In a 2005 interview with Eurogamer, Director Shinta Nojiri said Kojima asked his team to take a ‘different approach’ when developing a game to complement 2004’s Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. That direction led to Metal Gear Acid – a grid-based, turn-based, decking-building PSP game whose villains are a pair of sentient, people-murdering, plane-jacking puppets.
It doesn’t sound like Hideo Kojima’s sneaky, sneaky, peaky, peaky PlayStation classic – except for the convoluted description and the sentient puppets bit. Yet the two share far more DNA than you’d expect: Acid has all the beeps and the boops and the cardboard boxes and stuff and things we look for in a sneaking special from Kojima Labs Inc.
And yet it’s one of the greatest genre shifts you’ve never played — a game that sits on the periphery of our collective video game consciousness as that Metal Gear card game on Sony’s first handheld.
