Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou

Overview

Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou, known in Japan as Tong-Nou, is a surreal fantasy first-person point-and-click adventure game developed by OutSide Directors Company and published by SMEJ for Macintosh computers in Japan in May 1994. It later received a Windows PC release on October 1995, which also received a localized North American release by Sony Imagesoft on December 1995.

Directed by digital artist and composer Osamu Sato (who would later be known for the 1998 game LSD), Eastern Mind plays similarly to Myst, Alice, and Cosmology of Kyoto, with players exploring the environment and interacting with objects by clicking on areas around the screen.

Players control Rin, an unknown man who must navigate the mysterious island Tong Nou to recover his soul. Along with bizarre surrealism, the game's central mechanic is "transmigration", where players must fulfill the short lives of eight different creatures by completing their specific objectives throughout the island (and then being reborn in the Tree of Life).

The game later received a Japanese-exclusive sequel on October 1995, known as Chu-Teng.