ゆめにっき @2008-09-02 22:26:35The other day, I peeked into 4chan /v/. Somewhere on the first page, there was one of the usual lengthy threads of game bashery that are typical for it; at the bottom of it, however, was a post that mildly struck my attention - "Cave Story and Yume Nikki are the only games that /v/ agrees to be good". I played the former - and liked it, needless to say - and have been in search of a similarly wholesome gaming experience ever since. Naturally, a game put in the same league as it by the merciless gamer dungeon that is /v/ would warrant a look.
So yeah... Yume Nikki.
You are an, apparently female, what the English-speaking net resident would call basement dweller (though, technically speaking, your location is a room in an unnamed floor of a high-rise). You don't leave your room save for the dreary balcony which evokes memories of the depiction of East Asian lower-end living in Terranigma (think Yunkou). All you do is walking around, playing a video game about catching falling eggplants, writing in your dream diary and sleeping. The last point, however, is where the interesting things start.
After a countdown of 3 seconds has elapsed, you find yourself on your own balcony. There's still nothing to do here, so you can proceed into your room. You'll notice your eggplant game was replaced to randomly either display a blinking white comma/magatama or a full-screen loop of something between Atari graphics and Mesoamerican codices. A foreshadowing of what's yet to come.
At this point, your reservations about leaving through your room's door appear to be gone. Beyond it lies a circle of twelve doors, each leading to different points of an extensive, if not vast, world of interconnected, abstract, often psychedelic or outright disturbing/shocking dreamscapes, populated by strange creatures such as walking clocks or tall, thin women with distorted faces contact with which teleports you to any of a number of isolated spots across the world, leaving you with no choice but to wake up ([9]). Scattered across the world are effects which can be anything from a bicycle or knife you can equip yourself with to something that reduces you to your own severed head.
While the knife provides you with the faculty of fighting your environment, the game's apparent main focus remains to be its nonlinear exploration aspect, backed by an extensive score of ambient dark, disturbing music that sets the mood skillfully. Two canned-review-in-a-sentence descriptions that came to my mind were "bastard lovechild of Earthbound, Clock Tower, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei and Knytt Stories" and "one of the more interesting feverish dream experiences out there".
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