Yume Nikki is one of the most important games ever despite its seemingly small scope, paving the way for several RPG Maker games inspired by it in one way or another, as well as one of the most iconic surrealist games of all time, and for very good reasons.

In several ways, Yume Nikki isn’t really meant to be understood in any conventional way, nor is it meant to be played with the mindset of expecting a conventional game.

Yume Nikki as a game strips down the gameplay down to the very basic cycle of walking around like an idiot, soaking up in its atmosphere and occasionally finding something new, though the main difference is that where as in other games, such as Super Metroid, the reward for exploring the map to its fullest are upgrades that make you more powerful, finding new areas is the reward here, with some of the “power ups” merely changing the look of Madotsuki and nothing else (while others aid in traversing the map), but in the end they are still pretty cool.

But what truly matters in the game is what’s present (and what’s NOT present) in each location you find. Mind-bending landscapes where the borderline nonsensical reigns over anything else, seemingly endless black voids where surreal entities and abstract images coexist, and even the (arguably) more grounded places manage to feel just as strange as everything else due to their haunting atmosphere, helped by a stellar soundtrack which really sells the vibe of every place, all of that make the game arguably more harrowing more so by virtue of exploring a world so uniquely alien and terrifying as Madotsuki’s perturbed mind than that of an actual threat hiding around the corner. But eventually you start getting accustomed to the world’s idiosyncrasies, and consequently starts to get a better hang of the environments both based on their map layouts and their sights and sounds (for better or for worse), and the game itself is absolutely ripe with imagery and symbolism, and thus, much like the best surrealist and abstract art, it’s up to you to find meaning in everything you find throughout the game, and that’s the magic of Yume Nikki, isn’t it? Finding sense in everything found throughout the seemingly endless dimensions of abstract images, and piecing together all of it to find a meaning to Yume Nikki, or maybe not doing that at all and just soaking up all of it as it is and leaving it at that, that works too.

Now you may be wondering why did I rate this game only a mere three stars out of five despite everything I said so far?

SHORT ANSWER: IT’S BORING! Or rather, it BECOMES boring.

Long answer: When you first start, everything seems and feels extremely bizarre, and thus, it ends up being incredibly compelling and rewarding to explore each location and sometimes find new things, helped a bunch by other secret places and events that are entirely optional, making your first time reaching those moments really friggin special.

HOWEVER, it does get tiring when you have to do that to accomplish a goal as dull as “Collect 24 Effects”, especially with the slow as a snail speed of Madotsuki, and no, the Bicycle doesn’t make this much better. What starts as engrossing and bewildering starts to become annoying and exhaustive to go through, and I’ll admit I used a guide to find out how to get the rest of the Effects after I got 14 of them or so, since some of them are fairly tricky to find as well, which I would appreciate more if not for the aforementioned slow speed. Pro tip: Get the Bicycle ASAP, and then start using the Bicycle Glitch to get through most areas as quickly as possible.

I get that most people will look past this and still adore it for everything else, and I can perfectly see why, but when the whole gameplay loop involves something as mundane as walking and nothing else, that one flaw starts to get on me. And to me, the game manages to be boring both intentionally and unintentionally, and the latter part is the issue.

In summary, I do really admire what this game does (and did to indie gaming as a whole alongside Cave Story), it is an absolute piece of art that broke the boundaries of what video games could be at the time, to the point where several games were inspired by it, including fan games like the famous Yume 2kki or .flow… However, I could also say something similar about other games I far prefer to play over Yume Nikki.

TL;DR - I admire the hell of what Kikiyama did, but I don’t like actually playing it, and I’d rather just watch about it than playing it, but I don’t know, maybe YOU will find those “flaws” as something that adds to the experience of playing Yume Nikki, and I'm fine with that.

Edit: Who the fuck changed the cover art in IGDB? Come on bro the other cover art was so awesome, but now it's replaced with this dull as a plank stuff!

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.

Okay, isso me surpreendeu.

Eu ja havia dado duas chances pra esse jogo antes e eu não consegui gostar, sinceramente. Agora na terceira vez... se tornou meu jogo de RPG Maker favorito e um dos meus jogos favoritos no geral.
Yume Nikki tem uma simples premissa, ser um simulador de sonhos, praticamente não existe nenhuma lore, o objetivo é conseguir 25 efeitos que mudam algo na Madotsuki e alguns mudam alguma coisa na jogabilidade e são necessários para ir mais longe, o jogo é livre para explorar na ordem que quiser. Sua maior qualidade é a liberdade, de início pode ser chato, eu mesmo desisti duas vezes, porém depois se torna divertido andar, ver uma coisa mais louca que a outra, sentir diferentes sensações únicas, sentir o prazer em encontrar as coisas por você mesmo. A trilha sonora é incrível, cada música passa a sensação de cada local, muitas músicas são tão icônicas que até hoje são usadas em vídeos e memes, tenho certeza que muita gente ja ouviu a OST sem nem saber da existência desse jogo.
Seu único defeito também está ligado á liberdade, muita coisa é jogada e é praticamente impossível zerar sozinho sem o auxílio de guia, eu encontrei apenas 18 efeitos sozinho depois de revirar todo o mapa inúmeras vezes.,

No fim de tudo, esse jogo é uma obra de arte, passa inúmeras sensações, é uma experiência única, cada lugar, música, NPC, momento, é tudo muito memorável, incrível como fizeram uma experiência assim em uma engine simples como o RPG Maker 2000 em uma época onde indies não eram algo comum, além das teorias que esse jogo tem, que fazem sentido e se conectam, afinal, tudo é interpretativo.

Yume Nikki é um daqueles jogos que você zera e diz para si mesmo: "Nunca existirá outro jogo como esse".