One of the most misunderstood games ever done. First i wanna start this review by saying im a huge yume nikki nerd. Thousands upon thousands of hours into the original game, fan games, information, music etc, and it was today when i ended dream diary, and i really think this game has a barrier of entry, where if you have just, played a bit of yume nikki, you would hate it, but as someone who has spend so much time on this game i think is lovely. The whole new design of the game is conflicting by many, but i think it works, it's charming and i love how they addapted some of the stuff from the original. This should not be taken so much as a remake, but as a reimagination of the original, with different ending, rooms, events, all, is a different view on a game that should not be taken literally. You should not be playing the original as "a girl who dreams", the whole game is a metaphor, madotsuki is not a character but a way to tell you something, like paper works to write a story. And this is too, and i think it is charming, and really gives you an even better experience by knowing the original game, underrated gem

It's not disastrously horrible, nor is it even close to a masterpiece. I was initially excited to play a new reimagined Yume Nikki game, but reality sunk in and I realized that the game had almost no completely original content. The entire playthrough consisted of me pointing and going "Oh look, that thing from the original." Don't get me wrong, the art direction they took was really good, and seeing some iconic scenes in full 3d is pretty cool, but when that's all the game has to offer, it's not really that memorable. I'd only recommend this game if you're a die-hard fan of the original and dying to see what this game is all about.

i think i boosted the average rating giving it this

i wanted it SO badly to be good. it has its moments but come on... yume nikki :(
it makes me want to play a better yume nikki game in this style, puzzles and such are a pretty cool thing to add even if they make yume nikki less of a "meditative" practice or whatever as opposed to making it an actual game

also. how is this the final update (twitter sobbing emoji) you cant even jump up and to the right in the 3d areas

What an enormous waste of potential. The puzzles seem like a nice idea at first, to give the game more “gameplay”, but what they really do is trivialize the environments: now these are not spaces to inhabit and explore, they’re just transitory spaces, a mere process with no weight whatsoever. Dream Diary isn’t about wandering dreams and finding their meaning, but about platforming and puzzle solving. One could say that this doesn’t really matter, as the mysterious environments are still there, but the interest the game has on puzzle solving makes itself lose focus. Focus on finding the meaning of dreams and how we relate to them to give the spotlight to dull puzzles that become annoying more than they should, and even sometimes set pieces that add mostly nothing meaningful. The game could have made use of the dream diary you can check in the real world to reveal secrets or give hints at some puzzles, that way the game could have made the mechanical representation of the relation between oneself and their dreams, but instead the dream diary is just a bunch of pretty cool artwork, but meaningless in the long run. The puzzles themselves sometimes can be pretty easy, but sometimes they’re so vague that you’ll find yourself walking aimlessly with no direction for more than an hour just to find the missing piece in a really evident but badly indicated way, or trying things that you might think could work but not really. I could put up with the tedium if at least the puzzles were interesting, but no, most of the time they’re just: “go here and give this NPC a key item”, “go here and play the flute with these specific inputs” or “go here and interact with the environment a little”. Seen one, seen all of them.

This game is a mess, and it’s a big shame, because when the game wants it can throw you some pretty beautiful and, why not, evocative scenery at the rythm of a melancholic tune, and you can see some of sparks of greatness here and there, but the mix between 2D and 3D platforming and puzzle solving doesn’t seem to do any favor to any of the ideas on display. The dreams, their visual detail, their meaning, the blur in the far off distance giving the sense of endlessness, the moment where you stop to watch an erratically moving object in the night sky with three other people, sitting on the train with some bizarre creature, the feelings of loneliness, vastness and discovering oneself inner fears, the beauty of all of these things is gone when they’re just background noise and not the core of the experience. What a shame.

I love the original Yume Nikki and I knew a lot of people hate dream diary because it doesn't make the jump to 3d very well and it's more puzzles than exploration but I get it. In fact, I think making a 3D Yume Nikki the same as the original is a bad idea and I'm glad they went for puzzles but oH MY GOD I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT SOMEHOW THEY MADE THE GAME CLUNKIER THAN THE ORIGINAL.

First of all, the game has HORRIBLE blur/depth of field that made me dizzy and I never got used to it. I literally couldn't appreciate the scenery because they wouldn't let you see it or they would put a chase scene or something "cool" in it.

The puzzles don't bother me, but it bothers me that you get restarted at the beginning with a very slow animation.
The worst thing that this game has is a bug that if you want to jump, you can only do it diagonally to the right and this is NOTABLY annoying because if you want to go to another direction, you have to jump first (without touching any key) and THEN move and it's super uncomfortable. Luckily it doesn't take much, but one of the areas that interested me the most for being more exploration + puzzle, needs this and it took away all my desire.

Another thing I hate is that stealth and chases so tight that several worlds have.
I really wanted to finish this game, but I had to "finish it on youtube" because I was really having a hard time, and I'm glad I made that decision.

This felt like a really earnest effort so it's hard to be angry about it but it's definitely not good. I feel like this game kind of misunderstood the original Yume Nikki as being a horror game and tried to emulate that by putting its aesthetic into an environment similar to a game like Little Nightmares or Inside, but any attempt at understanding the original Yume Nikki was likely to be wrong.

The original Yume Nikki was made by a person who we know almost nothing about and was described by its creator Kikiyama as a game about "a NEET who dreams" and nothing more. It's my belief that, similar to the game LSD Dream Emulator that inspired it, the game was a deeply personal work and an actual dream diary of Kikiyama's with no deeper meaning intended at all, that they never intended to see success with. While I have no proof of this the game's highly experimental nature, free release on an isolated website, and Kikiyama's reclusion and total haltage of updates after its surprise blowout popularity all support this. There's also a lot of things in Yume Nikki that you can tell was the creator messing around with RPG Maker trying to learn things, mostly a lot of the effects.

Because of this someone who isn't Kikiyama trying to re-create the mood or atmosphere of the original game at all is impossible. So instead of a game that feels like an actual dream like Yume Nikki, what you get is a very mediocre attempt at a horror game. I think the "horror game" part is what people get so hung up about because I think it was made into this in part so it had a niche to market to since this is a paid game unlike the original, which couldn't really be described as any popular genre of game, but its most famous elements were the horror elements like the Uboa scene. Deram Diary isn't terrible and it's not offensive, but its bland and forgettable. Seeing tribute paid to Kikiyama's original art and ideas was really nice though.