Games You Should Play, Day #4: Yume Nikki

So far, Games You Should Play Week has had a taste of a lot of different kind of games.  We've got the modern RPG, the Dating Sim game, and the Hardcore Platformer all down.  Today, I've decided to give it up for a game that belongs to a near-dead genre: the Adventure game.  Now, when you think of an adventure game, you probably think Day of the Tentacle, or Machinarium if you're a little younger; or perhaps even the most recent Telltale classic, The Walking Dead.  You probably think of games that have some menial tasks to accomplish, like escaping a room or finding a way to combine these three items together to make a flashlight.  It's true, adventure games have a very specific formula to them, and rarely do we see games that truly branch away from the fetch quest/narrative formula that goes on in the adventure game world.  And, although the narrative part tends to be the main grab for these types of games, the fetch quest idea has gotten very stale.

So, how do you find a way around that?  Do you abandon the concept of fetch quests altogether, and make a narrative game like Katawa Shoujo or Analogue: A Hate Story?  Or should you make the fetch quests even harder to complete, making players waste hours of time looking for a single object that they could use to further their investigation of the story?  How about we eliminate the narrative aspect as well!  Oh, and the protagonist should be silent.

He's...

He's not kidding, is he...?

If you haven't already picked up on what I'm about to say, then get ready, as it's probably going to shake the foundation of what you know about Adventure Games forever.  Ready?  There is an adventure game out there that managed to do it better than any of those other adventure games, to produce a narrative without ever uttering a single word, to create a defined and elastic main character who remains silent throughout the entire game, and that actually makes fetch quests interesting.

I did NOT go through 4 years of law school and 12 hours of fetch quests

TO HAVE YOU PULL THIS SHIT IN FRONT OF MY FACE.

The game is called Yume Nikki, and yes, you read that right.  Once again, I have pulled another Japanese game from the ether to show you, and this time, I can guarantee that at least some of you have a vague idea of what I'm about to say.  Yume Nikki is a game about a girl named Madotsuki, who, as mentioned above, is a silent protagonist.  She is also a shut-in who does nothing at all in the real world except go on her computer and sleep.  Those are your only two options for the whole game.  That's right, this is all you can do in the real world.  However, once you start dreaming...

Oh my gods, does it get messed up.  This adventure game puts you in the top-down view of a RPG Maker style game without the RPG, and it puts you in this shut-in's dreams.  And if you've seen some of the things that Madotsuki has seen, you'd be pretty messed up as well.  During the course of her dreams, she'll enter into these doors, which take you to different dream worlds, all of which have a central theme.  The themes, however, are not what you think: there is no fire dream or ice mountain dream.  There are, however, dreams of isometric cubes and sky gardens and coral castles and even hell!

This is fan-art for this game.

I repeat: fan-art.

Now, to get to the good stuff...  You see, Madotsuki does not have any insane abilities like seeing into the future or complete control over her dreams; in fact, she can only walk around and observe what is already in front of her.  She can, however, pick up specific powers that turn her head (or entire body, as the case may be) into different objects.  There is a power to turn her head into a stoplight in order to stop all enemy activity in the area.  There's another power that attracts enemies toward her by making Madotsuki into a nekomata, or cat-person.  There's also her knife power, which does exactly as advertised.

So, as you can imagine, the game is mostly about scenery and observation.  You are not in control of her dreams, as they are actually controlling you, getting into Madotsuki's head and making her even more recluse.  The funny thing about this game is it will never provide context to her adventures in dream world, as you are the one who gets to infer what is happening to our dear friend Madotsuki.  And trust me, there are some things that will make you question not only what's going on with her, but whether you should continue playing the game.  Did I forget to say that this game is scary?  Not in the 'ha-ha, I got you' kind of way.  No. We're talking, "Oh my god, did that girl get into a car accident, or did Madotsuki do this to her?"

It's like Trent Reznor and Satoshi Kon had a baby!

And it's a girl! :D

The funny thing about this game is that you'll never get any legit answers, as there is literally no context given to anything that happens in her dreams.  All of her dreams could be completely inconsequential, or even just figments of an imaginative little girl's mind.  Whatever the case may be, there's still that weird little voice in the back of my head every time I boot the game up that says, "Hey, I figured out a new theory, but... You might not sleep for a day or two."  It really makes you wonder what is up with this girl and why is she not doing anything to change herself?  Why can't she just go outside like everyone else and just enjoy the world and have friends?

I won't spoil the ending, as it's quite the shocker, but needless to say, it's one of the greatest stories I've ever had the pleasure of piecing together.  It took quite a bit of research, and I had to break my 'no guides allowed' rule in order to actually understand this game at all (even though I will talk about how the scenery is just breathtaking in a whole new way in a little bit, I didn't want to spend 5 hours in one area).  But, perhaps we should move onto why this game has such a great atmosphere, and how the long fetch quests are a good thing.

This oughta be good.

First off, the atmosphere.  This is something that Yume Nikki does quite well: it manages to unsettle the audience with its subliminal messaging in the backgrounds (there are some phallic images as well as some other images disguised as characters or walls), as well as put you in the mood to explore with its wide-open areas and its music.  There's definitely a theme here, and that theme is "you just aren't safe in your mind anymore", as the music is often times upbeat, and yet, has that dissonant tinge to it as it uses sounds that just don't evoke good emotions.  The result is nothing short of amazing, as you not only get unsettled by an atmosphere and theme that can only exist in a subconscious environment, but also the music just pulls you into that, making you want, yet be very afraid of, seeing more.

It's one of the most abstract games out there, as it uses the subconscious as a way of admitting its message.  For example, a lot of areas in the game look like real-world locations: subways, forests, piers, etc.  However, every single one has been crafted in such a way that there is constantly something nagging about it, like everything just feels so wrong.  After wandering around in this world for a short time, its tough not to feel insane; however, soon enough, I embraced that insanity.  I simply said, yeah, everything about this next area makes me so uncomfortable and scared, but I can't help but feel that there are important demons in there that Madotsuki needs to face.

I guess that's one of the biggest draws of this game: it makes you comfortable with how unsettled you'll end up getting.  Soon enough, you'll realize that you've heard the same haunting refrain and that you've been wandering around this dream world for hours, and yet, something keeps drawing you into it more and more. This game is the closest thing to an actual nightmare that I've ever played, something that you want to stop, that you just want to turn off and shut down, but you just can't.  There's something at the end of this area that I need to see, that she needs to see, and I won't turn back until I find it.

I played this game for 10 hours for this?!

...At least he's kind of cute, in a Yume Nikki sort of way.

Last thing: the fetch quests.  Sure, every adventure game has them.  And sure, they usually involve combining items into some weird new one in order to get past the guard to get into the castle or whatever.  Not Yume Nikki.  In Yume Nikki, you just wander.  That's it.  That's the whole point of the game.  To wander around this disturbing dream until you find a new power, and then use that power on something new.  Now, as I've mentioned already, this game gives no context to anything aside from the fact that you can dream.  Couple that with the fact that the fetch quests in this game aren't actually "quests", but simply an inherent duty, and it's painfully obvious that finding any of these powers is going to take a long effing time.  And in that time, you are going to get freaked out by the sensory overload that comes with playing this game for hours on end and finding nothing.  It's the equivalent of Einstein's theory of insanity: Insanity is when you do something repeatedly and expect something different to happen.

And there it is.  The answer.  Yume Nikki does this because it wants you to feel like you're actually just as crazy as Madotsuki.  It wants you, yes, you, to wander around and find something that you could have sworn wasn't there five hours ago.  It wants you to be unpleasantly surprised every time you enter a new area.  There's a reason why there are only a spare few moments in this game that can be considered "happy", and I'm convinced the only reason those are there in the first place is because otherwise, the creator might have literally gone postal from the cabin fever.

"Well, only four more hours of hardcore programming and then I can release my new-"

YOU DIED

Yume Nikki is one of those games that is very difficult to actually describe, and instead, it should be played and just enjoyed.  Attempting to describe any more than I have is simply futile, as the rest of this game is just what you make of it.  Everyone I've talked to has a different reaction to everything in this game, and it just builds and builds until people start to formulate theories on Madotsuki's life.  It's a brilliant work of the medium, and whoever designed this game should get a gold star for probably losing his sanity by making it.

Like I said, just pick it up on PC.  It's a free download online, and it is worth every non-penny you'll pay for it.  And, again, just remember: if you don't like being mentally disturbed or depressed after playing/watching videos or video games, just ignore this game.  It will do both, and that, I can guarantee.

~Cascadakatana

PS- I just realized that every game I've put on GYSP Week has been Japanese.  I should probably even out them odds, eh?