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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