can't express how much i hated this game at first, how much I thought it was a snobby, cheap, heartless attempt at edge and disingenuous expression that everyone clung onto for a sensation of community in its lazy ambiguity. This is, however, not true, and i realized far too late that this game was just much more.
Yume Nikki, when played with the wrong mindset, is a boring, aimless, senseless, hopeless terrible loop of wandering, mashing, ending up back at the beginning, never learning anything. Makes you feel like playing some other dumb low brow game instead of trying to sort everything else out.
Very literally, however, Yume Nikki, as you will come to see, is about a girl and her dreams reflecting her life. And everything mentioned before? It's agonizing, and blatantly intentional, executed with gorgeous art and music that creates a cold charm of loneliness and vague horror and the terror of never knowing what the hell to do. It's about Madotsuki's life. The things this game does are vague enough to theorize about but clear enough to never leave you, even when you want to forget, all in a chilling harmony that will be relatable even when you don't want it to be.
Yume Nikki is experimental and utterly creative in what it wants to say. The staggering amount of sheer symbolism is something that still persists to this day and the secrets of this game have had untold influence on how the internet has come to view the medium. The only reason this game is not a full five stars for me is because it's really not fun in any traditional sense, but it is nothing short of art, and for the price of FREE it is surely art for its own sake. Yume Nikki is a must play for anyone who'd desire to create any silent story, and it's a mystery only adaptable to the modern mind.

I guess it's probably the best game ever made. Hollow Knight was made by like three people and if you think about it for three seconds it can be considered nothing short of bona fide miracle and the kind of game some kids could only have dreamed together about years ago. There is no stretch of the imagination where you could possibly see such a grand, sprawling artistic vision executed with utter precision, and yet even then all of that powerful, POWERFUL storytelling is merely swaddling the actual best map and game design out there. The atmosphere of HK's collective parts are unlike anything else, accomplishing every amazing gameplay idea under one solidary identity. Every single upgrade changes everything, and every single fight challenges something within you. It is essentially a humble collection of everything people love about the classic vanias and adventure games wrought together in the most liberating ways possible.
All of the music is exceptional, and it all blends together but specifically in the masterful way one blends scenes together of an opera or orchestra. You can try and say Hollow Knight did not innovate as much as some other games, but it went above and beyond to show us how much we could do with the things we already understand about video games, and stands as a testament of hope for the future potential and powerful heart within the medium in the face of soulless corporate design.