my favorite game was psychonauts. i considered it my favorite game because it was the game i liked to play the most. in that i mean, it had the best controls and level design suited for me. it might also be the game i've played all the way the most, given how i usually never replay games. anyway. i used to think my favorite game had to be the one i liked to control the most, but as i grew older, i found out there are other things i value in videogames.

in 2021, when i first played .flow, i was in a mental and physical headspace where reality was blurred and my body felt inhuman. i started feeling immense pain everywhere, sometimes i couldn't even stand up, and added up with the fact that i wasn't studying nor working, i just felt like a literal walking corpse. i felt rotten, every day, that was all i could think about. i was rotting in this bedroom and no one could notice.

so, that was the first time i felt seen by a videogame. i wouldn't say it's the game that touched me in an emotional level the most, or the one that made me cry, the one that reached the deepest parts of my soul and will never leave the #1 spot in my favorites list, as i believe i haven't found that game yet, but damn it if this isn't close.
.flow, more than any critique i could give, makes me happy. it makes me feel comfortable, makes me feel at ease. i initially felt like this because i could, to my surprise, strongly relate to sabitsuki. the theories go around but the truth we all know is that sabitsuki is ill. she feels like she's rotting, which is one of the most prominent motifs in the game, along with internal organs. she uses her computer to escape from her visceral reality, or at least that's my interpretation. she could as well be in a hospital bed too. so, from my point of view, this game spoke to my reality. i felt seen. nowadays i don't feel so dead. my body is uhh... manageable, at least. but i still enjoy and relate to .flow as i did back then. i have an emotional attachment to it after all.

but those are all personal, subjective, emotional reasons. the thing that makes this my favorite game even more is just the fact that it completely revamped every gripe i had with Yume Nikki and not only fixed the design problems but also incorporated much stronger horror elements and, imo, more consistent art direction.

i could probably explain this better on a youtube video or something but Yume Nikki is a larger than life game that i don't wanna play at all. the biggest problem to me is the navigation being too difficult, such as the rooms taking way too long to loop and being so spacious, and getting to interesting places is such a hard task without a guide. those are things that aren't present in .flow. any first time player can get to see interesting areas without much trouble because navigation is, dare i say it, incredibly intuitive here.
of course, it wouldn't be a yume nikki game - or much of a challenge at all - if it was all brainless. the game still has its deep parts, mazes and secrets. i myself had to use a guide to get all the effects- which, by the way, is what i considered my personal goal to beating the game. yeah, i haven't gotten the ending, so the completed mark is just for getting the effects. i might become rust one day, just not today!
anyway, what i want to say is that .flow just improves over every "gameplay" thing of yume nikki, but some (myself included) would argue that the original is still better due to how much more content it has, and also a better soundtrack.

speaking of which... i think i might be the only person on earth who would say this is either better than yume nikki's or at least on par with it. sure, it isn't as [mind bogglingly genius] as kikiyama's music because, let's face it, that guy is one of the greatest, but it has this dream-like quality to it that is a perfect combination of a few factors, with the biggest one being the piss bad low bitrate of everything. that's genuinely one of the things that makes this as good as it is. the industrial snow theme (which is maybe my favorite) is a good example of this, being melancholic and lonely but also scary, suspenseful, as if something is watching you.
the songs are also way more minimalistic, using very short loops and sometimes low-passed instruments that sound muffled and wrong. there's also an abundant use of sound effects such as heart beats.
yume nikki's ost is certainly more impressive but i'd wager no other game has ever sounded like this before or is ever going to sound like this again.

[CONCLUSION]

.flow is my favorite game. it is also the best yume nikki game. it is disconcerting. it is also comforting. it is disgusting. it is also beautiful. it is great.