I’ll kick off with a notice that some of what you’re about to see is decidedly NSFW. It’s for adults.
In the 1990s, Japanese surrealist artist Tomomi Sakuba realized that he could make a game with the free HyperCard software on his Mac. After a few prototypes, he started working on what would eventually become Garage: Bad Dream Adventure, a bizarre and disturbing point-and-click adventure about a fetal biomechanical creature navigating a parapsychological and disturbingly sexualized, but not explicitly sexy, world.
Though it’s not an outright horror game, and it doesn’t rely on scares or gore, the aesthetic can be generously described as nightmarish—which fits, since it’s supposedly cribbed from Sakuba’s nightmares. The protagonist has two stats: Ego and Fuel. Run out of fuel and you die. Run out of Ego and, well, you fall into a state of mental strain so profound that you might as well have died.
Either way, game over.
Garage: Bad Dream Adventure for Steam is coming July 8!Wishlist now: https://t.co/FqWXNcpYJE- Playable on your PC.- Increased the save slots to 5 from 2 and Steam cloud save available.- Uncensored. Includes all original artwork and movies.- US$19.99. pic.twitter.com/Hvxd4eoqyLJune 17, 2022
Soon after Garage was released it was effectively killed. Publisher Toshiba-EMI stopped printing CD-ROMs. Only 3,000 copies of Garage were made, all in Japanese, barely enough to qualify the game for cult status. It languished in obscurity for two decades. But now it’s back, partially due to efforts of fans, and partially due to the efforts of its creator.
So now you too will get to experience the delight of feeding weird crabs you caught in a gutter to a large female-coded robot that will then turn it into fuel. The fuel will be dispensed from pumps in its breasts.
The new version of Garage includes entirely retouched images, revised videos updated with AI frame interpolation, a new user interface, and better game balance. In addition, the Steam page says “new chapters, subquests and multiple endings have been added.”
You can find Garage: Bad Dream Adventure on Steam, where it will release on July 8th. Shoutout to Obscure Game Aesthetics, without whom I would not have known about what I can only expect to be a transcendentally bizarre experience.