In trying to make a shorter, more digestible delivery system for its technological prowess, Square produced something weirder than anything they’d made before. Parasite Eve was an attempt to streamline the concept of a role-playing game - strategic, evocative games that take dozens of hours to unfold their action and plot - so it could more seamlessly integrate with the lushly animated, Pixar short-style story sequences that Square was revolutionizing on the PS1. (Is it a movie? Is it one of those VHS board games? These were valid questions in the ‘90s and they still are unless you’re the sort of person that immediately understands what “RPG” stands for.) That awkward moniker was a mission statement. Square called it a “cinematic RPG,” a weird genre signifier that raises more questions than it answers. That’s the New York in Parasite Eve.ĭeveloped by SquareSoft and released in 1998 for the original PlayStation, Parasite Eve remains an eminently playable, bizarre experiment as beguiling as its setting.

New York at rest feels like a dream space made flesh, a place both alien and familiar, isolating and enveloping. All the speed and fury of 8 million people pushing and yelling between the cars and the sirens falls away into a rumbling susurrus, half noise and half feeling. It’s eerie the first time you experience it, coming home in the small hours or walking out the door before the sun comes over the East River. Everything slows for a while, neighborhood by neighborhood, the city’s cardiovascular system easing down just like a human body at the end of the day. It rests fitfully, ready to rise at the crash of a car, the wail and fade of ambulance sirens mixing with the sharp bleat of drunk laughter filtering up from the sidewalk at 2 a.m., but it does in fact slumber. Parasite Eve knows the truth: New York sleeps.

Parasite eve trailer