i've been after a hard copy of this forever and just recently snapped one up. the packaging is really weird and awesome, even among pc-88 games, so i just gotta share. hopefully someone other than me finds this interesting!
the game's box art isn't hard to find online. still one hell of an artistic cover though.
...but what really impresses me is the back. no ad copy, no legal text, no screenshots. man, how many game companies ever have had the guts to do that? fitting that a game that exists to be an confusing alien mystery for the player to unravel is equally strange and imposing on the outside.
it's a pretty unusual box, the top and bottom are actually just removable flaps folded over a styrofoam carrier for the disks and paperwork.
i don't know if it comes through in my shitty picture here, but the disk labels have a distinct brushed metal look to them. classy.
on the other side, the manual and fliers are held in a inset - with this cool gigeresque relief pressed into the styrofoam behind them!
manual opened. there's that head again, along with a message written in japanese, transliterated to roman characters and then encoded in the english substitution code used for the game world's language.
once opened, the manual folds out again. more cool creepy art along with sparse story and instructions.
anyway, if you'll excuse me i got something i need to be doing here.
snake, tell me where you are stuck? i'll help if i can. when i get there.