Over a year ago, I stumbled across the Japanese-language release of a multimedia tour de force, Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou, at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in San Francisco's Japantown. Since my Japanese has never matured beyond the basics, I was forced to rely on instinct as the strange creatures populating the CD-ROM adventure babbled at me in Japanese. It was an overwhelming, surreal experience.
Now the English version has been released, and I understand everything I missed before. It is still an overwhelming, surreal brain jam - one I recommend highly. Eastern Mind feels like Myst, only far, far weirder. Based on the Buddhist ideal of perpetual reincarnation and betterment, players search for their lost souls on the spirit-stealing island of Tong Nou, a nexus of wisdom, dreams, time, and the force of life itself. (The island resides in the digitized head of the designer, Osamu Sato, and is accessible by his ears, cheeks, and mouth.)
Sound involved? It is. Hideously so. Eastern Mind is a trip straight down a sociocultural well that's centered on esoteric goals and saturated with psychedelic imagery and jarringly original music.
Sato's art, particularly the creatures populating the exotic island, is at once elaborate and childlike. His sprawling, energetic life forms straddle a stylistic line somewhere between tasselled, ornamental jewelry and Mr. Potato Head. This suggestion of simplicity embodies the coolest aspect of Eastern Mind: Sato's continual artistic presence - in the graphics, music, ambient sounds, and deep spiritual undercurrents. Eastern Mind reminds us of the finely crafted, personalized worlds that technology allows us to create and showcase.
Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou: US$59.98. Sony Imagesoft: (800) 922 7669, +1 (415) 655 5683, on the Web at www.sony.com.
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