I think, above all else, what makes Yume 2kki stand out as unique in not just RPG Maker games, or even just video games, but media in general, is how it still manages to impress years after its release. For all that I appreciate about my other favorite games, including those that so obviously inspired 2kki, none have managed to continuously leave me speechless so long after I initially played it like this free indie game has. If games are art, Yume 2kki is a canvas the size of the Louvre.

The fact that 2kki advertises itself as a mere fan sequel to Yume Nikki is an ultimate understatement. To be clear, Yume Nikki is fantastic, it's a 10/10 classic, and it’s an arguably equal game to 2kki. That said, it’s still a cute little hour-long experience that’s fun to drop into from time to time in order to immerse yourself in its vibrancy and its melancholy. 2kki is a monster. Yume Nikki fans can easily count all of its worlds; I’m not sure if anyone has ever experienced all of 2kkis worlds. Yet Yume 2kki, even with its massive amount of locations, would be considered like any other fan game if it just stopped there, but what makes the game stand out is that it just keeps going. Yume Nikki games stop when the player obtains all of the effects, but in this one, that’s when the game really gets started. Collecting wallpapers and menu themes, and digging as deep as possible for the most obscure worlds and events is what really turns this game from a fantastic tribute to something all of its own, completely enjoyable as its own experience and even more impressive as a tribute to Yume Nikki and its community.

It's no secret that this game’s range of quality varies wildly from world to world. That’s naturally going to be the case with this type of game. Some moments will feature some of the best pixel art and dark ambient music you’ll ever hear, the next world will look like a 10 year old’s MS Paint portfolio, but I can’t help but feel that even these utterly mediocre worlds serve as a bonus to the overall experience. Despite a lack of artistic ability in some of these areas, they’ll often simultaneously feature a lot of great ideas (see the Dream Park), and help further establish Yume 2kki as a passion project of passion projects.

Even if these stylistically lesser worlds bother you, that shouldn’t take away from the best this game has to offer, which goes far above and beyond what any other Yume Nikki game, dream simulator, or “walking simulator” has to offer. Any vein of worlds made by qxy or wataru fit nicely within this category. It’s so easy to jump to my favorite section of this game, the path to Lavender Waters, which provides such bittersweetness yet bliss as the player goes deeper and deeper into its worlds. It feels like it’s own game entirely, yet it, and qxy’s other worlds perfectly showcase 2kki’s mix of emotions. Traveling through the Cotton Candy World, the player can continue into the surreal loveliness that world has to offer, but they may find themselves drifting into the horrors beyond the surface. I’ve never been outright terrified playing Yume 2kki, but the ways that horror works itself into areas one wouldn’t expect made those few horrific moments stand out (see the Infinite Library and Static Noise Hell for my favorite examples of this).

Most importantly though, these sudden moments of horror call back to 2kki’s crowning achievement: no other game quite recreates dreams and nightmares in the way that this game has. Most dream simulators are limited in the sense that they often simulate the dreams of its small team of developers, maybe even just one person. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that 2kki’s state of being as a free, international, community-led project has led to a far wider, more realistic portrayal of dreams. The only other game that comes even close is the relatively new B3313, fittingly another community led, free project. Even that game only goes so far though. Yume 2kki really takes RPG Maker to its limits. The engine itself has often been viewed as an outlet for the independent developer, writer, musician, or artist, and in that sense, 2kki is an even more accessible outlet, by already giving developers the game’s defined mechanics and just letting them explore.

To be fair though, so many dream simulators don’t even really try to accurately simulate the average dream. Take the original Yume Nikki, for example. That experience serves less as a simulator of dreams, and more of an open window into a tortured mind. Yume Nikki tells a story, and that makes it a different beast entirely from Yume 2kki, which has no greater story to tell (realistically, most Yume Nikki fangames come with a clear story to decipher). To call 2kki’s symbolism and exploration meaningless would be a flawed perspective, though. Again, Yume 2kki is a canvas for the surrealist, and ultimately, these developers have their own story to tell. It’s as if a character and a world were presented to a room of writers, and every one of them then crafted their own wildly different, yet similar stories out of them.

Still though, 2kki doesn’t really have a main plot, and much like Yume Nikki, all of the endings are very short. A short ending isn’t too big of a deal in a short game, but after spending maybe 30 to 40 hours getting 95% of the wallpapers for 2kki’s final ending, only for it to be a 30 second abstract scene, might hit players the wrong way. The same might be the case regarding how obtuse the exploration can be sometimes. Realistically, the 2kki wiki is a requirement to complete the game, and it’s a great wiki. I find exploring the website to be akin to some kind of treasure map, especially when there’s a menu theme or a cool wallpaper attached at the end, but some might find a constant referral back to the wiki to take them out of the immersion. Neither of these issues bother me too much, what my main issue tends to be is that some worlds are just a bit too convoluted for their own good. Sometimes, great art can get in the way and make worlds actively harder to navigate through, and other worlds just boil down to massive mazes that are easy to get frustrated by without, again, a constant referral back to the wiki. Far from a dealbreaker for me, obviously, though it does turn some potentially fantastic locations toward mediocrity.

For more or less two and a half years, Yume 2kki has been my go-to video game. It stands out so clearly among a sea of open world games where areas are virtually indistinguishable from each other. There’s still so much to discover, too, and many of my favorite discoveries only came in the form of updates from the last year or so. It may seem like I talked about a few worlds, but I didn’t even talk about the perspective shifting areas, if you know you know. You can’t really go wrong with at least trying out Yume 2kki. Knowledge of Japanese isn’t really needed at all in order to play, and there are so many different methods of playing through the game, whether you view it as a collectathon, or just something to blindly fire up once in a while and wander around. I’ve never stopped loving RPG Maker games, but over the last month, I’ve been looking at some RPG Maker horror games I never played before, reaffirming my love for this niche of gaming. That said, nothing I’ve played comes even close to Yume 2kki (or Yume Nikki). It’s a joy coming back to these games and realizing there’s so much more to discover, though it’s a bit melancholic all the same knowing that there’s likely no game in this field that will reach the level of ambition, community support, or raw artistry of Yume 2kki.

tldr: good.

Played this at a mate's house who wasted $13 on this streamer-bait game. Yeah the visuals are pretty because of Unreal Engine 5 but this game is such a pile of nothing. All the game has to offer at the moment is 18 minutes of randomised jumpscares as you walk around a generic forest map doing nothing. You don't even have any objectives, you just walk around for 18 minutes doing practically nothing as the God in the sky known as RNG decides to throw a cheap jumpscare at you to make you scream. In fact, screaming is the only way to die in this game. There's no monster or omnipresent threat that can kill you so there's no real sense of danger and the jumpscares are all the same loud screaming woman. The longer you survive, the more jumpscares occur and in the last 2-3 minutes we were getting bombarded by lame jumpscares we were trying so hard not to laugh so we don't die.
Only time we died was because my friend ended up sneezing next to me and that was apparently loud enough to be considered a game over.
Don't waste your time with this.

Free superchats on sign up means you can blast "wearing my james sunderland c o c k ring" on screen and change the canon of Silent Hill.

Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.

Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.

Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...

This game is so good. In many ways it is a major leap forward from SoM. Except the menus. I wish they would have kept the ring menu system. But whatever, ruin a good thing by going bog standard rpg menus.
I haven’t finished the game as my save got lost in a move. That was when it was still Seiken Densetsu 3. That killed me. I was about halfway through the game.
That kind of thing just puts me off a game for a while. But I’m thinking of starting over, and that is why I’m doing this review.
Because this game is worth starting over with. The story is whatever. It’s not bad, it’s just serviceable. But that’s ok, because the gameplay is fun. They added a class system of sorts to Trials of Mana. You start off as a class (each character has a predetermined class) and at certain points you can upgrade that class to a new class.
It’s sort of an upgraded version of Final Fantasy 1’s class system. Where the Fighter can become a Knight at a certain point in the game, or the Thief can become a Ninja (I think it was Thief -> Ninja).
Except in Trials it has been expanded to two moments a character can upgrade their class during the game.
But it’s more involved than that, you can go dark or light.
Honestly, if you okay this game, look up a class guide for it.
I didn’t in my playthrough and I should have. I was struggling lol
But this game is fun, like I said.
The characters are interesting -for the most part. The class system is involved. The graphics are nice. A definite upgrade from SoM (though it lost some charm in the process).
This is, overall, a much darker game than SoM. Whether that’s a good thing is up to you to decide.
Personally, I liked the whole vibe SoM had. This game doesn’t share that vibe.
It doesn’t share much with SoM, or Final Fantasy Adventure. But what it does share is fun gameplay, nice graphics, but Lenny to do and see.
I do like the wide variety of characters. Like SoM you only have 3 characters, but when you start a game you can mix and match them in any combination. I find that pretty compelling.
This review is way too long.
So I’ll cut it off here with one last thing:
Give it a try.

This is my favorite of the "Indie horror game that becomes absurdly popular with 12 and unders" genre because while most others at least try to be scary, this one's such a blatant shitpost you can't really take it seriously. One of the enemy characters is literally a random broom from the devs closet because they realized "oh shit, i didn't design the janitor enemy and the game jam ends tomorrow let me just take a picture of this" and now i look up the broom in google images and people are drawing tons of "human versions" of the character that make him look like a himbo and it's very bizarre.

Wonder Flower gimmicks are cute until they turn repetitious, which they do by the end of World 2. The badges largely make up for a lack of platforming aptitude which, as a seasoned gamester, means I have to play the game wrong to accommodate their use. But I'm not gonna unlearn my Mario skills so I don't remember to use them outside of when they are clearly necessary for side objectives like an over-polished immsim. You mean I should use the Dolphin badge on the levels right after I got it? Wowee Zowee!

Broadly speaking this feels like an attempt to teach the kids that grew up with the Switch what Mario is about. The hypersleek UI elements, mountains of spoken text as a replacement for other markers of design intent, the badges, the Wowee Zowee, the oodles of characters, the gacha elements of the standees, the multiple currencies (and decimalisation of Flower coins to further litter the field with shinies), the little emojis, the lack of points. These additions and subtractions are by no means bad but I won't lie, it feels a little like I'm playing a AAA game from the 2020s. Because I am. It's hard to read Wonder as a creative reinvention and reinvigoration of Mario because I know it took thousands of people to make this. That every decision was subject to board meetings and focus groups. It's the same problem as your New Super games -- the formula must be adhered to. And even if the formula changes, it's still a formula. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I look for at this point in my life.

I'll keep playing it, I'll probably finish it. It's like a Coca-Cola Creation, y'know? You see it on the shelf, you think 'what the hell do '+XP' or 'Starlight' taste like, the first sip is novel and enchanting, before long you're still drinking Coke. If I want true innovation, I'll reach for the local-made can of kombucha flavoured with some berry I've never heard of before. Like Haskap. Uhhh, for the purposes of this analogy I guess the random shit I pick up on Steam and itch.io are the kombucha.

And I gotta say, I'm sorry but I can't hear the Mario Gang say Wowee Zowee without having flashbacks to Game Grumps Kirby Super Star Part 2 where Jon and Arin argued for like a minute straight over whether or not Arin had said Wowee Zowee before. Back then life was so simple. I was so young. Games held so much potential. Eleven years, gone in the blink of an eye. In another life, I'm the Mario Wonder kid, growing up on a Switch. Who could have known things would turn out the way they did, that I'd be the person I am today...

Feels like a rebrand to cover up some controversial past half the time.

WOAH JUST LIKE GAME GRUMPS 😱

Gyms entirely replaced by bad boss fights that consist of tossing pouches until the enemy gives up? Fine.
Super shallow plot (even for Pokemon standards) with no obvious antagonist? Fine.
Not a single 6v6 battle? Fine.
Around 10 or less forced trainer battles in total? Fine.
Forcing you to throw balls at bidoof for hours just to level up to progress? Fine.
Bad battle system that's still slightly confusing to me at the very end? Fine.
Mostly just remixed music from D/P? Fine.
Pokemon still using their cries from the GBA? Fine.
Mind numbingly easy battles? Fine.
Ugliest first party nintendo graphics in a long time? Fine.
There is just one issue for me.
Where the hell is piplup

You could arguee that Luigis Mansion 3 has boring gameplay and therefore the game is bad. But to me, luigis mansion 3 isn't about the gameplay, it's about little details and enviornments. The sound of the poltergust absorbing everything in its path, all of the different boss ghosts and their personalities, the funny ghost dog, etc...
The enviornments on each floor are unique, wether you're in a pirate room, Egyptian room, 80s discotheque, greenhouse, museum, or a film set.
In short, the game is a lot more fun looking and appreciating the visuals instead of powering through the story.

i always love a game that has a sole focus on it's core mechanic and builds around that, i think this game has a solid idea and executes it well (for what it's worth). it's all i really care for in games nowadays; BUT, do i find this game fun? hmm... i think the real question is, "is addiction fun?" depends on the person but a definite no for me. this game has consumed a good chunk of my day, thinking to myself "just one more time and surely i'll beat my highscore" and 5 hours later i'm still not satisfied. psychologically this game is addicting and satisfying, but holy shit is this a time waster, it feels so unhealthy to play. just getting a hold of it makes me feel dirty and gross but i can't put it down. i can't argue that this game feels incredibly rewarding and satisfying to play, it's up there in game feel and polish, it's just an addicting concept all round. big numbers go up, easy dopamine rush, lose and the desire for that dopamine rush encourages you to continue and the cycle repeats until you've wasted 5 hours. i love/hate this game, leaning towards hate.
don't play it for your own sake, just watch other people play it and live vicariously through them. trust me, you are not missing out

game SUCKS i go to BED

In typical Game Freak fashion, this is technology from a decade ago being paraded around like it's cool when it's Pokemon. Accelerometers tracking your movement in the night certainly works as a means of tracking sleep, but integration with wrist trackers, smartwatches, and smart rings (and AI beds? Whatever that even means?) have allowed a greater degree of fidelity for users. Sleep as Android has been doing a damn good job of telling me I have horrible sleep hygiene for a decade, only improving with time. It has recommended ways of improving my sleep, alarms that go off only when I'm in a light sleep cycle so I'm less groggy, 'captchas' were I can only turn off my increasingly loud alarm with math, or tapping an NFC point, or shaking my phone like it owes me money. Not only am I firmly entrenched in my current sleep tracker, it has always been frictionless. I tap a widget, I put my phone beside me, I sleep.

Pokemon Sleep shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why sleep trackers are used, how they are presently used, where the market lies, and how the gamification of life actually works. This isn't Habitica or Fabulous trying to improve your life through things you don't already do. I have no choice in whether or not I sleep. The appeal of a sleep tracker is that it is set and forget, a companion for something I have to and will do anyways, so it better not be an annoying partner. If Pokemon Sleep wants the user to be concerned about the quality of their sleep, shouldn't it be able to sync up with existing hardware that can supplement its readings? If sleep is meant to be restorative, why is that rejuvenation immediately undone by tutorialisation and currencies and systems and a goddamn battle pass when I wake up? Why am I chastised when I wake that I only got 54/100 sleep points because I woke in the night and can only get 5-6 hours of sleep a night if I'm lucky? Why is the assumption that 8.5 hours of sleep is a perfect ideal for everyone to aim for? Why is there no accommodation for the peculiarities of the human sleep experience, for the insomniac, the narcoleptic, the medicated? The very least it could do is offer a sleep quiz, or a calibration period. The very least it could do is not inundate me with things I have to learn and keep in mind. The very least it could do is not make my phone radiate enough heat that my wrist tracker thinks something is wrong. The very least it could do is not eat 80%(!!!) of my battery at night so I panic when I wake up. And for the chronically eepy like me, the bare minimum amount of effort could be put towards not having a minutes-long load-screen before I can track my sleep. Last night I passed out waiting for it to complete. Y'know what it took for my wrist tracker to document my sleep last night? Nothing.