Serial Experiments Lain (PlayStation, 1998)

About the game

Released in Japan on 26 November 1998 by Pioneer LDC, the same year as the anime, and never sold anywhere else. Its official genre was "attachment software", and its makers did not call it a game at all: they called it "Psycho-Stretch-Ware".

What it is

You are handed access to a strange database, the "Life Instinct Function", and piece together the story of Lain Iwakura from the files in it: her diary, recordings of her counseling sessions, notes and videos. There are almost no puzzles. You move around a column of rings, open files in any order, and slowly assemble what happened.

The files belong to Touko Yonera, a young psychiatrist just back from university in America and new at the Tachibana Research Center, who takes on Lain as a patient. Lain hears voices and has nightmares; over the sessions both of them change, and the line between Lain and the network, and between Lain and other Lains, wears thin. The story stands apart from the anime but shares its heroine and its questions, and it explains much of what the series leaves unsaid.

The database

The files sit on two sites, Site A on the first disc and Site B on the second, which opens later. Each site is a stack of levels, and every file is a node:

Some files only appear after others have been watched, and the player has to be upgraded before the deeper ones will play.

Credits

The staff, as the game itself lists them, in its menu's "lain staff list" (family names first):

Source: the game's own staff list (the whole list as the game draws it), read from the disc through the decompilation.

Then and now

On release it drew little attention, and reviews faulted the slow interface, long voice clips and the lack of anything to do. It has since been read very differently: as one of the more serious portrayals of mental illness in a game, and as an early example of the kind of story told through found files that later games such as Her Story made popular. Being Japanese-only and rare, it is also a collector's item; sealed copies sell for thousands.

Fans translated the whole game into English between 2008 and 2014, released the browser recreation lainTSX in 2020 and 2021, and in 2026 finished a complete decompilation that runs it natively on today's computers.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org archived · ja.wikipedia.org archived · Konaka's HK interview archived · 4Gamer, 2018 archived · lain.wiki archived · the game's own node table, for the file counts (see the file index)

How to play

The game needs the original Japanese discs (or your own copies of them) for everything except the browser version. Ways to play, from easiest:

Also worth knowing

More fan projects, translations and preserved sites are on Links, and every file in the game is listed in the file index.

Downloads

The native client from the decompilation. It plays the game from your own discs (or disc images), which it never includes.

Translations and subtitles, by the fan projects that made them:

And this archive's own data, free to reuse with credit to the people named on Credits: