You, Me, and Yume Nikki (-DREAM DIARY-)
It’s a strange time to be alive. After as remarkably hellish a year as 2017, and as terrible as 2018 is already shaping up to be, any gift the universe gives me feels like a cruel joke to the point where I find great difficulty in accepting those gifts at all. I found a dollar in my pants pocket the other day and instead of thinking, “Yes! I love money,” I just felt tired. No amount of money could feel like a real sign of sympathy from some higher power in times like these, if one even exists, and truthfully almost nothing could. When a new Yume Nikki project was announced late last month, I felt no joy, no mirth, no happiness; I crawled into bed and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and when I woke up and breathed in the cold, stale air of my bedroom, I came to a stark realization. Of all things, Yume Nikki 2 was furthest from that sign of sympathy, and indeed I regard it as a sign of malice from the god I am now sure exists. In the dim light and frigidity of my room that morning, I whispered to myself, “God doesn’t love me and Yume Nikki 2 is proof.”
Needless to say, I’m excited. Yume Nikki, for those unfamiliar, is a surreal horror adventure game made in RPG Maker 2003, and is probably the most well known RPG Maker project, period. In it, you explore the dreams of a hikikomori (a Japanese term for a social recluse to an extreme degree) named Madotsuki, and collect various “effects” that let you explore the dreams further. The game is very sparse in terms of dialogue or narration; the menus are practically the only lexical way it engages the player at all, and the announcement trailer for the new project, entitled Yume Nikki -Dream Diary-, is much the same. Those familiar with the original will recognize a lot within the eight and a half minutes of VFX reel and sound effects, but to the uneducated viewer there is nothing to indicate that it’s announcing a new video game at all, save for the logo at the end. Thankfully, a second trailer featuring a great deal more information and some small clips of gameplay was released, followed by a third trailer containing a small sequence of gameplay, and we now know that Yume Nikki -Dream Diary- is an adaptation of the original game under the supervision of Kikiyama, the creator.
This won’t be the first time Yume Nikki has been adapted or reimagined - both a novelization and a manga adaptation exist, alongside countless fangames - but this will be the first time Kikiyama themselves have been involved in any significant way. The small sequences of gameplay from the second and third trailers and the screenshots on the game’s Steam Store page immediately reminded me of both Inside and Little Nightmares, two recent horror adventure games from Playdead and Tarsier Studios respectively, particularly because of the tilt-shifted sidescrolling both of those games feature that Dream Diary appears to utilize as well. This is a huge departure from the top-down grid-based movement, à la every other RPG Maker game, that the original Yume Nikki featured; just how closely Dream Diary will follow after the original in other aspects of gameplay, most notably the open exploration and the collection and use of the effects, remains to be seen.
In the weeks since the game’s announcement, which have been horrifying and miserable for both me personally and for the world, I’ve come to another realization. Whether they are cruel jokes from a god who hates us or simple happenstance, we can accept gifts like Yume Nikki 2 without guilt, and maybe even accept what small reprieve from the malaise of modern living they can offer us. Yume Nikki -Dream Diary- releases February 23rd on Steam, and the original is available to play for free on Steam right now.
