I have struggled for quite some time now to articulate my feelings for this game.

It is a very simple game to describe literally - there’s no dialogue, no direct story, and no stated objective besides “explore and collect effects.” The worlds are very often abstract and mostly barren, only containing a few choice landmarks that you have to navigate around to find new landmarks, with many maps looping around on themselves, and backgrounds that scroll across the screen. The length of the song accompanying the world you’re in is, on average, less than 10 seconds. Despite- and dare I say because of this odd atmosphere, I was totally immersed. On an aesthetic level, I would describe Yume Nikki as being less of an attempt to recreate any specific dreams and more like a game about exploring the abstract idea of dream worlds which are not bound by conventional logic and exist as a pure stream of unconscious thought; the places you explore simply “are” and do not try to justify or explain their existence. Yume Nikki on a gameplay level was enjoyable because I was able to just toss away my preconceived notions of what to expect out of a game and simply explore an interconnected world towards “nowhere in particular” to see what happens with total freedom, using effects I collected purely for fun.

A lot of the qualities that make the game great to me feel at odds with its status as an indie darling. One of the reasons why is because it is often misplaced on a very similar pedestal to much more conventional indie games despite being very little like them. Either that, or it is compared to “walking simulators” and dismissed as pretentious or simply boring - I definitely assumed it was in the latter group, and have been aware of the game for many years before finally becoming interested in playing it.

Another issue is that because the game is so well-documented, players now have an incentive to just turn to the internet to look up things to do when they get stuck; should you play this game, I suggest you hold off from doing this as long as you can bear to. Once you start using walkthroughs, this game’s nonlinear quality starts to become lost. The one I ended up using only shows you what door an effect lies behind, but even this somewhat turned this game into a much more linear experience for me. I would go as far as to say that I kind of wish there wasn’t an ending, because it creates incentive to “complete” the game, rather than just letting the player decide they want to stop exploring on their own terms.

On the other side of the Yume Nikki being popular, its status has led to the creation of a vast amount of works that I have found myself either passively or actively influenced by. Notable fan works that are big reasons I finally checked this game out are “Yume 2kki Online” a much larger MMO dream exploration game that is comprised entirely of community-made maps, effects, music, etc., and “Yume Nikki: Between The Lines” which is a fan album remixing many of the game’s tracks in a way that I find pretty fitting to the loopy feeling of the original songs, or occasionally making larger divergences from the original track that feel like musical tributes to Yume Nikki as a whole. After having engaged with these for a few months, as well as having been a fan of some of the numerous games that cite YN as an inspiration, it feels great to have finally experienced the source of these inspirations.

It is honestly quite impressive that a game this slow paced and simplistic kept me hooked for so many hours while playing and thinking about it for so many hours both before and after playing it, when I have been bored to death by much more stimulating games. Despite its popularity, though, I do not think this game is for everybody - in fact it is rather niche, and I wouldn’t pass judgement onto people who didn’t care for it. There is basically no commitment to trying it other than your time though, so I may as well say it’s worth taking a look at even if you don’t stick around with it for very long.

Leaves a ton of space for your imagination to run wild in which is likely why so many people have vastly different experiences with this game. When so much is left up to interpretation, your brain can't help but fill in the lines itself.

My personal experience with the game is one of feeling incredibly isolated and displaced within the world while also being comforted by an abstract warmth, almost as if I am being hugged by a childhood friend with whom I had lost all communication with but who's memory has lived within myself and shielded me in ways over the years that I've never been cognizant of.

I now understand why a common joke is that Yume Nikki's biggest fans are all schizophrenic.

(Winner of "Don Miguel Award" for best RPG Maker game of all time, speech below)

Every game nowadays has a plethora of guides that hold your hand and wipe your ass all the way from the main menu to the credits screen. But when you boot up Yume Nikki, you are given only a short list of instructions, and that's it. Everything else you must figure out on your own. Something like this could easily have been dismissed as horribly pretentious, but when Yume Nikki was first released back in 2004, it was practically a novelty. Yume Nikki was already noteworthy for completely ignoring RPG Maker's built-in combat system, but what made the game memorable was its adamant refusal to explain itself. I'm not entirely sure how Aztec Rave Monkey fits into Kikiyama's personal understanding of reality...

(DAVID LEAN: "Elaborate on that, if you would...")
(DAVID LYNCH: "No.")

... but hey, who are we to judge? The game offers no answers, and so it was left up to players to derive their own meaning. This has helped keep the game relevant nearly 20 years later. Sharing your discoveries, learning what you may have missed, one could argue that the players are just as responsible for making the game what it is today as its reclusive creator. The only way to discover what Yume Nikki is all about, and why it's the best RPG Maker game of all time, is to play it for yourself. But do yourself a favor and go in blind. Perhaps it will all make sense to you, or maybe truth is only in dreams.

... While you're still here, get the bicycle or you're gonna go bananas. I'm not fucking joking, just take this door, it's right here, it lets you move hella fast.