PlayStation Basement #60 - D

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on October 19th, 2019.

Hello again, and welcome back to the PlayStation Basement! PlayStation Basement is a weekly review of an odd or obscure game for the original PlayStation. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral. Now, let’s go!

October’s month of horror returns with Kenji Eno’s D. This was intended to be my first horror review for the month, but various challenges arose that forced me to push the review back. It was my first PlayStation longbox game (a set I ended up completing a year later) and a game that I sometimes saw growing up but having no idea what it was. D was released on the 3DO, Saturn, PC, and the PS1 at various points in 1995 and 1996. I’ll just be talking about the PlayStation version. The game was released in Japan as D no Shokutaku (D’s Dining Table) and later as D’s Diner: Director’s Cut, but it is known only as D in the West. The game was developed by Warp, basically an indie developer run by composer Kenji Eno, and published by Acclaim in all regions. The game was followed by Enemy Zero on the Saturn and D2 on the Dreamcast after Eno jumped ship from the failed 3DO and the untruthful Sony, who did not produce the game in the numbers that they had said they would initially. Of course, Eno himself did not give Sony what they expected, throwing in extra scenes of violence after the game was given an ESRB rating of Teen.

But wait, what is D? Well, I think of it as a traditional adventure game (point and click), though the game has also been called an interactive movie. Though I feel that calling anything is kind of misleading, D is a game composed entirely of pre-rendered graphics and FMVs. Across three discs, players take on the role of Laura, the daughter of the famous Dr. Richter Harris who has unexpectedly committed mass murders at the Los Angeles National Hospital. Laura enters the hospital alone to discover what has become of her father, finding corpses leading to a bizarre portal to a medieval castle. Only two hours remain for her to solve the puzzle.

The cover art sets the tone for D nicely. The North American and European covers display a dark face with crying eyes within the letter of the title with scenery below. The North American version shows a staircase and a statue, while the European version shows the entryway of a castle. The Japanese version is kind of cheap-looking, showing a motion blur of Laura in stark white light with red lettering for the title. They are all a bit unnerving and help represent the creepiness and awkwardness of D.

Since D is composed entirely of early FMVs and pre-rendered images, it is both ambitious and limited. The graphics are pretty good overall with smooth animations, cool textures, and eerie places. The characters feature expressions on their faces as terrible events happen, so you feel involved in the game. Some of these animations are kind of stiff though, mostly when fine movements need to happen, so there’s almost a B-movie quality. The backgrounds also border on cheesiness. It’s a dark castle with torture devices and decaying corpses. This is legitimately disturbing stuff, but it’s also been done many times before. To me, this dualism of camp horror with gore and eeriness works in the game’s favor. Your opinion may surely vary.

Moving on, I find D’s sound design to be brilliant but also idiosyncratic. The game has a soundtrack like a film, the musick having kind of a modern classical feel except for the rock theme used for the credits. The musick was composed by the designer, Kenji Eno, and it works really well with the game. The dissonance gives the scenes in the game an uneasy quality. Soundtracks sound really crisp and lifelike with clanking gears, clacking footsteps, water splashing, gunshots, and various sounds of things breaking. The sound is really dynamic and seems kind of loud at times. I played this game on my PSOne using the attachable screen; the sound distorted, going into the red when significant events happened with loud sound effects and musick. I’m sure it would sound great on a bigger system, but I’m still getting my house set up from our move at the end of July.

You may be thinking, “if D is an interactive movie, what is the gameplay like?” Basically, as I mentioned above, it’s an adventure game. It’s not a long one and one without fine movements, but it’s not unlike other games in the genre such as Myst. Basically, Laura moves between scenes, this game using lifelike movements, to find clues and solve puzzles. Buttons are used to interact with objects, cancel selections, and open the menu. In addition to the key items needed for puzzles, you are also equipped with a mirror and a watch. The mirror can be used to gain a hint during the game, though the mirror cracks a bit with each use. The watch tells you the current time. The game starts at 3 o’clock and ends at 5 o’clock. Everything plays out in real time, and you cannot pause D (except for on the screens that tell you to change to the next disc of three). This limited time makes the game hectic and anxiety-inducing since exploration and puzzle-solving aren’t always done instantly. You’ll probably need to play through the game a few times to make it to the end, and hopefully no real world obligations will pop up requiring immediate attention.

I still haven’t entirely completed D because of real world obligations, though I do think it’s an interesting and artful game. My first playthrough ended in me taking a walk after having a few days of sitting in cramped quarters, taking a bus for three hours, and then more sitting as I waited for people who never showed up. I didn’t know if the game could pause, so I left it on the inventory screen and went out. I came back to a game over which wasn’t incredibly surprising or alarming to me. I only played got a tiny bit into the game anyway due to my tiredness. The second playthrough ended with my girlfriend and I running out of time in what appeared to be the final screens of the game. It’s all okay, as I know what to do next time.

D is a pretty weird game that took new technology and made something a bit off-kilter. The horrible revelation of horribleness (sorry, you’ll need to find it out for yourself) was shocking as I discovered the truth about Richter Harris. It was fun to explore the weird castle and figure out the puzzles with logic and clues. D seems to have influenced Resident Evil and Dracula: Resurrection with similar settings and stories; the wild maps of the Spencer Mansion and the Raccoon Police Station really remind me of D’s weird “castle in a hospital” setup. Kenji Eno went on to make other weird games like Real Sound: Wind of Regret and Flupon: Space Biology P!, the latter of which we will see in a later review. In the mean time, explore a castle and escape in the nick of time. You can always try again.

D receives a Good.

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