I’d never heard of Yume Nikki before. Turns out it’s a cult classic Japanese indie horror game from 2004 that was re-released on Steam last year as a free to play game and pretty much as otaku as you can get, especially if you’re a real otaku gamer (I couldn’t resist!). The game is about a female hikikomori, a Japanese cultural archetype I was also previously unaware of. Hikikomori are essentially isolationist hermits or shut-ins in modern Japan who will lock themselves up in their houses for six months or more with little to no contact with the outside world. There are estimated to be around 500,000 hikikomori in Japan at the moment. It’s such a problem that the Ministry of Health in Japan addresses it and there are official psychological qualifications to be classified as hikikomori.
Needless to say, this was a lot to take in. Yume Nikki – Dream Diary takes the original Yume Nikki game and modernizes it, adding puzzles, platforming, and more to the original’s Earthbound-like graphics with the assistance of the original game designer, Kikiyama. You play a young girl who has shut herself in her room. There’s nothing for her to do other than play a game called Super Nasu, a Buster Bros./Super Pang knock off) on her Famicom, and sleep. When she sleeps however, she enters a dream world and we get to explore the depths of her subconscious.
The original game is hailed as an independent masterpiece and complete schlock. It’s hard to really even quantify the game itself. Yume Nikki – Dream Diary is much the same. It’s a hard game to even explain. There are multiple doors which allow you to enter different parts of the girl’s mind and explorer. Between simple puzzles, exploration, and platforming, you’ll gather a variety of objects that will help you to continue on your quest, even though it’s rather unclear what that quest is. It’s like taking a dream diary, shuffling the pages, randomly picked a format for each stage, and making the whole thing into a video game. Stages are short but can be challenging or creepy, odd or downright bizarre. There’s no dialogue, no real storyline, you simply have to intuit what to do, which can lead to a fair amount of frustration. The game isn’t hard, but it is a bit clunky, and you may have to work to get through a few of the platforming areas.
Along the way you start to understand what’s going through the girl’s head, and you slowly understand that the stages are linked as well as representative of the issues in the real world that turned her into a hikikomori in the first place. The ambiance is consistently weird and creepy and often had a distinctly Silent Hill feel to it. Music is subtle, graphics are simple but sufficient, and the game’s overall feel is that of a moderately well-crafted indie game.
Ultimately, this is a game that’s only attractive to a small audience, one that likes suspenseful horror, Japanese culture, and exploration. If you have the patience for it, it’s an interesting game, but definitely don’t expect to be led by the hand. You won’t be. Apparently, the original game didn’t help much either, and players were left slowly discovering the right path through trial and error, but Yume Nikki – Dream Diary manages to keep things interesting by adding things that didn’t make the cut in the original version of the game.
It’s hard to talk about Yume Nikki without mentioning its rabid fan base. Turns out the game has quite a cult following and has inspired a lot of video game horror itself. Multiple fan titles have been released based on it, merchandise is available, and there are hundreds of reviews on Steam explaining why both the original game and the remake are either fantastic or terrible for varying reasons.
Ultimately, much like the game’s creator, it’s virtually impossible to tell anyone whether they’ll like the game or not, or what any of it means. There’s a wild overabundance of unexplained symbolism rampant throughout Yume Nikki – Dream Diary and you’ll simply have to interpret it for yourself. Kikiyama has utterly refused to explain a single thing about the game, and that’s okay, since it allows you to have an experience free of expectations.
I thought Yume Nikki – Dream Diary was interesting and compelling with each level whisking me away to another dusty corner of the brain for more bizarre experiences. It’s a game that you don’t really want ruined since expecting things to happen would fundamentally taint the experience. On the Switch, the game works well, both docked and undocked, and provided different ambiances for both experiences. Overall, it was better on the big screen however.
Yume Nikki – Dream Diary is a game that simply defies categorization. It’s a bit of horror, a bit of exploration, a bit of platforming, a bit of a puzzler, and a bit of a journey of self-discovery. It’s a bold, unique game that was paced a little slower than maybe it should have been, but it’s not really a mainstream commercial release to begin with. Think of Yume Nikki as more of a fine art style of gaming, where your experience isn’t pre-defined in a standard way but you’re still forced to follow the paths laid out for you to an extent. A linear non-linear game if you will. With slightly clunky controls and older polygon graphics, Yume Nikki isn’t Hellblade or anything like that, but it’s still an interesting experience worth having and an overall interesting game, especially for the $20 price point. If it’s your style, you probably already know it, so check it out! Yume Nikki – Dream Diary is a game that would probably never exist outside of the currently flourishing indie scene and it’s great that it does!
This review was written based on a digital copy of Yume Nikki – Dream Diary for the Nintendo Switch provided by the publisher and played in both docked and undocked modes.