Games like LSD: Dream Emulator are so important to me. The "walking simulator" genre of game where you can transport yourself to another location and just explore is a feeling that is very overlooked in games I feel. There is like this spectrum of ways to approach something like this. A more grounded and realistic manner, which is valid. Your "Gone Home"s, your "Dear Esther"s and then you have games in the same kin to something like "Antichamber" or "Yume Nikki". A near complete non-euclidean space that would be impossible in our world.
It's somewhere in that middle ground that really hits the sweet spot for me. The visuals of realistic architecture but with a vague dreamy mist thrown over it that strikes the nerve of the uncanny. Everything about this is familiar but there is that nagging feeling in the back of your head that won't go away. The same feeling someone would get from a "liminal space" or a video of a huge abandoned building like a school or mall. I love that, it resonates with my soul. Echos of life so muffled that you can't tell what happened. Almost like you're in a dream. The unnatural natural, a seemingly impossible occurrence.
LSD: Dream Emulator is an example of that, if not leaning more towards the end of incomprehensibility given it's literally based on a dream journal. The locations of LSD are ones that at a glance are very understandable to most people. A town, a city by the docks, a giant field, apartments, a carnival... but the more you interact and explore the less familiar the location gets. Layouts get less realistic, like it's a memory you experienced long ago. It helps that no other "person" you share these spaces with are recognizable as people. It's all vague similes of people or even when it's clearly a person it's so detached from reality that it doesn't register as one to you. The sense of loneliness, separated from any other living creature is, I feel, paramount to an experience like this.
I so desire a game to replicate this feeling, no strings attached. I just want to explore man-made monuments left to rot. Left in a state that implies that people left impromptu. Only left to wander and wonder all to yourself. No NPCs, no narrator, no cutscenes, no monster, no space travel. Just you in this impossible dream-like location. What secrets does it hold? Who last left their footprints here? Are you going to be the last person to ever open this door? Walk these halls? Shine a light on the dark corners of this room? The only noises you hear are from you and the world. You are alone.
Images sourced from Dream Emulator Fandom, MobyGames