There are not a lot of multimedia artists out there.  Game designers, yes.  Computer graphics artists, definitely.  Musicians, sure.  But almost no one is capable of handling all, or even the bulk of, the disparate skills required to put a multimedia product together by themselves.  Enter Sony Imagesoft's Osamu Sato.  After being "discovered" in a talent search that stretched across Japan, Sato designed Tong Nou, which quickly became Japan's top-selling CD-ROM.  The game has just reached our shores under the only slightly less cryptic title, Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou.

	Not only is Sato responsible for the unorthodox visual style and the bizarre storyline, he also composed all of the music.  And his face, as the mysterious soul-devouring island Tong Nou, is one of the main playing fields in the game.  "I think it's time game artists started getting some recognition for their efforts," said Sato, defending this rather unusual artistic choice. "Look at the thousands of CD-ROM games on the market.  Who made them?  You never find out. Now look at music CDs.  You see the jacket, you know who the artist is.  Why not us?"

	If nothing else, Eastern Mind will definitely get Sato noticed in the American market.  It is quite an oddity: an adventure game where one of the first tasks is to get killed.  But let me start at the beginning.

	The player is Rin, who wakes up one day to find he is missing his soul.  The only possible explanation for this is that it has been devoured by Tong Nou.  It does this sort of thing every now and then.  But Rin doesn't particularly want to spend the rest of his life as a soulless zombie, so he plans a journey to the legendary island to retrieve his pilfered spiritual property.  Rin visits a friend who loans him a temporary soul (he must be a very good friend) and also gives him a protective amulet and a satchel, or "furoshiki," to hold anything he might run across.

	When Rin arrives at Tong Nou (in the form of Sato's green-tinted noggin), he can choose where he wishes to explore.  The realms of Desire, Life, Time and Dreams are all reachable through Tong Nou (the ears and cheeks).  It probably won't be too long before Rin makes a wrong step and gets himself killed.  This, as it turns out, is exactly the right thing to do!

	In order for Rin to finally get his soul back, he's going to have to be reincarnated as a number of denizens of these strange lands, each with different tasks to accomplish - some very easy, some quite taxing and difficult.  When one of these beings completes its life purpose, it dies and returns to the Tree of Life, the ultimate recycling center.

	At the roots of the Tree, the player selects his new life by choosing from an assortment of eyes, noses and mouths.  Each permutation is a specific character, and they can be chosen in any order, and can occasionally meet each other in the worlds above.  As each character fulfills its destiny, it receives a tile with a pictographic letter that gives the character's name.  When all of these are gathered, they go back to Rin, who can use them to open the sealed gate of Tong Nou's central mountain, and there solve the island's great riddle, hopefully getting his soul back in the process.

	This is both a very easy game to play and a very difficult one to get a complete handle on.  While there are elements of Eastern religion inherent in the game (especially with the reincarnation theme), I strongly suspect that Sato was often being idiosyncratic for no other reason than to confuse players.  He himself says, "If it's not new, it's not worth putting out."

	Under all the surreal glitter, there is actually a good solid adventure game.  There are a few aggravating elements, and they usually involve the time-consuming business of getting from here to there.  For example, the Land of Time is dominated by a tower that the player must climb.  It has a spiral staircase that must be climbed several times.  This involves clicking the mouse somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty or forty times!  There is a character that takes the job of "elevator," but even with his assistance, it takes more than a dozen clicks to reach the top.
	But if you get any enjoyment from just seeing an artist in his element, you will probably really like Eastern Mind.  It is far more of an "experience" than a game.  It can be navigated in any order,  and there are lots of characters and places that serve no purpose in the game other than strange distraction.

	For those of you who are interested in following Sato as an artist, he already has plans to expand on what he calls "the Tong Nou trilogy."  The second part will be called Chu Ten, and will be released in Japan this fall.  "Whereas Tong Nou takes place above the earth in its setting," Sato explains, "Chu Ten features the universe as its stage.  It will not use the reincarnation format, but will be a different game in a different setting.  The third part of the trilogy, as yet unnamed, will take place in undersea and subterranean worlds."