In early 2021 I had a dream about a game. It was a gen 1 Pokemon ROMhack called Obsidius developed by somebody named Kirian, and remade/ported to run natively on PC by someone as an archival project (I'm unsure what their name was, don't even know if it was ever specified in the dream). The game was a surrealist puzzler thing, and it had no battles, or really any actual Pokemon in it. I think it started in a pretty standard looking room - or perhaps it was normal as far as Pokemon games go for a while, something like that - before the player exited a certain room and emerged in a wide but short hallway with a tiny staircase. The room's visuals were 2-tone black and white, just outlines of the walls. Kind of like Antichamber when you're not around colour. It also became apparent around then that the player had the ability to toggle their point of view whenever they wanted, with the alternative perspective being first-person 3D.
Details are hazy, but generally it progressed through the visual styles of the first three or four generations, with esoteric NPCs that looked vaguely Pokemon-like and gave weird dialogue (or maybe just weird wordless interactions?) and obscure little puzzles. Vibe was fairly consistent the entire time and I really quite like it. Eventually it reaches a point where you're very briefly dumped into a skungy Cave Story section that harshly interrupts the mood of everything prior before the game's archivist shoves in a little disclaimer explaining that that's where the hack's contents ended, probably implying that it was unfinished or something.
Of course, this couldn't have been a gameboy game hack, introducing colours and first-person 3D at the fidelity of the dream isn't possible on that thing. Surprisingly, that was the entire point of Obsidius rather than being a dumb dream logic moment. There was no gen 1 Pokemon hack, there was no Kirian - Obsidius and the entire narrative surrounding it were fabricated by this rando dev to cultivate certain expectations and vibes. They also had several other games which had completely unrelated presentation, which secretly linked back to Obsidius, and playing those ones would in essence continue the saga of Obsidius. It was very ARG-esque.
I'm not sure how I knew the nature of their other games in the dream? I never played any of them and the dream ended fairly soon after I got to the 'ending' of Obsidius and went to the dev's site or whatever, but for some reason I just implicitly knew it to be the case.
Anyway my username is just a combination of the beginning of Kirian and Obsidius. Explaining the game isn't necessary to understand where it came from, but I think it's a cool enough idea to warrant it! I only started using Kirobsi in September 2021, since I wasn't very comfortable keeping my prior username anymore.
