This is not a review so much as a brief commentary or analysis of a certain aspect of Yume Nikki I find interesting. I have no intention of providing the (n+1)th narrative interpretation of the game's imagery etc.
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A large subset of "art games" (a term I dislike, but I won't go into that here) turn on the central act of moving through space. While derisive commentary on such games generally draws attention to the lack of interactivity between the player and environment, I find it more interesting and helpful to think about the ways in which these games allow movement to be expressive, or how they fail to do so.
In a certain sense many, if not most, games already have movement at their core, and arguably handle it more profoundly than many art games by complicating and problematizing the nature of movement itself. One trick is to split movement into distinct actions (jumping, walking, dashing, etc.) which are required in different combinations at different times; another is to confront the player with AI agents ("enemies") that impede the player's movements unless they are avoided or overcome. If this is obvious, the point is that these complexities make the act of movement itself expressive in ways that are easy to forget when everything is viewed abstractly in terms of genre conventions.
The question is, when such things (whether we insist on calling them "gameplay" or not) are subtracted, what is left to be expressive? Many authors will rely on the strength of their writing or art, and this approach can be fruitful, but it sidesteps the question I'm interested in. Yume Nikki answers this challenge with the very structure of space itself.
Partly it does so by drawing on the conventions of a kind of game that predates digital games, i.e. the maze. Even putting aside its scale and interconnectedness (and the occasional gate puzzle), Yume Nikki is a particularly forbidding maze in that it has no end, at least in the usual sense. The "effects" scattered throughout its interior (some of which aid traversal while others are purely cosmetic) unlock an ending, true, but many of Yume Nikki's depths contain no effects at all. The game's world is many times larger than it needs to be to accommodate the effect-finding game. Certainly, each "unnecessary" area serves its own narrative or affective purpose, but in terms of my argument they all serve just one: they are places to be lost in.
The other, complimentary aspect of Yume Nikki's approach is its austerity. Yume Nikki has no concern for making a first impression of variety or density; looking at the areas immediately accessible from the Nexus, the impression is rather one of emptiness. Partly it's the repeating tiles, a technical convention of RPGMaker and the games it draws from, but also the scarcity of features, interactive or otherwise, that would distract the eyes or hands in the way we normally expect.
The upshot is that Yume Nikki requires two things of its players: firstly, not to become bored (something of a dare in all honesty), and secondly to be quite deliberate and systematic in their approach to exploration. All this results in a level of serious engagement the typical "walking sim" does not require, and in the long run that other aspect—Yume Nikki's art and aesthetics—only gains from this.
Notes:
1. One could reasonably argue that much of what I have said about Yume Nikki's structure derives from its unfinished state. While I doubt an updated version would drastically alter this structure by filling in currently "empty" areas, I'll concede that I have nothing to base this on besides intuition, and that other additions or alternations could change the core in unforeseen ways. (That is, of course, assuming the project has not been abandoned.)
2. I will also concede that certain secrets are definitely /too/ well-hidden.
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A large subset of "art games" (a term I dislike, but I won't go into that here) turn on the central act of moving through space. While derisive commentary on such games generally draws attention to the lack of interactivity between the player and environment, I find it more interesting and helpful to think about the ways in which these games allow movement to be expressive, or how they fail to do so.
In a certain sense many, if not most, games already have movement at their core, and arguably handle it more profoundly than many art games by complicating and problematizing the nature of movement itself. One trick is to split movement into distinct actions (jumping, walking, dashing, etc.) which are required in different combinations at different times; another is to confront the player with AI agents ("enemies") that impede the player's movements unless they are avoided or overcome. If this is obvious, the point is that these complexities make the act of movement itself expressive in ways that are easy to forget when everything is viewed abstractly in terms of genre conventions.
The question is, when such things (whether we insist on calling them "gameplay" or not) are subtracted, what is left to be expressive? Many authors will rely on the strength of their writing or art, and this approach can be fruitful, but it sidesteps the question I'm interested in. Yume Nikki answers this challenge with the very structure of space itself.
Partly it does so by drawing on the conventions of a kind of game that predates digital games, i.e. the maze. Even putting aside its scale and interconnectedness (and the occasional gate puzzle), Yume Nikki is a particularly forbidding maze in that it has no end, at least in the usual sense. The "effects" scattered throughout its interior (some of which aid traversal while others are purely cosmetic) unlock an ending, true, but many of Yume Nikki's depths contain no effects at all. The game's world is many times larger than it needs to be to accommodate the effect-finding game. Certainly, each "unnecessary" area serves its own narrative or affective purpose, but in terms of my argument they all serve just one: they are places to be lost in.
The other, complimentary aspect of Yume Nikki's approach is its austerity. Yume Nikki has no concern for making a first impression of variety or density; looking at the areas immediately accessible from the Nexus, the impression is rather one of emptiness. Partly it's the repeating tiles, a technical convention of RPGMaker and the games it draws from, but also the scarcity of features, interactive or otherwise, that would distract the eyes or hands in the way we normally expect.
The upshot is that Yume Nikki requires two things of its players: firstly, not to become bored (something of a dare in all honesty), and secondly to be quite deliberate and systematic in their approach to exploration. All this results in a level of serious engagement the typical "walking sim" does not require, and in the long run that other aspect—Yume Nikki's art and aesthetics—only gains from this.
Notes:
1. One could reasonably argue that much of what I have said about Yume Nikki's structure derives from its unfinished state. While I doubt an updated version would drastically alter this structure by filling in currently "empty" areas, I'll concede that I have nothing to base this on besides intuition, and that other additions or alternations could change the core in unforeseen ways. (That is, of course, assuming the project has not been abandoned.)
2. I will also concede that certain secrets are definitely /too/ well-hidden.