(This is the 108th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)
You probably know about Heavy Rain's JASON and SHAUN. Now get ready for D's Laura. Laura. LAURA... Laura. If you can appreciate the hilarity inherent in low poly character models coupled with the developers trying to give them serious, vivid expressions, D will have plenty of stuff to laugh at for you.
D, yes, just D, is an interactive horror game that initially released for the 3DO in April 1995 and later was released for the Sega Saturn, PlayStation and MS-DOS, as well as Steam and GOG decades later, where it's still available today. It's a game in which you control the main character through FMV sequences. Each time you choose to walk in a direction, a video plays moving the character in that direction, so there are only a limited number of spots in each room your character can stand in.
The director of this game is a pretty interesting character in his own right. Named Kenji Eno, he has done some wild shit during his time as a video game developer. For starters, he added some violent and pretty dark elements to the game, which he removed in a "clean version" shown to the publisher. Getting the game approved due to that, he then swapped out the clean version for the actual, violent/dark version on his way to the manufacturer, which is why we got that stuff in the game.
When the game released for the PS1, Sony did not print enough copies to match the pre-orders, which upset him so much that he exclusively released games on Sega platforms from then on. When presenting his next game at a SONY press conference, yes Sony, he showed a Sony logo warping into the Sega Saturn logo and announced the game would be a Sega Saturn exclusive. Again, AT A SONY PRESS CONFERENCE.
He also shipped condoms with one of his games "Short Warp" and probably even more wild shit I didn't find. Definitely quite a character, but his games, if they are anything like D, and they seem to be, are certainly not of the highest objective quality. He unfortunately passed in 2013 at the very young age of 42.
D is certainly a unique game for this time period where distinct video games releases and overall innovation were seemingly non-stop occurences, so let's see what it brought to the table.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
The game starts with an opening cutscene showing us a hospital at which a revered doctor turned into a mass murderer. Some text explains this to us alongside an awkward scene depicting a man with overly long limbs shooting a handgun with some weird looking recoil on it. Anyway, the text goes on to say that the daughter of his, Laura Harris, gets a message by the LAPD that her father went on a mass murdering spree, so get this, she rushes to the scene in her sports car and just rushes into the hospital while the LAPD just chills outside at their cars trying to contact the man, not giving a single fudge that a young woman puts herself in insane danger by going into the hospital on her own. When I tell you that video game developers trying their hand at storytelling during this era of games will be quite an awkward struggle, I'm probably understating that by quite a bit. All the more impressive what Kojima is about to do just 3 years later.
Back to the story. Laura gets into the hospital but gets teleported to some sort of castle where she is met with quite a task. Solve the mystery in two hours (no save points, no pauses) or start over. Here is where the game begins and you start doing a bunch of puzzles to find your way to your father, who regularly interrupts Laura by saying "Laura...Laura...LAURA", showing up in warped-head form, and telling her to not come closer.
It's a story that makes little sense, so unpacking it will do your enjoyment all harm and no good. Know that the poor voice acting makes the experience funny at times but it's not a priority for this game where atmosphere is more important to the experience.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
The game, as explained, has you control Laura by clicking buttons on a directional pad to turn and move through FMV sequences that play out whenever you press something. If you get closer to an item you can interact with, click the circle button and a short scene plays out, such as Laura looking into a bowl that turns into a pool of blood, or a hand coming at you out of a mirror or Laura opening a door. That's pretty much it. You walk around and interact with stuff in a puzzle game / point and click adventure type fashion.
It gets the job done and the walking motion is quite cinematic, which adds to the feel of the game, but your interaction with the game is primarily solving puzzles and watching Laura as she veeeeery slowly executes your solutions and opens up her mouth wide to express surprise, shock or horror no matter what happens.
There are some sections that are slow and some that are even slower, but you should still be more than OK with the 2 hour time limit. At worst, it will take you two tries I'd predict.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
The voice acting here is twofold. You have Laura breathing heavily whenever she is scared and you have Laura's dad, the murderer, doing all the talking. It's pretty bad overall. The sound design gave me mixed impressions, as some sounds added to the atmosphere well and some didn't really sound all that accurate, like turning a handle early on in the game, which sounds like some developer letting himself get kicked in the nuts and squealing in pain. The soundtrack has a limited number of tracks in it, and they're OK. The game mostly lives on atmospheric sounds, such as the gong that you hear throughout the first area alongside some static noise. Music plays during interactions or other cutscenes do amplify the horror in a situation, and I think it does a solid job there, typical to any horror movie of that time you'd watch.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
You have many ways you can feel about the visuals in this game. On the one hand, you have the cinematic feeling of the FMV sequences, which are relatively well made actually. You got the aesthetic of the castle, the disgusting nature of all the bodies and the flashback scenes and also some of the animation as positives. The walking sequence also adds a lot to make the visual experience more distinct.
On the other hand, the character models lend themselves to hilarity, whether it's the overgrown limbs of the murderer, the Dwayne The Rock Johnson-esque shoulders on Laura or the exaggerated expressions on her face. Then there are the blurry textures and the 15 FPS the game runs in, which will dampen the experience depending on your sensitivity to that.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
The atmosphere and immersion are the main priorities in this game, and I feel like the game does a solid job in that regard for the most part. The voice acting and character models can unintentionally make the game funny rather than scary, but depending on how susceptible you are to being frightened in horror games and the age you play this game at, you might actually get really scared by the game. The retro look and feel to it also amplifies that in these games I feel.
If you're wondering, the game does not kill you, but has plenty of jumpscares and near-death experiences in store for you, both optional and mandatory to experience, and there is one singular QTE fighting scene. You get these events nearly all the time, so tension is high throughout. It'll all depend on your tolerance. It's no Resident Evil 1 or Silent Hill 1 which would release for the PS1 in later years, but it definitely can be scary and disturbing.
CONTENT | 6/10
Content does not mean the game needs to have a lot of it. If the game takes only 2 hours to beat, how does it fill those two hours? Well, D has you running around doing puzzles, which is a straightforward process for the most part, but the castle is also filled with lots of optional areas to go into which will give you some scenes that you don't have to see. So both the mandatory and optional content is designed to have you on the edge of your seat as you figure out a way forward, and I don't think there is much wrong with that for a game like this. Execution lacks sometimes though.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
Moving around is a slooow process, which drags down the experience a bit. Then there is the rotation room, where you need to rotate a wheel around and then turn around and see which of 5 available doors opened. This happens randomly and seemingly 8 out of 10 times, you get a brick wall to appear, which means you can't enter that at all. You need to enter the remaining doors in a specific order, so you will be stuck for many minutes overall trying for the right door to appear. Rotate, turn around to check on the door, see that it's the wrong door, turn back around to the wheel, rotate again, turn around to check on the door etc. It's a really dumb level and takes over a third of the time you will spend on the game. Other than that, you got rather simple puzzles to solve, and that's that.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10
A game full of FMV scenes that is not a Night Trap-like game but rather a horror adventure game was conceptually unexplored at the time, and looking at how the game turned out, I don't think D managed to get it quite right. That said, I can tell that with the start of the 5th generation of consoles, experimentation is a big theme, so I can appreciate that about D, as well as the fact that it atmospherically did plenty right.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
There is a good ending that you can impact at the last scene. Do a specific something and you'll get it. Don't do it and you'll get a bad ending. Exceed the two hour time limit and you get a game over ending. Then there are plenty of optional rooms to open and cutscenes to watch. I'd say those are kind of worth the second playthrough if you really enjoy the game, but no replayability here otherwise.
PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Works well, but the 15 FPS and the slow pace of it all makes it a slog to play through at times.
OVERALL | 53/100
I don't think the game is worth playing today because what it aims for has been done better by many of the horror games we consider mediocre these days. D doesn't stand out in any way anymore, but if you do see yourself as a retro (horror) games fan, D is probably a niche title you could get a bit of enjoyment out of for its 2 hour run time.
You probably know about Heavy Rain's JASON and SHAUN. Now get ready for D's Laura. Laura. LAURA... Laura. If you can appreciate the hilarity inherent in low poly character models coupled with the developers trying to give them serious, vivid expressions, D will have plenty of stuff to laugh at for you.
D, yes, just D, is an interactive horror game that initially released for the 3DO in April 1995 and later was released for the Sega Saturn, PlayStation and MS-DOS, as well as Steam and GOG decades later, where it's still available today. It's a game in which you control the main character through FMV sequences. Each time you choose to walk in a direction, a video plays moving the character in that direction, so there are only a limited number of spots in each room your character can stand in.
The director of this game is a pretty interesting character in his own right. Named Kenji Eno, he has done some wild shit during his time as a video game developer. For starters, he added some violent and pretty dark elements to the game, which he removed in a "clean version" shown to the publisher. Getting the game approved due to that, he then swapped out the clean version for the actual, violent/dark version on his way to the manufacturer, which is why we got that stuff in the game.
When the game released for the PS1, Sony did not print enough copies to match the pre-orders, which upset him so much that he exclusively released games on Sega platforms from then on. When presenting his next game at a SONY press conference, yes Sony, he showed a Sony logo warping into the Sega Saturn logo and announced the game would be a Sega Saturn exclusive. Again, AT A SONY PRESS CONFERENCE.
He also shipped condoms with one of his games "Short Warp" and probably even more wild shit I didn't find. Definitely quite a character, but his games, if they are anything like D, and they seem to be, are certainly not of the highest objective quality. He unfortunately passed in 2013 at the very young age of 42.
D is certainly a unique game for this time period where distinct video games releases and overall innovation were seemingly non-stop occurences, so let's see what it brought to the table.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 3/10
The game starts with an opening cutscene showing us a hospital at which a revered doctor turned into a mass murderer. Some text explains this to us alongside an awkward scene depicting a man with overly long limbs shooting a handgun with some weird looking recoil on it. Anyway, the text goes on to say that the daughter of his, Laura Harris, gets a message by the LAPD that her father went on a mass murdering spree, so get this, she rushes to the scene in her sports car and just rushes into the hospital while the LAPD just chills outside at their cars trying to contact the man, not giving a single fudge that a young woman puts herself in insane danger by going into the hospital on her own. When I tell you that video game developers trying their hand at storytelling during this era of games will be quite an awkward struggle, I'm probably understating that by quite a bit. All the more impressive what Kojima is about to do just 3 years later.
Back to the story. Laura gets into the hospital but gets teleported to some sort of castle where she is met with quite a task. Solve the mystery in two hours (no save points, no pauses) or start over. Here is where the game begins and you start doing a bunch of puzzles to find your way to your father, who regularly interrupts Laura by saying "Laura...Laura...LAURA", showing up in warped-head form, and telling her to not come closer.
It's a story that makes little sense, so unpacking it will do your enjoyment all harm and no good. Know that the poor voice acting makes the experience funny at times but it's not a priority for this game where atmosphere is more important to the experience.
GAMEPLAY | 8/20
The game, as explained, has you control Laura by clicking buttons on a directional pad to turn and move through FMV sequences that play out whenever you press something. If you get closer to an item you can interact with, click the circle button and a short scene plays out, such as Laura looking into a bowl that turns into a pool of blood, or a hand coming at you out of a mirror or Laura opening a door. That's pretty much it. You walk around and interact with stuff in a puzzle game / point and click adventure type fashion.
It gets the job done and the walking motion is quite cinematic, which adds to the feel of the game, but your interaction with the game is primarily solving puzzles and watching Laura as she veeeeery slowly executes your solutions and opens up her mouth wide to express surprise, shock or horror no matter what happens.
There are some sections that are slow and some that are even slower, but you should still be more than OK with the 2 hour time limit. At worst, it will take you two tries I'd predict.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 6/10
The voice acting here is twofold. You have Laura breathing heavily whenever she is scared and you have Laura's dad, the murderer, doing all the talking. It's pretty bad overall. The sound design gave me mixed impressions, as some sounds added to the atmosphere well and some didn't really sound all that accurate, like turning a handle early on in the game, which sounds like some developer letting himself get kicked in the nuts and squealing in pain. The soundtrack has a limited number of tracks in it, and they're OK. The game mostly lives on atmospheric sounds, such as the gong that you hear throughout the first area alongside some static noise. Music plays during interactions or other cutscenes do amplify the horror in a situation, and I think it does a solid job there, typical to any horror movie of that time you'd watch.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
You have many ways you can feel about the visuals in this game. On the one hand, you have the cinematic feeling of the FMV sequences, which are relatively well made actually. You got the aesthetic of the castle, the disgusting nature of all the bodies and the flashback scenes and also some of the animation as positives. The walking sequence also adds a lot to make the visual experience more distinct.
On the other hand, the character models lend themselves to hilarity, whether it's the overgrown limbs of the murderer, the Dwayne The Rock Johnson-esque shoulders on Laura or the exaggerated expressions on her face. Then there are the blurry textures and the 15 FPS the game runs in, which will dampen the experience depending on your sensitivity to that.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10
The atmosphere and immersion are the main priorities in this game, and I feel like the game does a solid job in that regard for the most part. The voice acting and character models can unintentionally make the game funny rather than scary, but depending on how susceptible you are to being frightened in horror games and the age you play this game at, you might actually get really scared by the game. The retro look and feel to it also amplifies that in these games I feel.
If you're wondering, the game does not kill you, but has plenty of jumpscares and near-death experiences in store for you, both optional and mandatory to experience, and there is one singular QTE fighting scene. You get these events nearly all the time, so tension is high throughout. It'll all depend on your tolerance. It's no Resident Evil 1 or Silent Hill 1 which would release for the PS1 in later years, but it definitely can be scary and disturbing.
CONTENT | 6/10
Content does not mean the game needs to have a lot of it. If the game takes only 2 hours to beat, how does it fill those two hours? Well, D has you running around doing puzzles, which is a straightforward process for the most part, but the castle is also filled with lots of optional areas to go into which will give you some scenes that you don't have to see. So both the mandatory and optional content is designed to have you on the edge of your seat as you figure out a way forward, and I don't think there is much wrong with that for a game like this. Execution lacks sometimes though.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
Moving around is a slooow process, which drags down the experience a bit. Then there is the rotation room, where you need to rotate a wheel around and then turn around and see which of 5 available doors opened. This happens randomly and seemingly 8 out of 10 times, you get a brick wall to appear, which means you can't enter that at all. You need to enter the remaining doors in a specific order, so you will be stuck for many minutes overall trying for the right door to appear. Rotate, turn around to check on the door, see that it's the wrong door, turn back around to the wheel, rotate again, turn around to check on the door etc. It's a really dumb level and takes over a third of the time you will spend on the game. Other than that, you got rather simple puzzles to solve, and that's that.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10
A game full of FMV scenes that is not a Night Trap-like game but rather a horror adventure game was conceptually unexplored at the time, and looking at how the game turned out, I don't think D managed to get it quite right. That said, I can tell that with the start of the 5th generation of consoles, experimentation is a big theme, so I can appreciate that about D, as well as the fact that it atmospherically did plenty right.
REPLAYABILITY | 2/5
There is a good ending that you can impact at the last scene. Do a specific something and you'll get it. Don't do it and you'll get a bad ending. Exceed the two hour time limit and you get a game over ending. Then there are plenty of optional rooms to open and cutscenes to watch. I'd say those are kind of worth the second playthrough if you really enjoy the game, but no replayability here otherwise.
PLAYABILITY | 4/5
Works well, but the 15 FPS and the slow pace of it all makes it a slog to play through at times.
OVERALL | 53/100
I don't think the game is worth playing today because what it aims for has been done better by many of the horror games we consider mediocre these days. D doesn't stand out in any way anymore, but if you do see yourself as a retro (horror) games fan, D is probably a niche title you could get a bit of enjoyment out of for its 2 hour run time.