Yume Nikki

It's been well over a decade since I first saw Yume Nikki. It was a Let's Play from a YouTuber I used to watch. I don't think they ever finished it or even got close, but the game definitely seemed intersting from what I could remember, so when I saw it appear on Steam at the start of 2018 for free, I added it to my library. 6 years laters, I finally got around to playing it.

Uhmmm... I don't have a lot to say about it. The game is incredibly cryptic and gives no hints on how to progress. Though I did not intially know this, your goal is to gather all the "effects", which are like little accessories for your character that grant you powers to do things and get to places you couldn't before. I found 4 out of the 24, and found a use for none of them. I spent about an hour wandering around aimlessly in creepy, desolate worlds, listening to the unsettling, and somewhat irritating, background music. There's 12 worlds, I think? They kind of connect to other worlds too and feature sort of unique scenery. None of this tells you anything though. What do you do in the worlds? What's the goal? Where do I go next? Is this a dead end because there's nothing here, or is it a dead end because I don't have the right effect equipped? You'll never know, and the game won't so much as hint to it.

Listen, after an hour, I was emotionally tired. I had kind of given up after 30 minutes, which doesn't sound like a lot, but if you asked me to recount what I saw in that hour, I couldn't tell you. The game is so devoid of any meaning, and it doesn't make it easy to explore it either, with the worlds being large, the field of view being small, the things you want to find being hidden, your walking pace being a crawl, and the music eating away at your sanity. It's definitely an experience, but it's not an experience I would recommend having.