Criminally Overlooked Games #14: Lack of Love

Released by Ascii corp to a largely disinterested handful of Japanese Dreamcast owners without much ado, lacking any description on it's casing, any hint at the game play, this game got a fair amount of critical acclaim and was quickly forgotten. An eclectic mixture of what I can best describe as Katamari Damacy, Pikmin, and EVO: the search for Eden with no overlying goals aside from the immediately obvious goal of survival, and the not so obvious goal of doing what is right. You may survive indefinitely killing and eating the inhabitants, but you will not evolve, and no progress will be made. You need to do what is right. However, "doing what is right" is very often a gray area, and what is right is not right all of the time. In order to progress you must learn the lay of the land, it's inhabitants, their habits and customs. You need to invest yourself emotionally and through your intuition alone make decsions based on what you know. Fortunately though there are many decisions to make, not every one must be considered, most have hints and your options are initially limited to greeting, biting, resting, and urinating, though you can expect your options to expand as you progress and evolve. The game doesn't so much tell a story as much as it dares you to live in it.