LSD: Dream Emulator is a cult-classic PS1 game that was only released in Japan. Intending to be a game that captures the experience of dreaming, it drew a lot of attention from people looking for something unusual. Now, English-speaking enthusiasts can get a more proper look at the game with the May 1st release of an English translation patch.

The game was developed by Asmik Ace Entertainment and its development was led by Osamu Sato, who is also the game’s composer. Sato has a decent body of work as a digital artist and composer, having worked on other games like Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou. In fact, by sheer coincidence, Osamu Sato put out a new music video just yesterday. In spite of all this, LSD: Dream Emulator is undeniably the work he’s most known for in English speaking territories.

In LSD: Dream Emulator, you play as a featureless person walking around an environment. Upon colliding with an object, you’re transported to a different environment to walk around in. After 10 minutes, the dream ends and you head on to the next day, with past days being saved as flashbacks. As the game progresses, the dreams start becoming more surreal and psychedelic, with game textures being swapped out and new objects manifesting in the world. The appearances of the game’s sole threat; a humanoid in a long gray coat, also start becoming more recurring. Upon encountering the creature, the current dream forcibly ends and the flashbacks are erased. This essentially forces the player to start from scratch to see all the game has to offer.

On some days, instead of being thrown into the dream world, you experience a short scene. A lot of these scenes are short surreal videos. Others, however, are walls of text that are apparently transcribed from a dream diary kept by Asmik employee Hiroko Nishikawa, which served as the basis of this game. These bits of text are the main focus on the English translation, besides the main menu. Brief yet striking, these text dreams finally put together the unified vision the developers had in mind for English-speaking players.

The translation hacking work was mainly done by Romhacking.net user Mr.Nobody, with ArcaneAria as the translator for the game’s menus. The translated text dreams actually come from the hard work of LSD: Dream Emulator fans maintaining the game’s wiki. These fans include users like Badcafe, Puptoon and Chia. Thanks to all of them, LSD: Dream Emulator can be experienced perfectly as the developers intended.

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