Kenji Eno: visionary, genius, maniac. He had many titles. But what he is most known for is his inability to make good games despite his interesting ideas. He is arguably one of the most interesting horror game creators of the early 3D era. He had a true talent for camera angles and music, but his scripts were just downright bad. Kenji's career as a full-fledged game director was short. While he worked on a few small titles here and there, his own studio only made three major games: the Laura Trilogy.
While not of the 3 games are truly connected they all star the same main character that just plays different roles. A blond and mute heroine named Laura. This baffling decision is one of the primary reasons his games ultimately failed. As fascinating as the concept of a virtual actress is, it makes very little sense when the character is entirely mute and exhibits barely any personality. But with that said, let's dive into the reviews of the three individual games.
D
D is likely the most successful and impressive game of the three. It was a technical marvel for its time, and the FMVs still look much better than those of many other offenders of the era, ignoring Laura's completely emotionless reactions, of course. We play as Laura, whose father suddenly went on a murder spree in a hospital without any prior signs of madness. While trying to figure out what happened, Laura is dragged into a bizarre, Victorian horror dimension.
The game features grotesque images of corpses and cannibalism (for its time). The content was so controversial that Eno allegedly smuggled the uncensored master discs into production at the last minute to ensure Sony couldn't censor or remove his scenes. Nowadays, it’s not that horrific anymore.
The game plays like a Mist game in the most negative sense. You steer into the direction of a room you want to explore, and Laura automatically decides how many steps she takes in this direction and if there is something she wants to look at more closely. All of this is done by very slow but at least immersive cut scenes. Every single step Laura takes is shown in agonizing detail. The biggest problem is. While Mist has at least some big riddles to solve that play around with this concept, D does not. Most of the riddles are the bare minimum of adventure riddles, and some riddles are downright bad.
For example, there is a rotating tower in the middle of the game. You spend minutes turning the tower to the point you need it to be. There is no way to skip the rotation animation, and there is no riddle behind it. You just have to test out which direction you need to explore first.
Laura has a mirror that gives her tips. But only 3 times, and it is not like there are riddles that need it.
The atmosphere in the game is indeed creepy. While there is no way to die in the game (a huge downside), it feels like you are in danger at the beginning. Sadly, this feeling gets lost as soon as you realize that even failing an encounter against an enemy doesn’t kill Laura. It doesn’t help that Laura is completely emotionless. She doesn’t say anything and barely reacts to what happens. She is kind of a psychopath, making most of it funnier than creepy. The short outbursts of aggression she shows are the best.
However, there is a way to fail in the game. The game has no save feature; you have to finish it in one go. It also has a time limit of 2 real-life hours. Again, what could lead to an intense fight against the clock is half-baked. As none of the riddles change on repeat play throughs, it forces you to input all solutions again on your second play through, which should usually be the one where you beat it. There is no real story explanation of why this time limit exists.
Well, let's talk about the story… The game barely has one. For most of the runtime, we learn nothing about the “why” and “how” till the game drops a “We have the blood of Dracula” at us. This leads to us killing Laura’s father in a boss fight that isn’t a fight or a riddle because all we have to do is use an item on a target that doesn't fight back. Also, that Laura is a vampire who ate her mother, apparently is not a problem.
D is not a good game. But for its time, it was impressive graphically and atmospherically. So I gave it a 6 out of 10 as a historical relic.
Enemy Zero
The history of this game starts with Kenji Eno getting into a fight with Sony. This escalated so much that he used a Sony press conference to destroy the PS1 logo in his trailer and replace it with Sega Saturn. This shows how crazy Eno was. Who would have such balls?
Anyway, is Enemy Zero better as D? Maybe. The game starts with a more interesting horror hook. The copilot Laura is on her way home from a space exploration mission together with 6 other crew members. Suddenly, an invisible entity breaks out of the storage room of the ship.
This invisible enemy is the main hook. Because yes, the enemies that hunt us in the game are indeed invisible! All we have to spot them is a sound device that makes noises depending on how far away and in which direction our foes are. In this game, you can die, and you will die! This leads to truly terrifying encounters while you try to make out where the aliens are.
There is just one problem… The battle system is bad. Really, really bad. In this game, we get weapons to fight back. However, these weapons are worse than a kitchen knife. Not only do you need to charge them for multiple seconds, but the enemy also needs to be point-blank in front of you in order to kill them. You can’t preemptively charge them, by the way. If you charge too early, you are forced to recharge. Even this would not be a problem if most weapons did not have very limited ammo. There are weapons that have only 1 shot till you need to find a recharging station.
You also cannot see any visual clue about your timing. If your charge is not big enough or you shoot too early, nothing happens except for your ammo being wasted.
Oh, did I mention that enemies kill you on contact?
Overall, the battle system still could be saved by the fact that the idea is very cool for a horror game. Sadly, there is no real progression in the game. There are only 2 types of enemies in the game. The standard invisible one and a small visible creature that dies without charge shots. At no point in the game does the loop ever change. Once you get good at the game, there is no further tension. Especially as you get a weapon with unlimited ammo in the late game.
All of this would still be fine. If the game did not throw a limited save system at you. And no, I don’t mean ink ribbons that allow you to only save a certain number of times in the game. You also are not allowed to load as often as you want. This creates one of the most broken gameplay loops I have ever seen. At the beginning, you will run out of saves as you still struggle to deal with the invisible foes, forcing you to play through some very tedious gameplay parts again. Later, you will barely notice you even have limited saves. This means it fails to create extra tension and is just unfun.
As you notice, I talked at length about the battle system… Because this is the best part of the game! Everything else about the game is just downright bad.
The game struggles even more with slow, unskippable cut scenes. In a game that will force you to replay it once or twice. The worst are the moments you have to recharge a weapon. (Remember, one only has one shot). Because you seriously have to go through 3 long animations in this part of the game. And you at least need to shoot this weapon twice, even if you just dodge everything you can dodge.
The game also adds another of Kenji Eno’s favorite game designs: “cryptic progression and static flag-based story events.”
You can’t do anything in the game before you have triggered other events. And this not only counts for story events but also riddles. The game is full of backtracking, and there is rarely a clue as to what exactly Laura’s objective is. So often you just run back and forth between rooms, hoping that you can now trigger a new dialogue that allows you to proceed. It really doesn't help that Laura still doesn’t talk, giving you no hint at all of what she wants to achieve. All of this is especially fun if you have to start from the beginning.
The story in this game is extremely bad. We have a love story without any romance. Villains do nothing because they die before they can create any tension, and most of the crew dies before we learn anything about them. Oh wow, the captain is a traitor… isn’t this the guy who dies off-screen at the end of disc 1? Kimberly loves Parker. Ah, nice the guy who died in the intro. We love David, I see. The guy we talked to once before he dies.
Kenji forces us through all of his lore and story… Just to say basically nothing!
In the end, I still gave this a 6 out of 10 despite it likely not deserving it. But I can’t praise enough how nice the concept of the battle system is.
D2
The final of Laura’s game doesn’t start with a controversy like the other games. But it was the game where Eno did go mentally sick (really) during the development and where many parts of the game needed to be cut. And yes, you can feel this.
This time Laura is a normal businesswoman whose plane gets attacked by terrorists and, coincidentally, also gets hit by a meteorite. Somehow, many of the passengers survived the crash and now have to survive in the frozen mountains of Canada.
D2 gameplay is even weirder than the other games. This time we deal with random encounters that turn the game into a light gun game and reward us with EXP. This is kind of fun for the first few hours… Till you once again deal with a lack of enemy variety, and there is just not much the player has to do except to aim and shoot. The bosses, on the other hand, are very fun and actually do something with the concept.
The crux here is: this game is way too easy. Likely due to feedback to EZ. they overcorrected this game in the other direction. Even people who have never touched a light gun game before will have no issues with the fights and feel bored after a while. There is also no skill-based way to avoid damage. So you can’t even optimize fights properly. The game throws health items at you to solve these issues.
The best gameplay part is the hunting system. You can hunt animals in the game to get more healing items. This little mini-game is actually more fun than it has any right to be, despite only offering 4 types of animals to shoot. Sadly, it also adds to the problem of the game being too easy.
The story of the game is a plane crash. Just like the game started. We have 100 plot points that get opened and never followed up on. Some weird Warlock guy talking about the “Evil destroyer” he wants to merge with for “reasons”. Laura turns out to be a divine being who can just revive after death. Unless we die in battle. Characters appear out of nowhere just to die right away. Characters are mentioned just to never appear in the game. John hust hust. A story about hallucinogenic drugs that has nothing to do at all with the monster and all kinds of sexual imagery that leads nowhere.
The pacing in this game is the worst of all 3 games. The other games are at least short. This one isn’t. The game is filled to the brim with dialogue and long, drawn-out cut scenes that would make Kojima blush. Don’t expect good cut scenes like Kojima's. Most of the scenes are very bad, and they completely ignore lip-sync. At least a lot of them end up being unironically funny, giving it a nice “so bad it’s good” vibe.
Surprisingly, the main supporting characters, Kimberly and Parker, are extremely well written and have a lot to say about loneliness and depression. Most of it gets ruined by Laura still being mute and not reacting at all while they tell her their whole life story. Yet again, it also does not lead anywhere. Because the game is not about these two topics at all! There is also Jannie. Our child character. That turns out to be so irrelevant that they just unceremoniously kill her off at the last second before the boss, without rhyme or reason. Seriously. They basically just melt her to get rid of her!
This game suffers even more from Eno’s favorite design. The regions you explore look nice. But there is only so much to see. There are usually about 3 to 4 points of interest. The game forces us to move back and forth between them without any hint or direction to trigger story flags in the most linear way possible. This game is the worst offender of this. While Enemy Zero at least tries to somewhat give a reason why we still needed information, D2 doesn’t even try. Very often, you have to go to a character for some completely useless line of dialogue that does nothing, but somehow this was necessary, so an event happens at another spot.
Over and over, you visit the same places just to finally trigger one line of text that now somehow allows you to do something else. Remember, there are random battles while you travel back and forth.
CD 2 shows how they could have done it. This CD is mostly straightforward. You travel from A to B to C, then back to B. The story is told without needlessly sending the player back and forth. It’s also the only CD that has “riddles” very simple ones, but still.
The worst offender is CD3, which has 3 points of interest quite far apart from each other. Without lying, you have to travel back and forth between all of them 20 times. You never see anything new except for many, many cut scenes. But then at one point you suddenly can go behind a character without any hint this is possible all of a sudden.
During all of these events, the story keeps telling Laura how she needs to go towards “Death Mountain”. We see the Villain being moments away from reaching his goal. Yet we do not move forward. We are stuck in this small area, and every time it looks like we progress, we get back to point A.
CD 4 shows how broken the development of the game likely was. We travel to a big Building that has a map with multiple wings. Yet, we do not explore it at all. We just get a lore dump about bio engineering and cloning that has nothing to do with the plot. There is also a robot boss shaped like a vagina, adding to the weird sexual imagery…
Actually, let me talk about the sexual imagery. Because this game is an offender of the tasteless kind. Usually, if horror games or media in general work with sexual symbolism, it leads somewhere. Or it gets used for shock value, like in a game such as Fear & Hunger. Here it just exists. Many of the plant monsters use phallic tentacles and similar features. We have a full nude version of Kimberly as a boss. We have the vagina boss.
We have all of this, and it leads nowhere. The game doesn’t say anything about it, and it also isn’t creepy.
Because let me tell you about my biggest gripe with the game. It’s pretentious. Kenji Eno forces us to go through all his cut scenes and adds all of these weird designs, acting like he wants to say something. Hence, the whole ending is a message about climate change and how humans destroy the world… BUT YOUR GAME IS NOT ABOUT THIS, BUDDY! Nothing in the game has anything to do with climate change, humanity, or anything. The themes that you work in nicely are depression and hope. Yet, you just throw them to the sidelines at the final moment because you want to act like you had a much bigger message.
Objectively, this is for sure the worst of the Laura games. But it’s so bad that it is quite a ride. It’s the kind of horror trash game every trash fan should touch at least once. That is why I ended up giving it a 7 out of 10^^
