The only thoroughly non-commercial game I've played. Confident enough in its inherent interest as an art object to abstain from any kind of cultivated player experience, completely unburdened by guidance, challenge, or instruction. It's a vision of a game design without discipline, one which cedes concern for what the player does with the software.

Kikiyama's a sophisticated enough artist and musician to obscure their own range: the uniformity of the first layer of the game, its reliance on deconstructed video game aesthetics and its hint of Metroidvania-style item progression all belie the intensity, the authoriality, and the non-gamic structure of the content below the surface. Every area beyond the hub levels shocking in just how much it manages to expand the scope of game, while always managing to feel cumulative rather than disjointed. Each is aesthetically complete in its own way and yet enhanced by its place in the structure of the world. It was overwhelming -- I've never been as close to tears playing a video game as I was when I reached the desert village or the UFO in this. I'm reminded of trying to get out of bounds by scaling the courtyard walls in Mario 64 DS as a very young child: the experience of finding Yume Nikki's later areas was as if I'd made it and God was waiting out there.

The game's cryptic in that it refuses to teach, but I found myself surprised by how much I was able to find without a guide and with little foreknowledge. I knew enough going in to get the ending, a fact that I regret: the scene's an uninspired Easter egg that feels less of a kind with the game that came before it and more with the RPG Maker subgenre which would follow it.

Yume Nikki's successors seem to have been inspired not by what the game does but by a few weak scraps of imagery: the prim young girl chased by abstract monsters, the contrast between the neutral expression of a 16-bit character sprite and the acts of violence they commit, or the exploitative menhera theme of the framing device and the ending sequence. I'd already soured on Undertale, but knowing that its bad route is a sanctimonious riff on the Knife effect degrades it further for me.