deserves its reputation as one of the most gloriously twisted games ever made.

you hear the one about avid players of tetris? their minds basically get rewritten because of exposure to the damn thing. thing is, this is true of any earthly activity that brings together body, mind, and soul. its psychosomatic, kinaesthetic. any activity that informs consciousness will bleed into the subconscious. my dreams aren't really like the ones LSD presents, but my fear is that they will be.

a product of its time in all the ways that matter and bolstered as a result. psx architecture struggling under the weight of hell and failing to load in the density of its worlds in time leaves the mind incapable of guarding itself for whats going to happen next - legitimately unsettling, unpredictable, uncanny, uncaring. youre sieved through textures and atmospheres at a rapid clip. no barriers exist here, everything is simply a permeable membrane. every scene, vignette, happenstance, and interaction a stitched-together quilt one night and a tesseract the next. like any work of its kind it requires a certain level of maturity and commitment - particularly these days when the only thing you can reliably bet on about an audience is their urge to demystify - but you ought to take the leap. this is really affecting work here that i cant possibly be cynical about and a great alternative to melatonin

It's uhhhh quite something. The atmosphere is fantastic and genuinely unnerves me a lot of the time, in part due to the low framerate and bizarrely loud footsteps. The areas are interesting but I prefer how Yume Nikki is set up where you know exactly where you're going and there's a lot of things to see and do that aren't random. LSD is more unpredictable but leads to a lot of aimless warping around the same areas over and over again until a random event happens. Time to scour that wiki I suppose.