(Special Grade LSD Trip From Nihhon Land) ENA: Dream BBQ

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You remember those old Don Bluth games like Dragon's Lair? Yeah, this is like if one of his game's is based around this surreal painting. It's an adventure game, where you just talk to people who speak in different languages like French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, etc.

Think Tatami Galaxy meets Terry Gilliam's filmography. It is so persistent, almost eerily reminding me of those early adventure games with primitive 3D graphics. The best is, is how consistently it keeps throwing you weird stuff on and on. The multifaced and versatile art style must have taken some serious talent to bring, especially with a Unity engine.

It's hard to summarize the story, because there isn't really one convenient enough to convince you about what's going on. A series of events taking you from one place to another, sometimes requiring a higher plane of intelligence to figure out its continuity.

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So it starts off after I walk through what looks to be a remote Japanese village, with a giant silhouette of a person hovering over the sky. This level kept repeating itself till I found a single person bed, interacted before it took me to some small island surrounded by smoke and leg sharks.

I'm making sense of this as I can come along, because the first person I've gotten in contact with is a guy in a toad costume speaking Japanese. Let's call him Kenji. Kenji is my employer, he sends me out on errands exploring the vastness of this dream world. He's also vaxxed by a guy with penguin feet calling himself DRATULA! I need to remove the fog and leg sharks to proceed to the next island.

From here, I interact with a jinn, a talking French bot (Francois) obsessed with her collage of TVs, she explains about these doors to access. Ok, I have a few theories about that. What she has also explained is that a genie have the power to remove the smoke fog too.

So finding a genie is putting me on a task. Next I talked to is a neko mascot with coins for hands speaking Russian (Igor), he's pretty jumpy and often throws derogatory comments on me. But yeah, he tells me to head towards the Lonely Door, but not before speaking to this Korean employee (Seo-yeon) with a fungus face? She clears up confusion on a number of things.

Like, what are all these guys talking bout? What's my job? Which specific door should I go towards? Answers that actually brings more questions. The whole reason ENA is doing this, is because she needs to meet the boss. The ENA with the cap, blocky character model, and split personality both in red and aqua. You know, it's strange, it's like from a comprehensive standpoint I seemingly understand a lot, yet the more I delve into these things, there's like a whole other world unraveling.

This game is supposedly made by an art collective that dwells into the abstract. This feels like a linear game, but allowing me the choice of trying to know a lot more outside the objectives. I can take multiple missions, help some out, does that affect my choices in the end? Maybe.

You don't get a lot of games where they don't exactly spoon-feed you all the time as to what you're supposed to be doing. Like, a number of the characters in this world are just optional, and yet they pull me into some of the most obscure stuff I've seen. Making it funnier to watch and just gushing over the silliness helps a lot. Ok, who is this old magician now?

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I never get any lore, codexes, I'm supposed to make sense in my own way, and yet slowly a cohesive and comprehension understanding is coming to me about what kind of world this is. Majority of these characters are energizing, living with many intrigues.

Even getting glimpses of ENA's impression from some of them who does know her, and often times her past. The other time I'm screwing around, by trying to find pets for a guy who seems like he abuses them. Like, these pets of his leaves blood trails, damn. Funnily, death is no concept here, I can continue to fall down murky rivers and get revived again. For now, that is.

If you still feel like there are certain things that haven't been explained, here's why. This game is being released on chapters, the first one just came out not long ago. It's focusing on introducing these characters, the world from an overarching standpoint, and leave more pondering so that people would salivate more over the next releases. Sounds great?

Yeah, who wouldn't? I took a conjoined Taxi upside and down, to another bizarre part of the Lonely Door's world, following a child crawling on all four dimensions before leading me to a booth. Then a dancing club with a menagerie of exhibitions. Then this nonsense, I'm a dog now of sorts? What?

It took me not long to get out of the maze, and the trick was just looking into the entrance and backing out, trying the others. They open up. Leading me to this black abyss, with a giant bathroom. This bathroom is the genie we've been looking for. But I'll have to continue forward to learn more. By hopping over another lake stream with floating bamboo boards. Which I failed miserably.

Well call me a fan of artsy fartsy stuff, then again, I was already there when I watched various Terry Gilliam films, and explored my curious side of contemporary arts. This game should be in a museum somewhere, but it's on Steam. For free. You can literally down it now.

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