It's the third of four horror themed newsletters! Four horror games, each one can be finished in a couple of hours tops and each one is very, very easy to get running under emulation on pretty much anything you have in your house, should you wish to play along with these this Halloween. If you need any help or advice in getting these games running, hit me up on Twitter, slide into my DMs or just reply to this newsletter (which sends me an email, and I'll fire you a reply!) and I'll try and sort you out.

The Lady Is A Vamp.

Whether the visuals be rendered 3D or live action actors, there's this brilliant thing about mid 90's FMV adventure games where everything about them is trying to showcase this new technology as the clear future of not only the videogame medium but also film, offering interactivity that was previously impossible and visuals that - apparently - made your Marios and Sonics look like "kids stuff", but despite this we all know the whole thing is destined for very rapid failure. The budget just wasn't there for the film stuff, making most of it look like a particularly rough amateur dramatics presentation and in regards to the CGI stuff, the tech just wasn't around to allow for high resolution or smooth renders. Hindsight is always 20/20 and all that, but this stuff was always going to end up largely in the bin, no matter what the magazines at the time were telling you. They're a glimpse at a future of interactive entertainment that was never going to happen - Sam Barlow's recent belter Immortality, as well as the rest of his titles, flying the flag for the modern interpretation of this stuff.

D came out within a year of Resident Evil hitting shelves and changing horror and adventure videogames for the foreseeable future. It reviewed and performed well enough at the time of release but these days is considered a bit of a relic - a piece of horror gaming history that you'll see people say "watch a YouTube video" about, rather than actually sitting down and playing it. Now, I'm not going to spend this issue telling you that D is "good, actually" as it is absolutely a game that has a few issues, but instead just talking about the reasons I love the game. If your tastes align with mine somewhat, then you'll probably get something out of a playthrough. You can't talk about D at all, however, without first mentioning its creator, the late Kenji Eno.

There's plenty of brilliant documentaries on the man on YouTube so I won't go into great detail but Kenji Eno was a real maverick game developer. Here's a brief rundown of some of the things he did throughout his game development career.

• Blagged his way into game development off the back of a school project and when it was clear he couldn't actually do the job, blagged his way into writing the soundtrack.

• Developed an officially unreleased Superman game for the NES, although the ROM is now available online.

• Shipped a game packaged with a condom and one with "herb seeds".

• The game with the "herbs" was Real Sound: Kaze no Regret - a game designed entirely for blind people with textured items in the box and a braille instruction manual.

• Formed Warp on a plane on the way back from a trip to San Francisco where he saw loads of tech people getting high and thought "oh, game developers CAN be cool".

• Hid codes behind the jewel case disc tray on the 3DO version of D that required red cellophane in order to reveal them. The main character's name, Laura, or Left, A, Up, Right, A could be inputted at the end of the game to unlock an FMV library.

• Hoodwinked the censors by sending a 'clean' version of D to the publisher for certification, then switching the gold copy out for an uncensored version before it made it to the manufacturer. I think this might actually be fully illegal.

• Apparently no one at Warp even knew about these sequences, which heavily implies that Eno animated them HIMSELF.

• Trapped legendary composer Michael Nyman in a hotel room for six hours until he convinced him to do the soundtrack for Enemy Zero, then sent back his first draft because it wasn't good enough.

• Was a pioneer in indie development, with all of his studios being completely independent long before this was truly financially viable.

• At Warp's booth at TGS '97 he got together with some Sega music legends and played keyboard on a bunch of classic Sega music.

• Mugged Sony off live onstage at their 1996 E3 conference by announcing Enemy Zero for the PlayStation, only for the logo to morph into the Sega Saturn logo. He was immediately blacklisted.

• If this wasn't enough, a few months later at the Tokyo Game Show he ran a video of WARP employees dancing, singing "WARP IS A GOOD COMPANY, ENEMY ZERO IS A GOOD GAME" before cutting to a clip of him throwing a plush of the main character from Jumping Flash.

Eno struggled with his mental health throughout his life and left the games industry multiple times but whenever he returned, his goal of creating truly unique titles, from game to marketing to packaging - everything about them had his personality stamped all over them. His tragic death in 2013 at 42 years old is a huge loss. RIP big man.

After an introduction sequence that shows protagonist Laura Harris driving towards a hospital building where her father - Richter Harris - has barricaded himself inside, after seemingly going insane and murdering everyone trapped in there with him. Laura enters the hospital, in what can only be described as a frankly abysmal failing on behalf of the police who were on the scene, to confront her father and find out why this has occurred. Upon entering the hospital and seeing the carnage, a strange liquid metal looking entity transports her to some medieval castle. The disembodied head of her father appears to tell her that she needs to leave and if she stays in this pocket dimension too long, she will be trapped forever.

There's a hard time limit on this, too. Spend two hours trying to beat the game, and it's game over. Interestingly, although you wouldn't know it at the time, it's the only thing that can actually kill you in D - everything else is just implied threat. You have to navigate the castle, solving puzzles, making your way deeper into the place and eventually figuring out what exactly is going on.

D is an FMV adventure game, so although the game is largely viewed from a first-person perspective, you don't have 1:1 control over movement. You essentially move between screens, looking for areas where there are interactable elements and, once you find one, can either interact with them, trying to solve whatever the puzzle is or use an item that you have found. The puzzles are fairly simple and there's only ever one answer - there's only two elements that are randomised, and we'll get onto those in a bit - so once you know how to beat D, you can fly through the critical path in less than an hour. They're largely logic puzzles, requiring a little bit of lateral thinking or figuring out what item needs to be used where. Exploration is at a fucking glacial pace, with every single movement requiring the viewing of the video sequence of Laura moving between each screen. There's no skipping it, no way to speed it up. It requires a fair bit of patience and is one of the main reasons why D tends to be viewed as a bit of a product of its time and not worth playing in the modern day.

Thing is, I was brought up on a diet of C64 text-based adventures and Knightmare, so a slow-paced trot around a castle, where each movement requires you to take stock of what is around you and whether there's anything you can use or new direction you can take scratches a very specific nostalgic itch for me. The fact that you can't just edge into a room - pressing forward starts the video of Laura moving to the next screen - adds a tension to every step. You can't peek around a corner like you could in a horror game with more control given to the player, you have to commit to barrelling straight in, regardless of what is ahead. There's no pausing, either. The two hour time limit is constantly ticking away and there's something psychological about the fact you can't just step away from it, that anything can happen that adds a sense of dread. The atmosphere in D is like nothing else, equal parts creepy isolation, all alone in this horrid castle full of traps and corpses of less lucky explorers and bizarre, off-kilter surrealism, as the flashbacks and bad-but-actually-quite-effectively-weird voice acting makes everything feel almost like a dream. The way Richter appears as a translucent, disembodied head saying "LAURA. LAURA. LAUUURA." with a strange, tense and frustrated tone puts me right on edge, even if he can't hurt you and usually appears only to warn you to turn back or give a little more plot exposition away. The amazing, minimal soundtrack by Eno himself is the icing on the atmospheric cake. I would struggle to recommend the actual playing of D to most people these days but the atmosphere does a lot of heavy lifting. So much so, it makes me forget about its mechanical flaws and clearly aged ideas.

A way D ensures that you always explore every nook and cranny, even when you know all the solutions to solve the game is through a smart bit of randomisation. Throughout the game, on certain screens, there's a chance that a glowing beetle will appear. There's no way to see these until you're on the screen, so even if you know the critical path, you need to go to all possible screens to see if you can trigger these. When you find one, you get a flashback sequence, which is the area Kenji Eno conveniently left out when submitting the game to the publisher. There's four of these sequences, eventually showing Laura as a child murdering her mother by stabbing her to death at the dinner table and then - get this - cannibalising a portion of her body.

Turns out, Laura's bloodline is that of Dracula (and yes, that's what the D stands for) and periodically someone in the family can be possessed by the big man, so after that grim event, her father wiped her memory of it so she could live a normal life. After the massacre at the hospital and knowledge of Laura coming to confront him, her father created a pocket dimension and sealed himself away in it, so that Dracula couldn't possess his daughter. When you finally track him down, he's begun his full transformation into old Drac and you can choose whether to be consumed by him and allow him back into this world or you can shoot him dead, instantly transporting you both back into the real world hospital, killing Dracula but also your father, who dies in Laura's arms. I think. I think that's what was going on.

There's another bit of randomisation that is a total pain in the arse. One screen has you at this crank that can rotate a room, revealing one of six possible exits. Two of them are total dead ends while the other four need to be solved in a specific order, as the game is quite linear. Thing is, the room that you can access every time you move the crank and sit through the lengthy animation is randomised! If it's not the right room, you have to turn around, use the crank and wait for the animation to play out again and cross your fingers that the correct exit is revealed. It's clearly just to create some timer-based tension, but its highly, highly irritating.

Like I said, I'm not going to tell you that D is a good game, but I love it. I love how weird it is, I love the atmosphere and the soundtrack. I love the strange, dreamlike voice acting and almost nonsensical plot that actually does make sense in its own stupid way. I love the early CGI visuals and how even at the time they managed to be cutting edge and utterly rubbish at the same time. I love how its basically one big escape room puzzle that manages to tread the line between being challenging but just simple enough for an idiot like me to think he's really smart as he solves things and gets further into the game. I love that it came out just prior to Resident Evil and everything became a fixed-camera survival horror game for about a decade.

Much like it's creator, it's a work of flawed genius. Gaming needs more Kenji Enos.

THANKS FOR READING.

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