A Week with 'LSD: Dream Emulator'

A journey into the most "cursed" game on the PlayStation, where the only objective is to lose your mind...

LSD: Dream Emulator is unapologetically trippy. Less a game, more of a cult classic.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I actually wrote this back in the summer of 2025. My wife had just given birth to our third child. This means I was operating on a level of sleep deprivation usually reserved for hostages and medical residents. I decided that the best way to handle my delicate psychological state was to play a game designed to simulate psychosis. In hindsight, this was a mistake.

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My dreams are normally influenced by the day that proceeds them. Not always, but usually.

From the mundane to the extraordinary, I might dream of picking out paint colours from my local hardware store. Or I might dream of sitting in my late nanny’s kitchen, showing her our latest addition to the family, while trying to explain the modern world to her over a brief lunch.

I can still see her filling the glass, narrating the fizz and foam of the lemonade with infectious excitement. She’d hand me a treat for each hand, a simple gesture of care. Yet, the moment I moved to tell her how much I cherished being a father again, she would vanish.

There’s no sadness in this fleeting moment. I’ll see her again, just as I’ll be back in the depths of the paint aisle of B&Q, deliberating over the perfect color for the smallest in the clan.

I am a traveller by night, visiting untouched landscapes and the people who inhabit my heart. My wife, however, doesn't share in these voyages. To her knowledge, her sleep is a destination without a view.

Explaining a dream to someone who didn't live it is hard enough. Translating that same ephemeral feeling into the rigid language of bytes and hardware seems an impossible feat of engineering. But then I found it, or perhaps it found me?

A digital fever dream etched onto a disc. The internet told me LSD: Dream Emulator is a "cult classic." They told me it was a "pioneer of the walking simulator genre." They told me LSD stood for "Lovely Sweet Dream."

I think they were lying.

This Japan-exclusive PS1 title from 1998 is not really a game. It was produced by Osamu Sato, a multimedia artist who presumably looked at Super Mario 64 and thought, "Yes, but what if Mario was clinically depressed and trapped in a kaleidoscope?"

There’s much to explore in this collection.

The premise is simple, in the way a car crash is simple. You play through "dreams" based on a decade-long diary kept by a studio employee named Hiroko Nishikawa. You touch a wall. You teleport. You touch another wall, you teleport again. You try not to weep. And so on.

Here is my diary of the experience.

Day 1: The Graph of Despair

I boot up the game at 3:00 AM. The newborn is finally asleep, but the house still vibrates with the phantom energy of the other two children.

The mechanics are explained to me with the clarity of a ransom note. You walk around in first-person. If you bump into a wall, object, or entity, you "Link" to a new environment. A dream lasts 10 minutes, or until you fall off a cliff.

At the end of each run, the game plots your progress on a "Graph." The axes are Upper, Downer, Static, and Dynamic.

I do have to laugh at the uniqueness of Nishikawa’s dreams compared to mine. Screenshot from LSD: Revamped.

I spawn in a Japanese house. It’s quite nice, actually. Quieter than my house. Then I walk into a wall and am instantly transported to a dark, industrial tunnel filled with the sound of grinding metal. It sounds exactly like my washing machine on the spin cycle.

I switch the game off and play Uncharted instead.

My Dream That Night:

Nothing exciting. I dreamt I was at Tesco trying to buy a specific type of oat milk, but they only had the barista blend, which I find too creamy. I spent twenty minutes looking for a customer service representative. Very mundane. My brain is clearly rejecting the game's influence.

Day 2: The Textures Are Sentient

The game engine does this thing where it randomizes textures every time you revisit an area. It’s quite unsettling. Yesterday, the walls of the "Happy Town" were brick. Today, they are covered in giant, stretched images of a human eye.

I feel like I’m trapped inside a screen saver designed by a nihilist.

I met a character today. A small girl jumping rope. I approached her to see if she had a quest. She didn't have a quest. She didn't have a face. Her head detached from her body and floated away like a balloon filled with helium.

I don’t fight easily, but there’s something about my own sleep deprivation and playing this late at night that has me questioning aspects of reality.

My Dream That Night:

I was filing my taxes. I had all my receipts spread out on the dining table. The only weird thing was that every time I picked up a receipt, the sound of crinkling paper was slightly delayed, like a bad audio dub in a Godzilla movie. Otherwise, completely normal administrative anxiety.

Day 3: The Grey Man and the Mechanics of Fear

I’ve done some research. Apparently, there is a figure called the "Grey Man." If you touch him, he erases your "Flashback" ability. Essentially wiping your memory of previous dreams.

I saw him today. He walks with a jaunty, confident stride, like a man who has just successfully sued a hospital.

Characters often have no facial detail. Screenshot from LSD: Revamped.

I tried to run away, but the controls handle like a shopping trolley with a missing wheel in gravel. I backed into a wall and "Linked" to a field of giant sunflowers. The sunflowers turned to look at me. They sounded like a fax machine connecting to hell.

I'm starting to wonder if I've made a mistake here. I'm getting at most 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night.

My Dream That Night:

I was at a dinner party. Everything was going well, but I couldn't stop staring at the host's curtains. They were a tartan pattern. I remember thinking, "That texture is tiling too frequently." I tried to tell a joke, but I forgot the punchline and just said the word "Downer" instead. Nobody laughed.

Day 4: Violence District

I spawned in the "Violence District." It looks surprisingly like a regular city street, except there’s a giant sumo wrestler floating in the sky and a woman’s face plastered on the pavement.

I realized today that there is no music. Just... noise. Sometimes it's a jaunty synth loop; sometimes it's a woman screaming in reverse. It’s the sonic equivalent of finding a tooth in your soup.

I tried to follow a geisha down an alleyway. She turned into a pterodactyl. I’m not making this up. That is a factual description of the gameplay loop.

My Dream That Night:

I was back in Tesco. I reached for a BLT, but my hand clipped right through the plastic. The sandwich suddenly began vibrating violently on the shelf, emitting a loud mechanical screech, before launching itself into the ceiling tiles at Mach 3. I gasped and looked around in a panic, waiting for the screams.

There were none. I woke up.

Day 5: The Overlap

I played for an hour straight. The baby was asleep on my chest. The vibration of the controller seemed to soothe her.

The "text dreams" are getting to me. These are black screens with white text that appear randomly. One read: "I put the baby in the washing machine. It was cleaner that way."

A glitchy peacock parades through a surreal hall of red gates.

I looked down at my actual baby. She looked back at me with the judgmental eyes of an ancient deity. At least that’s what it felt like at the time. I turned the console off immediately.

I watched the US version of the office until my wife took over.

My Dream That Night:

I am sprinting down the frozen food aisle of Tesco. It is three miles long. The floor is made of raw meat textures. I look into the freezer to get some peas, but the freezer is full of the floating heads from the game. I turn to ask a shelf stacker for help. He turns around. It’s the Giant Sumo Wrestler. He is wearing a blue Tesco fleece. He body slams me into the fish fingers. I dissolve into pixels. The tannoy announces: "Clean up in aisle 'Downer'."

Day 6: The Elephant Made of Tofu

I found the "Nature" biome. It has animals. I saw a lion. It didn't roar; it just slid across the ground without moving its legs, like a chess piece pushed by an invisible giant.

I’ve started predicting the Links. "If I hit this tree, I’ll end up in the Kyodai House." I hit the tree. I ended up in the Kyodai House. I am becoming one with the code. I am the Dream Emulator. I am also Dad. I am tired.

My Dream That Night:

I was sitting on a park bench next to Bob Geldof. He was holding a packet of damp ham. "It's for the draw distance," he whispered. "We need the ham to render the horizon." I looked at the horizon. It wasn't there. It was just a black void with the words "LOADING..." floating in Times New Roman. I took a slice of ham. It tasted like static.

Day 7: Total Ego Death

I booted up the game for the last time. My "Graph" is a mess. It looks like a spider fell into an inkwell and had a seizure.

I walked into the "Temple" area. I stared at the wall. The texture shifted. It wasn't a wall anymore. It was... me. It was a low-res texture of my own face, looking back at me, bags under my eyes deep enough to carry groceries in, judging me for spending a week of my summer doing this.

I turned the console off. But the music didn't stop.

My Dream That Night:

I am floating in a void. Hiroko Nishikawa is there. She hands me an egg. I crack the egg open, and inside is a PlayStation 1 console. I plug it in. The game starts. I am the game. The game is me. We are all just textures waiting to be swapped out.

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Verdict:

LSD: Dream Emulator is a triumph of avant-garde ‘horror’ and a landmark achievement in early procedural design. Though it serves just as effectively as a compelling piece of evidence for a therapist’s couch.

It has the charm of a whimsical fairytale and the structural integrity of a nervous breakdown. Is it worth playing? Well, you can’t really get more experimental than this. If that’s your bag, then this is absolutely worth your time.

Score: 10/10 (Help me)