Yume Nikki is not a typical RPG. Don’t go into it expecting anything of the sort. Yume Nikki is brutally emotional, sometimes frighteningly abstract, and bears little resemblence to the games of today. 99% of the game consists of exploration, and the areas you’ll be wandering around in have no logical arrangement whatsoever. You’ll get lost often and miss things. You’ll find things in places you’d swear you’d crawled over with a fine-toothed comb. You’ll find things you’ll almost wish you hadn’t.

When struggling to explain the horror factor to a friend, the way which felt most right is the idea that your brain can only accept so much surreality before it clamps up. The various monsters or people you encounter (and I must warn you, there’s virtually no dialogue in the entire game), the backgrounds, and the sound for that matter, have nothing in common with sense. After a time, that hideous pink and green mutation in the background will make you shudder simply because you don’t know what it is, will never know what it is, and perhaps don’t want to know what it is.

Installing this game was a headache, unfortunately, due to having to download and enable Japanese non-unicode support in order to get it to run. It was worth the hoop jumping, however, and I’ve played through it a few times. Finding every effect gives you a real feeling of accomplishment, but the ending (and I am a sentimentalist, unfortunately) is liable to leave the average gamer either in tears or making o_o faces.

It’s also unfortunate that there’s no explanation for obtaining the ending, and it’s not something the average person will stumble on except by a very unlikely accident. SPOILER WARNING – - – - To get the ending, you must find every effect, drop them in the room of doors, wake up and go out on the balcony. I only state this because otherwise the odds of finding it on your own are extremely slim, and the ending comprises, I feel, a significant part of the game.

Is Yume Nikki a transforming experience? Odds are, no, it’s not. But it will linger with you, perhaps into your own dreams and nightmares.