Galerians (or: The Video Game I Gave Up On The Fastest)

I like to think I give anything I try a fair chance to impress me.  In fact, I've gone above and beyond in at least one instance.  However, there is a game that I never really got into despite it ticking off many check boxes on my list of things I like:

Weird psychic powers.
Science fiction-y sterile hallways.
Survivor Horror
Heavy Japanese influence

And yet, I never got more than two rooms into the game play.

I can't for the life of me tell you what the game is about.  I don't know what the plot was, I don't even remember any character names except for the main character Rion.  This is what I do remember:

You start the game in what looks to be a lab.  There's a large table that you're strapped on, you get free from it, and the game begins.  I remember a doorway that lead into a hallway.  I remember taking five steps down the hallway, and then my head exploded.

No, I'm serious.  Just "boom," game over.

So I tried it again.  I explored the room I started in from top to bottom.  I got the weird notes describing chemicals and what powers I'd gain from being injected with them (such a pro-drug message), I got the vision flashes from touching things.  I killed 45 minutes just wandering around one room trying different things to find an alternate way out of the room.

Then I tried the door again.  Within 30 seconds, my head exploded again.

Three more times I tried this, each time ended the same way.  Boom, explodey-head.  I consulted the manual, I checked online for hints, and nobody else seemed to be having the same problems I was.  Granted, this was before sites like Gamefaqs had become "old-school" so there wasn't as much information available back then.

But man, I don't know.  I mock some games for having tutorials for things like "press forward on the control stick to move forward" but I'm pretty sure this game needed a "how to not have your head explode" tutorial.