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CONTENT WARNING: Alongside spoilers for the ending of Yume Nikki, this post contains frank discussion of mental illness, suicide, paranoia, and sexual assault. Read at your own risk.
Basically since I started puberty, nightmares have been a very common occurrence for me. These range from something completely silly when thought of retrospectively, to exceedingly graphic and disturbing to recall even in my waking hours, to everything in between. Suffice to say, framing a game in a series of dreams (or nightmares) makes it immediately intriguing to me. While a lot of art is compared to a nightmare, or a fever dream, very few works have actually accurately managed to capture what it feels like to be in the midst of one. Yume Nikki is one of those rare exceptions. A perfect snapshot of the whimsical, unsettling, and utterly bizarre worlds that the unconscious mind can take you to.
I've been playing these little RPG maker games for a long time. I want to say I started around 11 years old, and as I write this I'm mere weeks away from turning 23. So I'm very familiar with the "genre". But I haven't played Yume Nikki, one of the biggest hitters and most influential games in this space, until this year. Why is that?
Technically, I tried. But my young mind was easily bored, deeply confused, and looking for strictly serious narrative experiences. All this to say I did try it out for about an hour in my early teen years and dipped. I resent my younger self for his close mindedness and unwillingness to meet this game on its own terms, but I also think I got to it at a time when I could truly, fully appreciate it.
I personally believe terms like "walking simulator" and "artgame" to be more than a tad reductive, but when faced with a game like Yume Nikki it's hard to think of terms that describe it more accurately. You wander, you wonder. I would almost hazard to say it's a game you experience or even feel rather than strictly play.
Sure, there is technically an end goal, and even a definitive ending with rolling credits. But it doesn't really feel like something that ends. I could go back anytime and find something weird or cool or creepy that I didn't see in my 6 hours of aimless and unsettled meandering. This lends to it feeling more like interacting with someone else's dreams. Individual dreams end, but you never really stop having them. Sometimes they recur identically. Sometimes they recur with slight changes. But they never really stop entirely.
But other than the vague (though accurate) description of being a game about dreams, what is Yume Nikki about? That’s a hard question to answer.
Supposedly, Kikiyama has said it’s not about anything. Though I couldn’t find a source for this, I wholeheartedly believe this is something they might have said. Though I’m not under the impression this is what they truly believe. Moreso that this is the correct answer to give. I’m sure they had some specific themes or even a full fledged story in mind when making the game, but as dreams are very interpretive, so is a story about them. Or rather, a story told through them.
So the question morphs. Not what is Yume Nikki about, but what is Yume Nikki about to me?
While playing it, I was lost in the game’s atmosphere. The absurd visuals, coming across violence and gore and death so often it begins to feel entirely mundane, the foreboding feeling permeating the entire experience. It’s a little difficult to balance that with trying to piece together some kind of story or thematic throughline. So I did a lot of thinking about it in the aftermath. There were things I noticed while playing. A lot of blood and gore and disembodied limbs which are kind of impossible not to notice. A lot of leering eyes which are similarly difficult to ignore. A lot of imagery relating to sex, genitalia and pregnancy, none of which felt particularly pleasant to be around. And the one that sticks in my mind the most, the fact that there are very few NPCs that are even vaguely humanoid, and the ones that do exist don’t give you any way to meaningfully interact with them.
The vast majority of the experience of playing Yume Nikki is underscored by a distinct feeling of loneliness. Vast empty maps that loop over themselves forever, full of warped humans or animalistic creatures which are sometimes hostile if they don’t ignore your existence entirely. The only way one can attempt to interact with them is by killing them with a knife, watching them fade away and hearing a shrill screech of pain.
Madotsuki herself lives alone. Any attempt to go outside of the small apartment where she resides is met with a solemn shake of her head and a noise which sounds a lot like she’s saying “muri”, a japanese word meaning “impossible” or “unreasonable”. It’s unthinkable you would even ask her to face the world outside of her home.
I think even in my very confused, intrigued, and slightly overstimulated state, I felt this loneliness when playing. The longer I linger on the feeling, the more I begin to connect with the game.
I am what many would call a NEET. I’m not in school, I don’t have a job, and I’m not involved in anything in between. I have always been a pretty big homebody. Even as a child I would have preferred to read in my bedroom alone than go outside and play. It got worse around the same time the nightmares started to occur more frequently. The older I got, the more the various cocktail of mental health problems I have started to take shape in my head. I became even more reclusive, even to the point of feeling fear at the idea of leaving my house or being around people I didn’t know.
But this doesn’t mean I didn’t crave companionship. I would regularly fantasize about having the life of a normal teenager. Making friends, going to school, trading notes I took during lessons with my classmates, joining clubs or going out after school, and many vivid fantasies of romantic and sexual experimentation I was never given the chance to undergo.
While my initial isolation wasn’t my choice, much of my later isolation was, at least in part, due to me not wanting to leave the safety of my home. Even my desire for friendship and romance weren’t enough to push me to step out my door or sometimes even out of my bed.
The longer I spent in isolation, the more warped my perception of things became. This was my perception of others, the world, and even myself. This mixed with intrusive thoughts from my yet undiagnosed OCD gave me something akin to psychotic episodes. I broke from reality. I found it hard to recognize the face in the mirror as my own. I found it hard to remember or even conceptualize human faces and bodies some days. I would be convinced of scary or disgusting things. Feeling watched in the privacy of my own room. Scared the food I was eating had some traces of human remains. Scared I had been violated or raped, possibly made pregnant without my knowing. Scared I was dreaming everything and hadn’t truly woken up in a long time. Scared the people I was living with wanted to hurt me or were lying to me about things. Scared nothing around me was even real to begin with.
Being awake felt scary. So I often escaped by sleeping the days away. Of course, this would often lead to the return of my commonly had and often dreaded nightmares. But even then, it felt like an escape. Nightmares eventually end after all. It felt nice to experience suffering that I knew had a definitive end point.
Although I’m luckily doing much better nowadays, I still feel a kinship between Madotsuki and my past self.
Yume Nikki is full of unsettling and absurd imagery. Warped images of human-like creatures, with strange impossible faces or extra limbs or massive wounds or orifices that solely exist to bleed out of. Colors and patterns that start twisting and turning and flashing behind your eyes. An appearance that changes completely with very little or sometimes zero intentionality.
People who have not lived in some degree of isolation for a long time might not catch on as easily, but as much as Yume Nikki feels like a series of surreal dreams, it also (quite possibly unintentionally) nails the feeling of being alone and mentally ill. Your mind begins to warp everything around and outside of you. Everyone you see, including yourself turning into a twisted funhouse facsimile of a human being. Escapism through art or sleep or something worse. The way your views of sex and love and friendship and life and death all take a turn for the worse. The yearning you have for something outside of all of this that feels just far enough out of reach that you can’t get to it.
Some people hate the ending of this game. And I understand why they do. But for many people in the position I believe Madotsuki is in, this is an inevitable fate for them. Truth is often stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction reflects reality so clearly that it’s hard to stomach. Yume Nikki is nothing if not hard to stomach.
Yume Nikki is a cautionary tale. This will be your ending too if you’re not careful. If you let yourself wallow in loneliness and chase escapism. A long, sprawling nightmare from which the only escape is taking its end into your own hands.
Take care of yourself. Face things head on. Do it scared.
And I know this is all easier said than done, but believe me, it’s worth it on the other side.
Most importantly, your hardest task.
Don’t jump.
Basically since I started puberty, nightmares have been a very common occurrence for me. These range from something completely silly when thought of retrospectively, to exceedingly graphic and disturbing to recall even in my waking hours, to everything in between. Suffice to say, framing a game in a series of dreams (or nightmares) makes it immediately intriguing to me. While a lot of art is compared to a nightmare, or a fever dream, very few works have actually accurately managed to capture what it feels like to be in the midst of one. Yume Nikki is one of those rare exceptions. A perfect snapshot of the whimsical, unsettling, and utterly bizarre worlds that the unconscious mind can take you to.
I've been playing these little RPG maker games for a long time. I want to say I started around 11 years old, and as I write this I'm mere weeks away from turning 23. So I'm very familiar with the "genre". But I haven't played Yume Nikki, one of the biggest hitters and most influential games in this space, until this year. Why is that?
Technically, I tried. But my young mind was easily bored, deeply confused, and looking for strictly serious narrative experiences. All this to say I did try it out for about an hour in my early teen years and dipped. I resent my younger self for his close mindedness and unwillingness to meet this game on its own terms, but I also think I got to it at a time when I could truly, fully appreciate it.
I personally believe terms like "walking simulator" and "artgame" to be more than a tad reductive, but when faced with a game like Yume Nikki it's hard to think of terms that describe it more accurately. You wander, you wonder. I would almost hazard to say it's a game you experience or even feel rather than strictly play.
Sure, there is technically an end goal, and even a definitive ending with rolling credits. But it doesn't really feel like something that ends. I could go back anytime and find something weird or cool or creepy that I didn't see in my 6 hours of aimless and unsettled meandering. This lends to it feeling more like interacting with someone else's dreams. Individual dreams end, but you never really stop having them. Sometimes they recur identically. Sometimes they recur with slight changes. But they never really stop entirely.
But other than the vague (though accurate) description of being a game about dreams, what is Yume Nikki about? That’s a hard question to answer.
Supposedly, Kikiyama has said it’s not about anything. Though I couldn’t find a source for this, I wholeheartedly believe this is something they might have said. Though I’m not under the impression this is what they truly believe. Moreso that this is the correct answer to give. I’m sure they had some specific themes or even a full fledged story in mind when making the game, but as dreams are very interpretive, so is a story about them. Or rather, a story told through them.
So the question morphs. Not what is Yume Nikki about, but what is Yume Nikki about to me?
While playing it, I was lost in the game’s atmosphere. The absurd visuals, coming across violence and gore and death so often it begins to feel entirely mundane, the foreboding feeling permeating the entire experience. It’s a little difficult to balance that with trying to piece together some kind of story or thematic throughline. So I did a lot of thinking about it in the aftermath. There were things I noticed while playing. A lot of blood and gore and disembodied limbs which are kind of impossible not to notice. A lot of leering eyes which are similarly difficult to ignore. A lot of imagery relating to sex, genitalia and pregnancy, none of which felt particularly pleasant to be around. And the one that sticks in my mind the most, the fact that there are very few NPCs that are even vaguely humanoid, and the ones that do exist don’t give you any way to meaningfully interact with them.
The vast majority of the experience of playing Yume Nikki is underscored by a distinct feeling of loneliness. Vast empty maps that loop over themselves forever, full of warped humans or animalistic creatures which are sometimes hostile if they don’t ignore your existence entirely. The only way one can attempt to interact with them is by killing them with a knife, watching them fade away and hearing a shrill screech of pain.
Madotsuki herself lives alone. Any attempt to go outside of the small apartment where she resides is met with a solemn shake of her head and a noise which sounds a lot like she’s saying “muri”, a japanese word meaning “impossible” or “unreasonable”. It’s unthinkable you would even ask her to face the world outside of her home.
I think even in my very confused, intrigued, and slightly overstimulated state, I felt this loneliness when playing. The longer I linger on the feeling, the more I begin to connect with the game.
I am what many would call a NEET. I’m not in school, I don’t have a job, and I’m not involved in anything in between. I have always been a pretty big homebody. Even as a child I would have preferred to read in my bedroom alone than go outside and play. It got worse around the same time the nightmares started to occur more frequently. The older I got, the more the various cocktail of mental health problems I have started to take shape in my head. I became even more reclusive, even to the point of feeling fear at the idea of leaving my house or being around people I didn’t know.
But this doesn’t mean I didn’t crave companionship. I would regularly fantasize about having the life of a normal teenager. Making friends, going to school, trading notes I took during lessons with my classmates, joining clubs or going out after school, and many vivid fantasies of romantic and sexual experimentation I was never given the chance to undergo.
While my initial isolation wasn’t my choice, much of my later isolation was, at least in part, due to me not wanting to leave the safety of my home. Even my desire for friendship and romance weren’t enough to push me to step out my door or sometimes even out of my bed.
The longer I spent in isolation, the more warped my perception of things became. This was my perception of others, the world, and even myself. This mixed with intrusive thoughts from my yet undiagnosed OCD gave me something akin to psychotic episodes. I broke from reality. I found it hard to recognize the face in the mirror as my own. I found it hard to remember or even conceptualize human faces and bodies some days. I would be convinced of scary or disgusting things. Feeling watched in the privacy of my own room. Scared the food I was eating had some traces of human remains. Scared I had been violated or raped, possibly made pregnant without my knowing. Scared I was dreaming everything and hadn’t truly woken up in a long time. Scared the people I was living with wanted to hurt me or were lying to me about things. Scared nothing around me was even real to begin with.
Being awake felt scary. So I often escaped by sleeping the days away. Of course, this would often lead to the return of my commonly had and often dreaded nightmares. But even then, it felt like an escape. Nightmares eventually end after all. It felt nice to experience suffering that I knew had a definitive end point.
Although I’m luckily doing much better nowadays, I still feel a kinship between Madotsuki and my past self.
Yume Nikki is full of unsettling and absurd imagery. Warped images of human-like creatures, with strange impossible faces or extra limbs or massive wounds or orifices that solely exist to bleed out of. Colors and patterns that start twisting and turning and flashing behind your eyes. An appearance that changes completely with very little or sometimes zero intentionality.
People who have not lived in some degree of isolation for a long time might not catch on as easily, but as much as Yume Nikki feels like a series of surreal dreams, it also (quite possibly unintentionally) nails the feeling of being alone and mentally ill. Your mind begins to warp everything around and outside of you. Everyone you see, including yourself turning into a twisted funhouse facsimile of a human being. Escapism through art or sleep or something worse. The way your views of sex and love and friendship and life and death all take a turn for the worse. The yearning you have for something outside of all of this that feels just far enough out of reach that you can’t get to it.
Some people hate the ending of this game. And I understand why they do. But for many people in the position I believe Madotsuki is in, this is an inevitable fate for them. Truth is often stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction reflects reality so clearly that it’s hard to stomach. Yume Nikki is nothing if not hard to stomach.
Yume Nikki is a cautionary tale. This will be your ending too if you’re not careful. If you let yourself wallow in loneliness and chase escapism. A long, sprawling nightmare from which the only escape is taking its end into your own hands.
Take care of yourself. Face things head on. Do it scared.
And I know this is all easier said than done, but believe me, it’s worth it on the other side.
Most importantly, your hardest task.
Don’t jump.
