Gaming Yume Nikki [Dream Diary]

[Sangome]

[SIZE="1"]What happens when a crazy Japanese man decides to use RPGMaker to make a free-roaming game devoted to scaring the pants off of those who play it? You get [b]Yume Nikki[/b], a 2D freeware adventure game by Kikiyama that could be best described as Earthbound meets Silent Hill.

You play as Madotsuki, a little girl that lives by herself in a small apartment. There is very little to do in said apartment, aside from playing a game, turning on the TV, writing in your diary [which functions as the save feature] and sleeping [more on that later]. And don't even attempt to go outside while awake -- Madotsuki will merely shake her head, leading players to believe she is a hikikkomori.

Now, remember when I was talking about sleeping? You gotta do that if you hope to explore 99.9 percent of the game. Sleeping will allow you to venture into Madostuki's dreams, which are truly bizarre and rather disturbing. This poor little girl is definitely not of sound mind.

In any case, the objective of Yume Nikki is...well...there's no true "objective", per se. There's no dialogue [save for the menu screen and item obtaining], no voices [spoiler][aside from certain screaming][/spoiler], and no one to talk to. So what do you do? You explore. The dreams that lie within Madosuki's dream world are extremely vast and open. The game relies on visual stimuli and sound cues to mess with your head, so to speak. I suggest maybe watching some videos of gameplay before downloading the game, to see if it's really right for you [Youtube has a buttload of them].

The one thing you [i]do[/i] actively pursue [well, you do not have to, but if you want to trigger some of the WTF-inducing events, as well as actually beat the game, then I suggest you do so] are collecting items called "effects". There are about 25 of them IIRC, and while most of them are just altering of Madosuki's appearance, some will actually lend you a hand against the sporadic random encounters [such as the knife], and increase your speed [bicycle].

As I said before, the game is freeware, meaning it is free for anybody to download [don't ask me for the link though, Google it yourself :P]. And yes, there is an English version, although it should be noted that there is apparently a patch out there that needs to be installed in order to fix a crash and see the ending. The English file will have all you need to install, although it confused my simple mind, so hopefully you all will have a better time with it, haha.

[b]tl;dr[/b] - Yume Nikki is a freaky game that I happen to enjoy, does anyone else here do too?
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[Tatsubei Yagyu]

[FONT="Comic Sans MS"][COLOR="Navy"][SIZE="1"]No surprise that no one really knows of it, and even fewer seem to be interested (fewer than no one? <<). Plus, I stumbled once it by complete accident.

But I've both of the above, and I've played a short bit of it. I try to get in sessions when it's late at night and I'm super tired to give the eerieness an added effect of sorts. But I'm madly in love with the game. My only real problem is the lack of stuff there is to do, but I never really thing about that as I'm actually playing, so it's all good. lol[/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT]