Game Review: Yume Nikki

(Content Warning: Discussion of mental illness, violence, and suicide.)

Yume Nikki is an RPG Maker game released in 2004 and recently released for free on Steam. You play as Madotsuki, a girl who either can’t or won’t leave her bedroom. When you choose to lay in her bed, you enter Madotsuki’s dream world. From a central hub called The Nexus, the player enters through doors into twelve dream worlds. There are no stated goals or objectives, so the player often simply wanders through these worlds. If they are thorough in their explorations (using Enter or z to interact with the environment), they may discover “effects”, which are collected from specific interactions and used to change the player character in some way. They are occasionally useful or practical (e.g. the bicycle effect, which helps you move faster) but many alter nothing but Madotsuki’s appearance (e.g. the Poop Hair effect or the Frog effect). If the player collects all 24 effects and drops them in The Nexus, a stepladder appears on their real-world balcony from which Madotsuki can jump, apparently committing suicide. The game itself has few written instructions and no stated goals or objectives. Just as a heads up, be aware that all names except for Madotsuki in this game review are commonly accepted fan names, as no names are given to most of the game’s areas and characters.

Yume Nikki’s ambiguous nature leads to a plethora of valid readings, but perhaps the most compelling way of interpreting it is in a discussion of mental illness and isolation. Madotsuki’s unwillingness and/or inability to leave her room seems to portray her as a hikikomori, an actual social phenomenon in Japan wherein young people withdraw into their rooms for months at a time and avoid all social interaction, often due to anxieties about social interaction and the outside world. The mechanics, spaces, and atmosphere of Yume Nikki do more than simply portray the mind of a character with mental illness, but also induce in the player the feelings of isolation, confusion, and desperation that accompany Madotsuki’s social withdrawal.

Madotsuki in her real-world bedroom.

The mechanics of Yume Nikki are incredible simple: sleep, wake up in the dream world, walk, attempt to interact with z, press 9 to wake up in the real world again. Repeat. The simplicity of these mechanics plays against the complexity and unsystematic nature of the world to leave the player with a feeling of powerlessness and desperation. The “z” key to interact begins to feel like the proverbial hammer, and everything feels like a nail. Will interacting with this tree do something? Will it give me an effect? Probably not, but the player has little choice but to interact in a desperate search for some sort of meaning or progress in the game. Perhaps one out of every thousand interactions yields an effect. One out of every hundred might yield some feedback (NPCs occasionally beep or flash, cupboards open, etc.), but for the most part they yield no result at all. This ineffectuality leads to the player feeling just as powerless and isolated in the game’s dream world as Madotsuki is in her locked-in existence. When combined with effects such as the kitchen knife, this desire to be acknowledged can have terrifying moral consequences. In my experience, it’s easy to begin using the kitchen knife on NPCs simply because it allows you to get a reaction in a world which otherwise ignores and isolates you.

A small section of the massive, looping maze (filled with chasers) that Yume Nikki fans have dubbed "Hell."

The design of the spaces of Yume Nikki compounds this effect of isolation and confusion. They hover at the edge of what might be called evocative space: some objects, spaces, and characters look familiar or seem to have references, but as a whole the dream world is surreal enough to prohibit a single unified theory of who Madotsuki is and why she has become a hikikomori. The spaces of Yume Nikki range from the soft, bright areas one might expect from the dreams of a young girl (e.g. the Pink Sea) to harsh, nightmarish areas full of jarring colors, discomfiting music, and violent imagery (e.g. Eyeball World and Hell). These worlds often lack distinctive features and loop seamlessly as the player walks through them, leading to an anxiety-inducing sense of being alone and lost in a vast space. The music throughout these spaces consists mostly of short loops of slow, ambient, or atonal music. Overlaid with this is the constant squeaky sound of Madotsuki’s footsteps as the player walks. Both these sounds contribute to a strong sense of repetition and being lost – as the world loops, the music repeats, and the player feels the sense of deja-vu that comes with being lost in a looping space.

The Pink Sea, a relatively relaxing area.

There is very little familiar material in these spaces: they are inhabited primarily by inhuman NPCs with whom any communication is impossible. However, these encounters are even less jarring than those with NPCs that appear human. For example, at one point the character may find the room of Poniko (literally “the girl with the ponytail”), a young blonde girl in a normal bedroom. However, if the player switches off the lights, Poniko has a one in sixty-four chance of changing into Uboa, a deformed white face on a melted-looking body, who when interacted with transports Madotsuki to an inescapable world inhabited only by a creature which vomits blood. Another humanoid character, Monoko (literally “monochrome girl”) has no reaction unless approached with the stoplight effect, which causes a picture of a deformed Monoko with extra arms to fill the entirety of the screen. These interactions create a deep sense of the uncanny within the player. When they seek familiar characters in this strange world, they find themselves only more isolated and anxious. All attempts to reach out end not only in a lack of communication, but also in some of the most horrifying events the game contains.

Poniko in her room...

...transforms into Uboa.

Overall, I would recommend Yume Nikki to anyone who has even the slightest bit of interest (it’s free on Steam for PC, and even a short amount of play can give you an idea of the experience). For most players, it probably won’t be a “fun” experience per se, but a deeply intriguing one. Yume Nikki forces players to confront why they play games, explore, and pursue meaning. By constructing a space where goals and meaning are subordinated to wandering, isolation, and confusion, Yume Nikki treats the topic of mental illness and social withdrawal in a very emotionally effective way for the player. However, Yume Nikki is an incredibly open-ended game, and I encourage others to form a reading of it for themselves. Other potential angles could include its relationship to video games as a genre, the nature of violence, and issues of humanity and identity. I wish I had more space to spend on this game which has been constantly on my mind, but all I can do is give one last encouragement for you to give it a try and experience the horrifying, uncanny, isolating, compelling experience for yourself.