Spoilers!
~ Estimated Reading Time: 9 min ~
~ Content Warnings: we are going to talk about social isolation, depression, the hikikimori condition and suicide. this is yume nikki after all... ~
What Yume Nikki reaaaaally gets, is that in order for there to be discovery, there also needs to be rarity. I've heard the game described as an interactive art museum before, but the way I personally played it - mostly blind, and constantly curious - it reminded me more of a nature walk. The vastness of the world around you is constantly perceivable, but contrasted by your incapability to reach beyond the soil you know how to walk on. Yume Nikki uses lots of techniques that intentionally obfuscates your awareness of the scale of the world around you. Seamless screen-wrapping as a layer of ambiguity to where each place starts and ends. That type of artificiality tunes the mind to look for seams in its world - to understand where its boundaries lie in a very video game-y sense - which is eventually rewarded by getting a glimpse of the secretive coils that lead to deeper trails. It feels large - not because it always is large, but because each secret opens your imagination that each dead-end could be more than meets the eye. And each failed experiment on a genuine dead-end pushes that back into contention, keeping its absolute terms in constant conflict.
It revels in the sensation not of solving a puzzle, but on parsing if the strange-looking object in front of you is even a puzzle or not. Effects, and their (often single-use) applications are always placed on opposite ends of the world. Got me thinkin' about how solutions purely by area association are a uniquely artificial aspect of video games, aren't they? Instead, Yume Nikki's secrets are punctuated by confidence, rather than trial and error. Many of its most cryptic events are tied to reasonable-but-not-guaranteed percent chances. So if you truly believe there is something off about that thing you're staring at, you have to test the answer you believe in multiple times in a row. You could say that results in more trial and error, but I think what the approach is getting at is that there so many points of interest, you shouldn't try everything with desperation. Especially knowing you may be missing a more obvious solution from an unobtained Effect, it also encourages you to re-test things as you retread the past during your wanderings. This also disincentivizes the too-common playstyle within point-and-clicks of testing every single item in your inventory one by one to bruteforce your way through puzzling. Whenever I stumbled into the game's deepest rabbit-holes, it was always because I firmly believed in my gut instinct, and held onto that hope for a long enough time that something worked. And when it missed one, well...I missed one. The "ending" requirements carry looseness to allow your missed discoveries to never be a frustration point.
It would be easy to champion Yume Nikki purely as some victory of experimental art. but I actually found myself thinking that...maybe, and just maybe, these are all things I'd consider traditionally good!
Another thing about Yume Nikki's exploration is how it uniquely leverages "that's it?". After stumbling into an obtuse entrance, following long passage after long passage, dodging the potential to miss the next step, only for that long trail to end with...nothing but ambience and art? Where's the next effect?! But I guess it didn't take me long to think to myself how silly it was that I was going "ugh...just another beautiful view?!". I'd almost describe it as "lowering my standards" in a beautiful way; any initial disappointment my journeying didn't result in material progression was halted, as I realized those short moments were a reward. But, something was missing. Every punctual moment of discovery was always a locale, never a character. Never would I share those wondrous moments with another.
While I found Yume Nikki's exploration joyful, the cultural lens through which it is altered by isn't always easy to swallow.
The keyword that comes to mind is "connection". In the same way that a puzzles are a collection of interlocking pieces, people seek purpose through clicking themselves into place with others. Underlying anxiety only seeps through when there's nothing or nobody meant to link to us. Or, inversely, that we serve no purpose. The NPCs we initially meet are abstracted in a way that always represents some unreachability.. A commonality of so much art (but especially out of Japan) expressing isolation always seems to be the anti-social aversion strangers share for each other on a bus-ride. Maybe the talkative ones only speak in a foreign language, or simply wouldn't notice us at all. Maybe they have company already. The only text boxes in the whole game are comprised of numbers. I'm the type that approaches singleplayer stories with a social angle - talking to every NPC I see - so this loneliness rubbed off on me as uniquely isolating.
Each Effect I obtained offered me a new hope I might solve this issue, and they usually didn't...but the few exceptions weren't encouraging, either. When I got the Knife, I assumed its morbidity would be straightforward. But instead, it stuck out for the opposite reason: that even our most extreme acts don't leave an impact on people. You leave the room, they respawn right where they were. If violence is a language, my words weren't reaching anyone. The Maneki-Neko Effect attracts NPCs towards you - even revealing unique reaction sprites out of NPCs sometimes. But it's easy to see that as money (or even innuendo for sexual intimacy, with its 'come hither' motion, as my friend theorized) being the only way Madotsuki knows how to get closer to others.
After years of its mythologizing, I'm glad I finally got to understand what's so unnerving about Uboa! After hours and hours of scouring the earth for any sign of life, I finally walk into a house that looks a bit like our own room. A girl is there, an actual girl! ~ She's even in the same sprite-artstyle as us!! ~ She's not asleep, or dead, or abstracted; but she's also just different enough from Madotsuki to assume she isn't just another fracture of ourselves. I know this might sound stupid, but my whimsical ass walked up to her sincerely believing a dialogue box was about to pop up. I must have sat there for a sum of forty minutes, rotating and trying all my effects, then trying some again, thinking that one of them would get some response out of her. And I'm not so terminally offline that I didn't know the lightswitch flicking trick - it's just that a unique horror emerged, as I slowly realized that was my only option. So we flick. We turn the lights on and off, and on and off - practically begging for attention - and she reveals a side of herself that nobody knows what to make of. It's hard to develop an interpretation that doesn't hinge on the idea that Madotsuki is a victim of something more than isolation; that that attachment she had tasted turned around, and immensely hurt her as well.
Potentiality becomes Yume Nikki's language for hope, and its absence emptiness. Throughout the game, there's this recurring area - seemingly a desert, though it looks a bit like a dried ocean with withering plantation - that you use as a mini-hub. You can both enter and exit it from several places, though it initially seems non-traversable. It's claustrophobically tight - you only realize you can move through the plants after noticing the collision boxes on their sprites are a little deceptive. But it took me until near the end of my playthrough to learn that within the heart of the desert, there was actually this huge expanse. Maybe the biggest room in the whole game, even! A locale that I had once relied on optimism to navigate - that maybe, I'd be lucky to find a lead in this maze - had now flipped into an overstimulating opposite. And yet, it took me tens of minutes to find anything in it. And all it was is another exit - taking us through our most melancholic climb yet. You climb a long flight of stairs, look down at a city far below you, and walk away from it all - only to be greeted by the Ghost Effect. But it's not collecting all the Effects that you lastly do before the final scene: it's putting them all away. The possibility of one of these keys locking into something emotionally gratifying and complete has dwindled. It's a bit easy to understand why the story ends the way it does, when we ludonarratively walk through the steps of giving up.
I find it extremely difficult to make something of Yume Nikki's ending.
Not because like, I can't see why it would happen. It's just that..how could I possibly find a satisfactory response to it? It's an almost obvious note to end on: Madotsuki was unable to retreat from reality within her dreams. The momentary joys and beauty came to an end quickly. After that, she was confronted by a mirror of exactly what had been out there that had hurt her; both the inside and outside worlds were unsafe. What world is there left to return to, Is there a point in dreaming any longer? Thinking along those lines, I came with various pessimistic and optimistic spins to take that narrative in the direction of, but none of it felt right to me. Suicide isn't something you can really make sense of. You can't agree or disagree an irreversible action that's already happened; there were many better outcomes but their circumstances made them difficult to obtain but if they worked hard enough maybe they couldve reached them but maybe it wouldnt have been enough but majok̶̖͐v̶̰͒d̸͇͋ȩ̵̈́s̸̱̉m̵̖̑e̸̪͋v̷̞̈́m̴̼̍.̴͙̈́
Suicide is often still violence, just indirectly - in the same sense that a death of illness in a low-income community is indirect violence done by lack of medical aid provided by government bodies. Senseless violence, mind you; something that shouldn't have happened happening. We can of course form narratives about something senseless: we can depict the fine details, critiquing dangerous behavior that drives people closer to the edge. But we are conversating with an abstract; Yume Nikki is still a guarded work of art, one that doesn't want us to know exactly what its roots of its pain are. It's still a successful work, beautiful and harrowing through the little context we're given. But it's that fine line that prevents it from feeling like a critique of a concrete social issue, and more like a view of a stranger's sad story just barely seen through their keyhole. Which is of course why so many of our minds wander out of the game, and begin to wonder about the artist's life. It's a game about solving mysteries, after all. When they had portrayed such sincere-seeming ideation, it is easy to imagine that in another world, we'd still be be discussing Yume Nikki is a similar tone to art like Nekojiru. "Look at how FUCKED UP and WEIRD this game made by a SUICIDE DOER's mind is!". But...isn't there something voyeuristic about trying to interpret an anonymous artist's life through their art?
I guess that's why we're all so relieved by Kikiyama's recent resurfacing. That we can see their tacky christmas cards, know what genuinely awful sounding dish they'd order from Denny's. Because we can know that Yume Nikki wasn't a true reflection of their own reality. That the abstract can stay obscured. That Kikiyama's odd comments about the game's story being "heart-warming" doesn't have to be something we can't accept. Maybe its creation expressed something truly happy, or not, or that we'll never know, or that it's okay we'll never know. That the oddly relaxing sensation of playing the game doesn't have to be at odds with my generally hedonistic interpretations. That the meaningless can return to meaninglessness.
That the dream wasn't real.