Yume Nikki: A game that anyone could have made, but noone can make anymore.

I really didn't like the game at first. It seemed like a completely inane walking simulator with no reason to play. 

It did not help that the first world I entered was by far Is the ugliest and most pointeless feeling world. It appears as a forest with a dark floor and a scrolling Aztec image underneath it. In most of the other worlds, the floor and walls feel much more coherent. The difference between the bright, endlessly repeating, trees, and the dark floor really makes it feel like the dev just put a bunch of random stuff in a room in RPG maker.

I think if I wasn't playing this on stream, I would have quit the game. But since I was, I kept going. I found the rest of it pretty enjoyable. It's a collect-a-thon going through various realms. Again, I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much off stream. Because I had two people telling me what to do to find everything, without that It would have taken twice as long to find even one third of the game. The game seems needlessly obtuse, with puzzles like "you have to sleep on this one bed whilst you are a snowman, and it only works a fifth of the time" too many things seem left up to random chance. If I wasn't told something was there I would have given up, or if I didn't know something was somewhere, I could see someone spending hours trying random combinations of abilities on every object in the game.

At the very end of the game I felt rather good about it, I had a chill time just looking at the scenery. Then the MC kills herself.

I was, well, confused. It felt tonally dissonant, completely unexpected. Like I was just vibing, was I supposed to think the MC was depressed?


Overall, I enjoyed the game, but I don't understand why it was so big. It feels like something anyone could have thrown together, just put a bunch of funky looking assets together in some rooms and add some portals between them. This game doesn't even have Dialogue, so you don't need to write anything.
People might say that the 'story' is deep, but it's only deep insofar as a game like Five nights at Freddy's is. It somehow feels like it was made specifically to be popular with the game theorists, even though it was released in 2004. Its story, if any is there, seems to only be enjoyable by people who spend hours counting the amount of pixels in each scene to find a secret code or something. Not a story that's meant to be too present to anyone just, playing the game.

All of my feelings might just be because this game is, well, antiquated. Everything it does has now been done better in a billion other games. Yes anyone can make a 'Yume Nikki' but if they released that today it would feel underwhelming, or it would feel obviously like a clone. In that sense, Even though Yume Nikki would be so simple to put together, you can't make a Yume Nikki ever again.


Sorry If that review felt a bit overly negative, like I said, I enjoyed my time with this game. Its just that the parts I enjoy are much easier to get across that why i didnt enjoy some other parts.

Thanks for reading:

Kindest Regards -- Fluffy