And you were there: loneliness and community in Yume Nikki
Yume Nikki (Kikiyama, 2004) is a game about a girl who can’t – or won’t – leave her room. She can only go to bed, to sleep, and to dream. If she has family, friends, a life outside that door, we never see it. It is a game about being alone.
I used to think that, anyway. It’s how people normally talk about the game, and I picked up the habit. But I’m not so sure anymore.
For one thing, Yume Nikki comes with no mission statement. It’s a “warm-hearted” game, according to one of the only details given by creator Kikiyama. There is no plot to analyse, no explicit narrative to interpret. All we have is the experience of playing it.
Ironically, the aspects of Yume Nikki that supposedly make it such a lonely experience are what ultimately force the player to immerse themselves within the game’s fandom. The infinitely looping, empty environments are so difficult to navigate that most every player will have to consult a guide to make it through. The silent NPCs are almost always (including within this essay) referred to by the names given to them by the fans, as are the many, many surreal locations. To understand Yume Nikki - to even have the words to describe it - you have to understand its community.
All videogames have a fandom, but the members of Yume Nikki’s community are more like co-authors spawning an entire new genre’s worth of fangames. Many of these reference other community creations – a room where the player can try on the clothes of each fangame's protagonist, a gallery of images from other dreamworlds – which only adds to the feeling of being part of a collective. And yet, these games still start with a character alone in their room.
This dissonance between isolating games and the community that creates them can be seen most clearly in Yume 2kki (Yume 2kki Team, 2004), perhaps the most famous fangame, which still maintains a surface conceit of being ‘about’ a hikikomori (a Japanese term for someone who completely withdrawals from society) while at the same time existing as a group effort, a feat of community collaboration: protagonist Urotsuki’s dream world is stitched together from the imaginations of dozens of different fans.
It’s easy to see this community as an accident, something spontaneous. But doing ignores thatYume Nikki is a game – at least in part – about videogame fandom.
Playing NASU on her Famicom is one of the only things protagonist Madotsuki can do while awake. Whether it’s an obsession or simply all she has left, the centrality of videogames to her conscious mind takes form in her dream world, the mental detritus of these play sessions appearing everywhere.
Familiar building blocks like vending machines and lampposts are scattered around like lost thoughts. The player economy, of “kill monsters, get money, buy items, increase stats” is left dangling, Madotsuki buying drinks to buff hp she’ll never need with money that doesn’t matter. NPC houses either open into Escherian mazes (the FC Basement) or appear in the middle of vast, unearthly oceans (Poniko’s House). The result seems uncanny, unfinished: a glitched-out game on a broken cartridge.
As long as there have been videogames, there have been players trying to find things lying just beyond the walls, a hole in the familiar into the unknown. Yume Nikki inhabits both the world of pre-Internet schoolyard rumours and the thriving forum communities that grew up around the RPG Maker series. The game was itself marketed like a rumour: a lost forum post, a file buried on a disc sent with an obscure magazine. Rather than being “released”, notes Julie Muncy, “[Yume Nikki] surfaced”.
The “Famicom Glitch” is probably the game’s most obvious example of this legacy in the game itself: interact with a random tile of wall in a remote location and an empty dialogue box will begin flashing, the room’s tiles becoming increasingly disordered and corrupted until Madotsuki’s dream abruptly ends. It’s a moment that seems designed to prompt the player to post a screenshot online, to send a copy of the game to a friend asking “is anyone else seeing this?”
Such “events” are scattered throughout Yume Nikki, but none are as well-known as Uboa. The distorted, shadowy figure is many people’s first introduction to the games, appearing without warning in Poniko’s house like a creepypasta come to life. Because of its ubiquity in the fandom, it’s easy to forget just how hard it is to trigger Uboa’s appearance. It requires the player to not only find and press a switch hidden on the wall of Poniko’s house (one of very, very few things in the game that can be interacted with in a meaningful way), but also - as Uboa has only a 1 in 64 chance to appear - to do this over and over again.
I don’t have answers for the symbolism surrounding this event, but it certainly feels significant, and the only realistic way for a player to find it is by following instructions left by others. It seems deliberate, too, that this secret is found in the mirror of Madotsuki’s own domestic space, deep in an ocean of dreams. It is only by journeying far enough to find Poniko that Madotsuki can face this terrible, important event. Two girls, living in two distant bedrooms, sharing something under the strangest of circumstances.
But this is all getting a bit nitty-gritty, isn’t it? There must be players, after all, who find the game and complete it without ever encountering its hidden secrets or its community. Being a fan of Yume Nikki isn’t a lonely experience, sure, but what about everyone who only gets as far as the game itself?
There’s no denying Yume Nikki's first minutes are deeply unsettling. The inhabitants of Madotsuki’s dream world, with their ambiguous, unsettling appearances and lack of dialogue, name, or apparent role, at first seem unfriendly - if not horrifying. But I don’t think they stay that way.
Here’s an example: in the sewers there’s an NPC that gives you one of the game’s 24 collectable ‘effects’; next to it is a blocked exit. The only other path takes you through a narrow stretch of sewer and straight into the mouth of the enormous, medusa-like Big Red (we are playing Yume Nikki, after all). Madotsuki is then spat out into Windmill World, which has exits to several other locations, and nothing else.
During my first playthrough, I came back to this area again and again, looking for something new: an effect in Windmill World, a way past Big Red, anything. That path through the sewers takes you past an NPC called the Alley Demon. It stands in the water, bright red eyes staring from a shadowy body. The first time I saw it I flinched. The second time I saw it, I gave it a mental nod. “Hello, again.”
By the time I saw it for the fourth, fifth, sixth time (I am very bad at videogames), I had begun to look forward to it. The Alley Demon was a sign I was going the right way, but more than that, over the course of my frustrated, endless journey, I had grown to like it.
Just by existing in Yume Nikki’s endless, looping mazes, NPCs become waypoints, known faces bobbing in a pixel haze. The game's recursive structure turns them from disposable dialogue dispensers into landmarks and residents; lost friends reappearing in a dream.
You can’t interact with Yume Nikki’s denizens using the typical language of videogames. You can’t ask them for a quest or buy a Potion for 2 Gold. They don’t talk to you, apart from the FC World’s Lizardmen, stuck going through the motions of their code by filling dialogue boxes with a garble of randomised numbers. Instead, they are drawn to you while transformed into a cat, freeze when you set your stoplight to red, and die with a discordant, unchanging shriek when stabbed.
Taking away expected methods of interaction doesn’t isolate Madotsuki from these characters, it simply means she must create new ways of communicating. The lack of dialogue doesn’t stop her from sitting down to play the flute with O-Man or at the piano with Seccom Masada-sensei. It doesn’t stop her standing next to Maussan Bros to watch the lights in the sky. To say that Madotsuki can’t interact with Yume Nikki’s NPCs is to ignore the many uncoordinated, unspoken encounters created out of the game’s silence.
But what about when there are no NPCs? There are so many places in Yume Nikki where Madotsuki is clearly and unambiguously alone: the endless roads pelted by a droning rain, the bare surface of a nameless planet, a dark room where a knife sits waiting. These moments are lonely, but they are an incomplete picture, an understanding that is itself isolated, this time from the most peculiar videogame device: the player.
Because, of course, Madotsuki is not alone. She is with you. You follow her everywhere. You are permitted to explore her mind, completely, unreservedly, quite literally without limits. Any fan of Yume Nikki will say that there are moments that, unaccountably, stop them in their tracks. I know people who have cried while looking out from the rooftop of the mall. I always find myself stopping in the cramped, degraded storage rooms underneath Madotsuki’s dreams, the bottom level of her subconscious. What moves me so much isn’t the loneliness of these moments, but their intimacy.
The world of Yume Nikki is isolated, but so are all dreams. How common is it to wake up from the most incredible or unsettling dream, rush to explain them to a loved one, and then fail to communicate it at all? Yume Nikki is often praised for seeming authentically dream-like - “Out of every game about dreams,” notes John Jackson, “this is the one that probably comes closest to actually resembling one.” - and Kikiyama’s greatest creative success is not imagining its dreamscapes but allowing them to reach the player. Fragile unreality becomes something solid. Loneliness becomes something that can be shared.
For the last few months, I’ve been streaming Yume Nikki and the fangames .flow (lol, 2009) and Me (Isasapiens, 2011). It’s a lot of fun. I was worried it would feel wrong, or less satisfying, to have people there with me, telling me I’d missed a door or a gate, or that I’d turned the wrong way in a maze. But it doesn’t. If anything it has made me appreciate even more how Yume Nikki seems to connect people, in ways that are surprising and bizarre but no less a part of experiencing the game.
After I collected all of Yume Nikki’s effects I streamed a little longer, showing my friends my favourite places: the vending machine in the middle of the woods where it always rains, the bridge to the Witch’s Isle. Alone in our rooms, we dreamt together.
Eve McLachlan (she/it) is a Scottish writer who likes to make games that are very personal and/or tapeworm-related. You can play her games on itch, or find her on Twitter @strangepdf.
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