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11 months ago
Feature: Wake up
Playing Yume Nikki: Dream Diary is like sitting across from somebody as they explain their dreams to you in great detail. No. Worse than that. It's like listening to somebody describe an acquaintance's dreams in great detail. Every now and then, they pause and say something along the lines of, “you had to be there”, as people do when they're telling a funny story that…
Time flies, eh? It feels like just a month ago that Japanese media conglomerate Kadokawa announced a successor to minimalist indie adventure Yume Nikki, working in close collaboration with Kikiyama, mysterious developer of the original game, and it's almost here already. Oh. It was just a month ago. Sneaking up on us like a particularly unsettling memory of a nightmare, Yume Nikki: Dream Diary is…
12 months ago
Feature: Weekend playlist
Dreams, nightmares, strange worlds created in your mind. You might have heard of Yume Nikki years ago, or like me you might have only discovered it recently as it found its way onto Steam. Maybe you're hearing about it for the first time right now, in which case you should skip down and start reading the first entry in this week's roundup of free games.…
I hadn't heard of Yume Nikki until a fortnight ago, when the Japanese cult classic explore-o-horror popped up on Steam after over a decade and a sequel was announced. After reading Giada Zavarise's praise of the first one, I feel I've really missed something. I'm now on a timer to catch up, as the publishers today announced that sequel Yume Nikki: Dream Diary will arrive…
1 year ago
Feature: Close your eyes
To see Yume Nikki appear on Steam feels like the closing of an era. This surreal game is a relic from a bygone age, when the concept of “indie” was still strange and the World Wide Web felt smaller, darker and more mysterious. It’s the stuff dreams are made of, which is fitting, since it revolves entirely around sleeping.
Cult indie horror game Yume Nikki arrived on Steam this week and, more than a decade after its original release, we saw signs that the dream saga might continue. Yume Nikki is free and if you're at all interested in wandering through subtle and not-so-subtle nightmare realms while trying to decipher their strange logic, you should play it! A countdown site suggested we'd find out…
I'm not a card-carrying member of the Yume Nikki cult. If I were, I'd be able to tell you how to pick your way through the dreamscape, and might even be able to decipher some of the mysteries that it contains. Since it's original release over a decade ago, Yume Nikki has fascinated me but I've never spent enough time in its surreal environments to…
3 years ago
Everyone should have a favourite freeware Japanese horror game. For me, Yume Nikki takes top spot. It's an uncomfortable journey through weird dreamspaces, occasionally too vague and empty to maintain its grip on my nerve-clusters, but never far removed from the next jarring moment of dread. The first two entries in the Strange Men series, from designer Uri, don't have quite the same unnerving charms…
