Looking Back in Time To See the Future from Outdated Hairstyles: D

Space.
It’s the cosmos that provides all the answers, which is why any self-respecting reader of a newspaper will always turn to the horoscope section first. The position of heavenly bodies will be sure to fulfill a bunch of arbitrary ciphers that don’t mean anything by themselves until assigned one by its faithful followers.
But there’s another way to harness space as a future-forecasting oracle. Looking up at the stars is to look backwards in time, as it has taken millions of years for the light traveling from these stars to reach us. In a sense, being an astronomer is to be a historian, understanding our future by looking into the past.
And yet, for all the similarities between astronomy and history that make them closer relatives than, say, astronomy’s Roger Clinton of astrology, there is a big difference. While our understanding of the past increases as we get further away from it, our perspective of the universe is more or less fixed to one spot—Earth. Yup, while we’re whipping through space on this giant blue marble, our perspective is many limited to this fixed point, which may explain why we think aliens all speak English, don’t wear pants and want to get to know us through anal probes.
With time on our side, we should be able to better understand videogames by seeing them in a progression of their peers, unbiased by the influence of hype and spectacle. But unlike historians, we’re more like these myopic, leering astronomers (total pervs), who are stuck looking at the heavens from a humble Earthling’s point of view. As gamers, we’re completely obsessed with the way a game looks rather than how it plays, and thus making certain games ineligible from worthy consideration just because they’re old.
D (1996) is one such game. An innovative offering at its time that intertwined FMV video with gameplay and offered first and third-person perspectives, this hybrid puzzle/survivor horror/adventure game must have been mind-blowing to the geeks of the period.
But the passing of time has meant that geeks have changed (because evolving involves crawling out of the basement and adopting to an food chain that doesn’t involve collectibles). What was once mind-blowing is now simply embarrassing as graphics get better and better. And yet while we’re fed a diet of generic first-person shooters on gaming platforms and match-three-colors-in-a-row games on mobile phones, the blandness of the future could really use a change by looking at games from the past like D.
Once we get over how horrible it looks and how slow the pace is, there’s an enjoyable game to be found once we get rid of the prejudices of time, although I’m not overly fond of the arbitrary method of using mathematical elimination as a way to solve D’s puzzles. However, to take it for what it is, D is a visual Choose Your Own Adventure novel that you can enjoy at your own pace.
The comparisons to Myst is undeniable, but D does stand on its own. There’s an urgency as you need to solve the mystery of why your dad, the best doctor in the country and director of the Los Angeles National Hospital, has killed a bunch of people and has taken hostages at his hospital. And it becomes horrifying as you creep around its dark passages and encounter weird talking disembodied heads.
Maybe there is a resurgence in this kind of adventure game. Gone Home was a recent big hit as many players couldn’t get enough of looking at items from a first-person perspective. A slower-paced adventure game that uses the first/third-person perspective along a fixed path of D would be a breath of fresh air, from the past, no less.

How far I got in 15 minutes: I found a key, experienced an LSD experience with a scarab beetle, and made my way to the safe.
The good: Suspense without violence. Lots of skewered skeletons, though.
The bad: It looks awful. The prettiest looking thing in the game is the protagonist’s hair, itself an egregious reminder of how awful the 90s were.
Will I play this game once this year is over: Yes. D deserves a detour from all lo-fidelity deniers.
Days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 47