Yume Nikki is one of those games I often point to in conversation with fellow designers as a shining example of how well a video game can capture a specific person's experience. These types of RPG Maker horror games usually get a bad rap; they are often cheap products made by inexperienced designers who believe that mashing teenage girl protagonists with horrific set pieces will instantly make a work profound. Yume Nikki does not deserve to be lumped in with the contemporaries. Kikiyama, the developer, managed to extract clever narrative meaning within the bounds of RPG Maker's limited toolset in a way that left me genuinely floored. This game is best approached completely blind, so I will refrain from saying any details, but it has transformed the way I approach experiential design even if the games I want to make look nothing like this.