Minor spoilers ahead? But probably worth knowing?:

Hey, game designers! If you're going to do a fakeout ending, please signpost it in literally any way! This game signified absolutely in no way that its fake ending was actually fake. Myself and at least 3 other people I've talked to about it fell for it. The credits played in full and I literally uninstalled the game after it because I straight up thought it was over. I only found out that I hadn't actually finished the game because I tried looking up alternate endings and everything was completely foreign! Please just tell me in any clear way that I'm not done please?

Platinum fans are the Jojos fans of games, and I say this with as much derision as possible. Really, what fandom would be complete without hoards of incessant blabbermouths, who appear out of nowhere to tell you how much you’re missing out? I am certain it is a vocal minority, but it’s hard not to notice. There is a certain brand of fan that wants to make it very clear to you at every chance they can that the thing they like is both wacky and good. It’s a brand of fan I greatly dislike.

But the more I meditate on all this, the less I am able to convince myself that any of this is a bad thing. Why is people being excited about a thing, even incessantly, a bad thing? Logically, I know that being annoying is, well, annoying, but I’m not sure that the annoyance is the only thing that’s annoying me. I dislike that brand of fan, but I worry it’s pettier than that. I think I might resent them simply for being so enthusiastic. Why should I resent someone for being passionate about something they enjoy?

Through the later years of high school, I basically only had one friend. I had switched schools, and most of my human contact disappeared with it. It was an extremely dark time. That one friend really liked fighting games, (part of my apprehension around fighters starts here, too) and in that vein, really liked Platinum games. He eventually felt obligated and did dive into Jojos, too. Once, I asked if he could lend me his copy of Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 for the Wii U. But he declined, saying, “I treasure them too much” or something of that ilk. That friendship ended quite ugly. They completely stopped talking to me one day. I would occasionally bump into them at college, but they didn’t seem to want to talk to me. One day they reached out to me, asked if I wanted to meet up for some food or something. I didn’t really know how to follow up. I sort of regret not doing anything about that.

Anyway, I started playing Bayonetta, and all I could think about were the annoying Platinum fans. I try to ignore them, but it just keeps nagging at me, this blight of contrarian twinges. I write a tweet.

Platinum game fans: yeah i love Platinum games, every game they make is great! oh except that one is bad, it sucked. oh and i heard that one was trash, i didn't even play it. oh and--

This post had been in my head for a long time, months actually, and I finally just let myself post it. And you know, it’s true, it’s a pretty good goof, but I also know it was fueled a bit by spite. I hate that about me. It was a good post, but I hate that. It got a hair of attention, including from known Platinum enjoyers, so at the very least some of them took it in good sport. But what I found was that, after I had finally let the sass out, I was able to enjoy Bayonetta a lot more.

Why? Is this small act of pettiness really enough to relieve the anxiety? Is that really a healthy relationship with discourse and art? Should I vent my spite for my own good? I try to avoid being sassy and rude online. I don’t try to target people for their taste, and I try not to dunk on anything. Everytime I do, I usually feel bad. I spend so much energy repressing it. I have no shortage of snark and spite inside me. But I bottle them up like pickles, let them lactoferment in my gyri. Does that make me seem all snooty and holier-than-thou? I dunno, I just feel like I ought not. The scruples are stuck in my teeth. Do I deserve to be a little snarky? I don’t know.

I would say its similar to my response to hype, which it is, and hype has ruined so many things for me, but this has its own dimension, too. For example, it even goes backwards. I had played Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance a long time ago, and I had enjoyed it. I had fun with it. But as time passed, and I was exposed to more and more of that certain breed of fan, I began to resent the game. How dumb is that? I liked the game, now I feel worse about it because other people I don’t like also liked it. Is that really healthy?

Some years ago, on a forum, we were discussing Astral Chain. This was before it was out, during an E3. I commented that I was weary about the theming of cops. But a Platinum fan dissuaded me. Surely, Platinum, the beloved studio, would not screw this up! I said I wasn’t optimistic, given their other games. Another Platinum fan, who from now on we will call “The Vigilante”, rode in. “Um, actually, you see, Platinum games are actually the most progressive and leftist. Actually, the trailer makes it look like the cops are the bad guys. And actually, it is your ignorance on display here.” I’m of course paraphrasing, editorializing, and reading into it. But the condescension was palpable. I recognized The Vigilante as a poster who tended to roll into threads, tell people they’re wrong and dumb, and then leave. Later on in that thread, someone shared an interview with the director who said “maybe people will come away from this game with a better perspective on the police.” But The Vigilante was gone, a shadow in the night, their duty to condescend fulfilled.

Now, Astral Chain has come out, and of course I was fucking right. The game was not some scalding critique of the cops. And all I’m really able to feel is a smug sense of satisfaction at The Vigilante being full of shit. Why are they even on my mind? The Vigilante is the same reason I couldn’t stomach to enjoy any of Utena, along with, well, trying to watch it in the presence of someone much similar to them. I was told with insistence that Utena is simply the best, and to not recognize it as such is, of course, my failing. It’s the best, most queer, most philosophical, and most best anime that there ever was. And that’s all I was ever able to think about the entire time. Trying to figure out where I’m wrong, or they are. Trying to figure out if they were right to cast judgement.

You know, I literally have to excuse myself from conversations about Jojos these days. I find myself increasingly exasperated every time it comes up. And of course it will always come up, Jojo fans love letting you know that they like Jojo, that it’s so wacky and good, and that you should really understand their references. But why should I fucking care? Seeing a thousand comments on prog rock videos will things to a person, I guess. But it’s probably more likely that it’s this… weird impulse I can’t shake, that I want to rid myself of but it just clings on me like a deertick. The sad thing is that I’d probably like Jojos if I had gotten to it before I met the fans. It seems extremely stupid and sort of bad, but I like things that are stupid and bad. But I have sworn off it to spite… I don’t know who. The incessant fans? My old friend? Maybe. I don’t know.

Have you noticed I haven’t said a word about Bayonetta? About the game this is ostensibly about? Probably. It’s because I cannot rid myself of the infection of spite.

As for the game, I mostly like Bayonetta. There’s not a lot to say in one way or the other that probably hasn’t been said. There’s almost no point in me saying anything, but whatever. I thought the combat loop was slick. I enjoyed hammering out flashy combos. I think Bayonetta is a fun character. I think she’s a bit much and very obviously one man’s fetish doll, but I’m also not above admiring her sass and her ass. I legitimately enjoy this game. I probably like it more than I’m letting on. Of course, there are things I don’t like, too. I don’t like its shitty motorcycle sections, or its shitty shmup section, either. I don’t like that it asks me to dodge attacks I can’t predict right out of a cutscene. I don’t like Luka. I don’t like its shitty quicktime events. And I dont like its awkward camera either. But all this is relatively small, right? I’ve loved games despite worse. And when I think about what I don’t like about Bayonetta (or Revengeance, for that matter), the first things that come in to my head are people like The Vigilante. Nothing to do with the game itself. Just things about discourse, people talking about how superior it is, about how the game is secretly feminist, how it’s secretly queer, how everyone says its simply the best combat in the universe, how Platinum fans are convinced these are some obscure niche kino, and… well, you get it.

These things aren’t that complicated. Sometimes the thing you like is not so transcendental. So much stuff has been pitched to me as the best, and I wish people would just tell me what it is without the effusive hyperbole. I don’t want hype, I don’t want to be told “you cannot predict what will happen” or that “you cannot oversell this”. You can, and you will. Maybe it’s my fault for taking people at their word, or my fault for getting so obsessive. I’m sure I’ve done the same. But fuck, man. Just let them be the things they are, whether they’re corny magical girl anime or sunshine pop or a wacky martial arts movie or a campy and horny hack’n’slash. Sometimes that’s all they are, and that is why they’re good. Platinum games are dumb action games, and that’s why they’re fun. It’s not complicated. I just wish people told me this stuff.

It’s so dumb. I know it’s dumb, but it just won’t go away. I felt judged, and I want to judge back. But I hate judging people. It makes me feel sick. So instead I just have this festering mass in my noggin, glowering down. I have so many examples of things like this in my life. Is this what people think about me when I talk about the things I love? Is that why I’m so afraid to do it? Is it because I can find so little in my life to enjoy enthusiastically that I feel envious? Or am I just being a snob? Am I really so petty? Am I so contrarian? Am I still upset about my old friend? Am I envious of the fans? Why do I have to obsess over what The Vigilante and other jerks think? Why do I let things be ruined by people I don’t respect? And why do I care so much about what they think about me?

There’s no moral to this. I just wish my brain wasn’t like this.

Well, I may not be the most well educated, I may not know what exactly I want out of my education, I may in fact have a profound anxiety over how I spend my time and on what, I may not know what I am doing with my life, I may not be certain that I am not ultimately wasting my meager lot of time, I may feel my life vanishing before my eyes, I may not be capable of living a normal life, I may be fundamentally broken, and I may never feel true fulfillment or true joy, BUT AT LEAST I can instantaneously recognize the cover of the 2011 first-person shooter video game Homefront, which I have never played, from just a few blurry pixels

Fuck it, I don't care, I don't have reasons, nor do I want them. I am capable of emotion, believe it or not, despite my scrawls of pontification. And I get feelings from these games. The first came out in 2017 (age of political awakening and steady decline) and this came out in 2022 (deep in the age of "it") and I needed it both times. Romance is dangerous for me; I avoid it because I get all up in my lonely feelings. This is my rare chance to curl up in it. There's no logical reason why this works for me so much and other things like it simply don't. I can dissect it or make a nuanced pitch, but it's a waste of words. This is not a recommendation or a review. I'm just saying things. I'm not going to compare one entry to the other; I don't much remember the first one other than adoring it deeply. Sure, maybe some of it is hamfisted this time around, and sure, there are anachronistic memes, but I literally don't care. I just like it. It makes me smile and I get warm fuzzies and I like it. It is so rare that I can just smile authentically and earnestly at art. Vulnerability can be embarrassing but it's liberating. Earnestness will set me free. And if you think it's cringe to find joy in something so vulnerable, then you can leave me the fuck alone

Not to be a bummer but I sort of resent this. My initial review, which I stand by, says that Norco did not leave me with questions about either its world or my own. Now, the developers release this, apparently a follow-up to a series of posts on Steam, that just answer and explain lore and answer some of the few ambiguous things left in the world.

Why? Why, for a game that seems to want you to linger on words like hauntology and ponder magical realist themes, would the creators also go out of their way to answer any remaining questions? Why is any of this necessary? Does this really enhance the experience, or does it rob us of what little mystery we had left?

There's only so many times I can say "the danger is in the neatness of identifications" before someone is going to slap me over the backside of the head. So, I'll take Beckett's rephrasing that I hope is easier to understand: "Literary criticism is not bookkeeping." Neither is writing.

Permit me another formalist critique. When I was talking about this game with others, the subject of Sonic inevitably came up. Now, I have nostalgia for those 16-bit Sonic games, but many people, myself included, feel frustration with those old 2D Sonic games because they “don’t let you go fast”. They throw spike traps in your way, they make you bump into walls, they make you do annoying sliding block puzzles. And it doesn’t help then that getting back up to speed feels incredibly slow sans spindash. But a 2D Sonic Defender dissented. There are people who insist that Sonic was never about going fast, and I find this patently absurd. Speed was a heavy aspect of Sonic’s marketing and it’s incredibly hard to ignore. However, the 2D Sonic Defender changed the angle a bit: it’s not a matter of speed, but of momentum. This seems like a fine distinction, but it’s one that’s worth taking up. Because momentum, rather than speed, doesn’t prioritize the rate at which things happen, but rather the duration and weight of player agency. Momentum is not just speed, but also slowness, and the way we move between them. When a Sonic game throws road spikesin your way as you’re trying to move through a level, and then you have to rev up again, the game robs you of your momentum. At its worst moments, Sonic does not respect your inertia.

So here’s how Freedom Planet 2 takes numerous steps to maintain, respect, and foster your momentum. If nothing else, I think it should be remembered as a game that did this. The first game, Freedom Planet, felt like a serious attempt to turn the elements of those early Sonic games into a game that felt good for players who weren’t prepared to master Sonic’s weird physics and memorize its sometimes uncompromising level design. I think it succeeded at that pretty well, and enjoyed it. But Freedom Planet 2 feels like a step above, creating a new echelon that every game in this lineage is going to have to reckon with. And while I’m a bit of an outsider (I like Sonic but I’m not one of the gremlin crew) as I’ve not been completely dedicated to all those games and their fan projects or things that take it as inspiration, I feel very confident in saying that this game did a better job of allowing me to have fun with inertia than any of the ones I’ve played. Freedom Planet 2 empowers players to harness and control their momentum, and I think it blows every game that inspired it out of the water.

Now, the game does this in a number of ways, with a lot of level design affordances to keep you speedy. (Even the puzzle sections here are snappy and fast.) In fact, almost every other new level mechanic the game springs on you is a way of playing with and transforming inertia. And I could get into specifics there, but I think it would be both tedious to write and read descriptions of levels. So I think the most prominent and immediately understandable way that Freedom Planet 2 powers up your momentum is through its player character design. There’s one thing that every character has that, if it were alone added to a game like this, would be great: the player has a guard button they can simply tap to evade damage. The guard has a marginal impact on your speed, and lets you dodge the knockback and slowdown you’d receive if got hit. So even in the event that you are moving too fast, aren’t prepared, and careen into a laser blast, if you’re quick to dodge (or turn on the auto-guard option in the assist menu!) you won’t suffer that consequence, and your momentum is maintained.

But there’s more! Every character also has a moveset that enables them to quickly gain speed, so even from the get-go, and even if you do get hit, it won’t be long before you’re back to zooming. I played through the game with each character (this is not normal for me, I just think this game is very good) and here is a rundown of how that works

Lilac: Water dragon protagonist. The most straight forward in this sense, Lilac has a super dash that does damage as she rockets off in a straight line, and even bounces off wall in that mode. It reminds me a bit of Epsilon Eagle’s dash. She also has a dive kick, and a spin attack double jump. But a lot of Lilac’s speed comes from that dash and using it right.

Carol: Bad bitch catgirl. Carol’s special throws a disk attack that she can zip to. She also has a little dash she can perform after jumping, but if performed close to the ground before landing, will give her a real boost. Holding down as she runs will also turn her into a little ball of fury and deal damage to what ever she rolls through. She can also snag a motorcycle power up that boosts her speed by a lot, and actually acts as her jump disc!

Milla: Green magic dog scientist. Milla is weird but that weirdness makes her really cool. At first she doesn’t seem to have a lot of speed options. Her jump ability is a flutter jump. Her special is a projectile/shield and her melee attacks dont move her forward. However, when you guard, Milla gains a floating green cube beside her which powers up her projectiles and also completely transforms her melee. Now, her melee unleashes a big column of green energy which does a ton of damage, but more importantly blasts her back. Newton’s third law, fucker. Utilizing this lets you jump higher and move faster. Building speed with Milla is probably best done by summoning a cube, jumping just a little bit, and then blasting behind you to propel yourself forward. Done repeatedly, you can really start zooming, and combined with the flutter, the air time Milla can get is unbelievable.

Neera: Icy nationalist panda knight. Neera works the least for me. She has the tools but they never feel quite right to me. Neera can enter a “Frost Art” mode, when she can freeze enemies, and one of her abilities spawns a bunch of frost spires that she can bounce off of. The main way Neera gains momentum though is by attacking twice. When you attack the second time, in the air or on the ground, Neera gets a boost. This works and you can get some major speed, but feels like her only tool for momentum. Also, she has a spear, but you can’t even pogo with it, which is frankly a crime. Unfortunately, this ends my little list on a down note. The irony is that in most other games Neera would feel like a standout, but in Freedom Planet 2, where all the other girls feel dynamic and snappy, Neera feels a little incomplete.

The result is a game that feels invested and supportive of player inertia, enabling you to zoom around and have fun in its environments. It’s a triumph, and not just for that. There are a lot of reasons this game owns bones beyond this: the soundtrack is full of bops, the spritework is beautiful, it’s got a million cool boss battles, the story gets really serious about colonialism, and also there’s lesbians, too. There’s a reason it’s a GOTY contender. Treasure-tier shit. I’m not even a furry. I just think it rules.

Anyway, please consider playing Freedom Planet 2. It’s very fun and I liked it.

Permit me a formalist critique: Gradius as a series starts making more sense when you realize it’s a game where you can have up to seven hit points. That’s at least when it started making sense to me, and it started finally clicking here at Gradius V. You start to realize that collecting those capsules is less like grabbing power ups and more like discrete meter management. Many games give you bombs as a last resort, but Gradius gives you something a lot more dynamic. Upon collecting enough to unlock a force field, which absorbs three hits, you can collect a few more and hover your meter over the force field slot, and then activate it again when you lose your shield, thus giving you a grand total of 7 hits before you need to collect more capsules. The result of this, when it works, is this beautiful little tension of trying to evade enough bullets until you can manage to fill your meter. It’s wonderfully tense.

Gradius has always had this cool little power up system, and it’s evolved and changed a lot over the years. You can opt for different configurations and weapons, and even replace that force field with other things, like shrinking or a bomb. Powering up is a series of choices. Now, there are some issues with this design. When you eventually die (which will almost certainly happen), you lose all your power ups (though here you can recollect your allied options) and start at square one. This can lead to a pretty immediate spiral of repeated deaths, and can be really frustrating. But even if it didn’t it would still commit the cardinal action game sin of punishing players with a bad time. You move so slow at the start and it really just feels bad until you get a few speed upgrades. Those choices can feel less like exciting crossroads and more like burdensome obligations. This also has the issue of severely punishing players who are struggling, resulting in a feedback loop of demises. And with a game as difficult as this, that’s going to push people away.

Gradius as a series has also always had this strange penchant for unpredictable and chaotic level design, as well as claustrophobic spaces, and this is definitely the case with Gradius V. This is not really in vogue for modern shmup design. I think modern shmups tend to lean towards a ballet of evasion. Gradius has a bit of that, but it also has these wacky maze elements of navigating corridors. It feels very old school, but I don’t think this is a bad thing. In fact, there are a few moments here where I think it works beautifully. (There’s this weird walker boss near the end of the game that I think is genuinely sublime.) The options function as a way of extending your attack range without endangering your ship, and their different configurations provide different ways doing so with very different advantages. Something is working here. At the same time, there are some moments in Gradius V where I felt like the game expected me to be psychic. While these obstacles can require snappy responses, some obstacles are just too unpredictable to feel fair. Weirder still, the game often feels like it expects you to memorize its levels due to obstacles that are unavoidable if you don’t know when and where they’re going to appear. It’s a weird combo that doesn’t always work. But sometimes it works. Sometimes scraping through its challenges is as thrilling as it is frantic. And that power up system, and the 7 hit points, enable these levels to feel like gauntlets. I just wish there were less moments where failure felt inevitable.

I’ve always liked Gradius and Parodius, but I’ve never really been sure why. I could never beat the first level of the first game (those volcanoes suck!) and the theming is generally pretty dull (well, not Parodius). It might just be a nostalgia for having played some of them in junior high. Who could say? But now, coming back to them and addressing them critically, there is a unique approach to shmupcraft here. When these games work, they can be exciting and tense, not in spite of their corridors and chaotic obstacles, but because of them, as they work in tandem with the upgrade system that defined Gradius from the get-go. If only it were easier to slip into those moments.

CW: death, depression, suicide, mental health, religion
Spoilers: Yume Nikki, :THE LONGING:, The Draughtsman's Contract, The Beginner's Guide
----

Yume Nikki precedes itself. There is likely nothing I can say about it that has not been said, that has not been thought, that has not been insinuated. It’s been scrutinized endlessly on forums, on fan wikis, in videos, in chatrooms and private conversations. There is nothing I can say about it that has not been said. That is why so much of what you are about to read (assuming you do not choose to leave, which I wouldn’t blame you for) won’t be about Yume Nikki at all. It will be about me. I can’t offer a clean thesis. Because inevitably, when new interpretations dry up, the ocean of meaning turns into a xeric lakebed, the gaze turns downward toward the navel, and what is beneath it. When the door will not open, and the world is your room, hermeneutics turn into an exercise in philosophy of self.

“There are always hidden silences
Waiting behind the chair
They come out
When the coast is clear
They eat everything that moves
I go shaky at the knees
Lights go out
Stars come down
Like a swarm of bees” - No Self Control, Peter Gabriel

“No Self Control” is about depression. So is this piece of writing. (Don’t worry; it will be about other things, too. To a fault, in fact.) The recurring line in this song is “I don’t know how to stop.” That was also the original name of the song. He describes impulsive hunger, calling friends, walking in the night. He doesn’t know how to stop. There’s a possible inversion of this reading, though: one of executive dysfunction. When he says, “I’ve got to get some food, I’m so hungry all the time”, he does not actually describe eating. Instead, it could be a failure to stop stopping.

Executive dysfunction is life-controlling. That is not an overstatement. It is suffocating. Everything is too much. My whole life, I have been in a losing battle with it. Since I was a kid, in the morning, I find myself paralyzed the awful possibility of having to get out of bed. The anxiety, the sopor, the blanket, all shroud. The act of doing, of having to begin, of having to be. It’s too much. So I usually crumple. I understand why Madotsuki stays in bed so much.

The bridge is in my bones. The marimba is steady, the beat is a solitary bass drum, Kate Bush chants in waves, a distorted sax and bassline interplay. And then, like a big breath in, and the drums come thundering. They come in like gunshots down a stairwell. The brooding guitar flanges and growls. “There are always hidden silences.” It always pulls at something deep in me, the nerve in my stomach which causes my knees to buckle and my arms to move.

Peter Gabriel’s third album, colloquially called Melt due to its cover, was an obsession for me. For about a two months, it was the only thing I wanted to listen to, the only thing I wanted to hear. I couldn’t tear myself away from it. His iconic voice, the bassy cymbal-less beats, the dark guitars and synths. It was all I wanted at the time. It wrapped around me and cradled me in brooding. I have a custom listening order, even: move “Start/I Don’t Remember” to the beginning, move “Intruder” to before “Games Without Frontiers”. You can also throw “Milgram’s 37” from So in there, which I’ve heard was originally recorded for this album. I’ve been told there is a light concept to the whole album, “states of mind.” Is depression a state of mind? Maybe, but it feels like more to me, a state of the body, which is hung over the bed like a wet shirt, interminably sad and sodden.

Peter Gabriel was not the first obsession I have had during the pandemic. First, it was Castlevania. I went through as many as the games as I could. The Igavania structure is satisfying; there’s a rhythm to the exploration, intoxicating and immediately validating to those familiar with its tricks. After that, it was the games of Treasure. I played nearly everything I could by them. This is not a new pattern for me. In the throes of summer isolation, I would hyperfixate on genres. Arcade puzzlers, traditional Roguelikes, shmups. And my affairs with music are almost always like this, throughout my life. As for the pandemic, after Peter Gabriel, I wrapped around to Genesis. Eventually, I got around to Cardiacs, too. Then there’s random stuff. Watching old episodes of Countdown or Robot Wars on YouTube. Trying to figure out how to make liangpi. Fixation is a sort of guiding light through the murky air of whatever swamp this is.

Sometimes I get obsessed with specific words. Sometimes phrases. Sometimes entire paradigms. But the words, they get inside my head, they become a way of describing everything. They are often bodily. For a while it was “blood”, a term for that which permeates something. Then “bones”, the underpinning structure of something. Now, it is “rotten”, an odious decay. I call many things rotten, though I do not know for sure what I mean by it when I say it.

I am not obsessed with Yume Nikki. I want to be. I want to dive teeth first into it. I want it consume me. I want to explore every room, cross through every door, catalog its biome on my spinal cord. But the dedication is not in me. And the pull isn’t there, the temperamental pull. I do not hear its call seducing my stereocilia. I drift away from it, longing to be marooned. Fixation is fickle. As I write this, when was the last time I played Yume Nikki? A month? Two months? How long will it be when I write the next sentence or paragraph? Will I finish it before I publish what I write here?

If there is a single thesis to what you’re about to read, it’s that Yume Nikki doesn’t make any sense. That’s a big part of why I have to bring myself to the text. But of course, that’s standard fair for games. Players are often co-creators in the meanings of text, more so than in other mediums. Conveyance is a bit of a misnomer in this way. Games criticism is inevitably saturated with the critic’s own identity. Criticism in general, though, is like this; the myth of the objective critic is of course a myth. But with games, this interplay is forefronted and almost unavoidable if we are to try to make a serious effort at all. And this is especially true with any art as sparse as Yume Nikki, which eludes context, an affront to traditional interpretation. So here it is: myself, borne so brazenly and blemished, for the sickness of it, for the need to make some kind of meaning here.

I could try and force myself to bring a sociopolitical analysis here. I’m sure I could figure something out. I’m sure people would like that. I know for some people that’s the only kind of criticism they’re interested in at all; I personally have a gated fence around it. And while I’m engaged in constant comparisons, it would be nice and fitting if I talked about Uboa’s The Origin of My Depression wouldn’t it? Or about the ever-mentioned David Lynch, or Egyptian surrealism? That would be lovely. Maybe even insightful. But it would be dishonest. Now is not the time for my darling pretensions. I will say what is in my head, tangents and references all, whether I welcome their stead or not. Let be be the finale of seem.

“Home, this my own receptacle which has seen better days
And a cap full of wind for assistance moves my sea
When pace is easy under sail, though it's taking a while
Better watch better watch I don't blink and...

Blink!
Isolation goes on, happy as the day is long and it drag it's slow length along
…
(blink)
Isolation comes again in the shape of a child made of plastic
Put tears on its stupid face” - Mare’s Nest, Cardiacs

Tim Smith of Cardiacs’ lyrics are notoriously cryptic. I wouldn’t dare to confidently announce that I’ve decoded one of his songs, as I would never say I think I’ve decoded Yume Nikki. But in my little view, “Mare’s Nest” is about being a child home alone. Childhood was a recurring theme in their early work. “In my home, my daddy TV brings in all mother world”, who are your companions in isolation? Toys, TV, imagination. Madotsuki plays video games. She lies in her bed and imagines a dreamscape of friends and foes. But she does not ever leave. A child alone at home searching for meaning.

Cardiacs (or all of Tim Smith’s work, for that matter, he was involved in other projects, though Cardiacs was kind of the head of the family) were an incredibly abrasive group, and not in the traditional sense of abrasive music. It’s not as much that their music is particularly aggressive or angry. Their music is carnivalistic and chaotic. It’s atonal, fast, and childish at times. Everything about their music is offensive at first blush. They dressed up as dipsomaniac clowns in their early years; I don’t think they’re going to earn a ton of fans like that. I’ve heard it described as atrocious, stupid, annoying, irresponsible; one review I saw described listening to their music as “like being worked on by four ugly dentists.” By all means, I am rarely shocked when someone says they hate Cardiacs.

There is some hope, I suppose, that they will be more venerated; Cardiacs seem to be getting more attention over these past few years, with celebrities like Mike Patton or Dave Grohl promoting them. Some publicity also came with a tragedy. Tim Smith, after a My Bloody Valentine concert in 2008, had a heart attack, during which oxygen loss damaged his brain, and suffered from dystonia for the last decade or so of his life. He couldn’t play any music during this time; he was unable to walk or do most tasks, and in constant pain. He even struggled to compose during this time. Even so, he received and honorary doctorate in music during this time. Most if not all proceeds from Cardiacs merchandise went to supporting him during this time. Beautifully, despite this notoriously weird band, people came together and raised funds for him. Tim Smith died in 2020, his final work with Cardiacs, LSD, still unreleased, but it seems that there has been a continuous spread of this band’s strange influence, like a psychedelic miasma spreading across message boards.

Yume Nikki seems to be well-liked. That’s kind of surprising given how experimental it is. Fan favorite games generally don’t tend to be deconstructive surrealist art games. But lo and behold, the fandom carries the torch. A game being well-liked does not mean it is approachable. Yume Nikki is confounding, not in spite of but because of its simplicity. Games that are unapproachable are typically difficult. Yume Nikki has effectively no win-state or fail-state. Instead, the difficulty of Yume Nikki comes in managing to try to figure any of it out. Difficult, arcane, and confusing art is often more likable than people will give it credit for.

What is so attractive about Yume Nikki? What hooks so many people into it despite its unapproachability? There’s a few things that stick out. For one, it’s free. There’s this kind of mid-aughts internet vibe that the game is dripping in. There’s a sort of pseudonostalgia to it. It’s hard to explain, the way things are rendered, the way the music sounds, the the kinds of world we see. Yes, the game itself, but also its history: an anonymous developer (KIKIYAMA) created this arcane, confusing, mysterious game and more or less disappeared. Engaging with this mystery, both in its production and its ever confusing contents, are part of the experience. Mystery, like secrets, keep our minds active; we return to a locked door, whether or not we were the one to lock it. So much to say, so much to guess. I suspect it would take much more time to just pore through all the various analyses of Yume Nikki than it would be to play through the game. Its eeriness and uncertainty call forth this kind of dissection. And around that comes a community. Forums, wikis, video essays, digital yeshiva. Despite that, it all remians a mystery. And then there’s fangames, some of which are as beloved as the original title, which attempt to capture the strange sensation we get from Yume Nikki. It’s so different from any other game, even now, that many feel called to try to reproduce it, which is no mean feat. How do you truly emulate that which defies dissection? These contributed to its success, but I also think to only highlight these would also be a disservice to the game, which I do believe is something special. It’s pretty singular, and that is part of why it is so beloved.

Let us talk, for a moment, about Uboa. It’s reputation is no doubt essential to Yume Nikki’s legacy. Upon flipping a lightswitch in a house in the snowy forest, there is a chance that Poniko, a young blonde girl, will transform into Uboa, and transport you to a strange, distorted world from which there is no escape. Uboa is often recognized as a black blob with a white face. I think this is an accurate read, but I often wonder if all I’m looking at is a smear of pixels with no meaning. Is it an it? A they? Does it have a gender? In any case, this little interaction, tucked away in a corner of the game, with no special items behind it, is one of the most memorable and well-known parts of Yume Nikki. Why is that? There’s a couple of reasons, I think. It’s one of the most overt “horror” moments in the game, although there is not much to fear, and it contrasts with the initial twee state of Poniko’s room. Uboa’s “face” also produces an ambiguity of intention, confusion about what it is it wants or is trying to do. We end up getting “trapped”, which feels menacing, but there is no direct threat. It’s frightening, but also mired in unease. I think this moment is also a good encapsulation of what makes Yume Nikki so special. In a random room, for no discernable reason, a strange creature(?) appears and whisks you away. It seems to come out of nowhere, and it does not explain itself. This is why so much theorizing has been dedicated to Uboa. It’s a haunting mystery in a game that is already packed to the brim with mysteries.

So many mysteries, and we want answers. Sisyphus pushes his rock. So, we craft theories. We dissect and analyze it. In an attempt to interpret, we encyclopedize its contents. We produce an almanac of Madotsuki’s dreams.

It’s always a stroke of luck when something experimental gets love. But it kind of breaks my heart that there’s nothing I can say that will make you like Cardiacs. Either you vibe with Tim Smith’s work, or you don’t. There is a very high chance if you give them a listen you’ll quickly turn it off. That’s fine, of course. I wish I could transfer it, I wish I could get others to understand what I hear. So often I feel compelled to want to cough this up, convince someone to see the beauty that I see int he art I love. Why? Why is it so important to me that I am able to share this with others? Why on Earth am I spending this much time writing about them here? Seriously: why? I can easily find a whole community of Cardiacs fans, but that’s not really what I want. I want to share it with those who are close to me, who I hold connection with outside of just this. Where does this compulsion come from? To connect through this vector? Why not any other? Is that my failing? Is it wrong to want it? Is that selfish? Is it sad? Either way, it’s futile. There’s no sequence of words I can say that will make you feel the same goosebumps I feel on my skin.

The first time I heard Cardiacs, I didn’t really get it. Their debut studio album (A Little Man, A House and the Whole World Window) was carnivalistic and spastic, and Sing to God left me nonplussed. But obsessions aren’t always immediate. I kept listening, and found myself more and more fascinated and engaged with every minute. They are now easily one of my favorite groups, and both those albums are some of my favorite albums of all time. There is a total freedom in their chord progressions, a heart-pounding thrill to their rhythmic shifts, a sick charm to their stylings. It seems undeniable to me now, but it took time to warm up to them.

Isn’t that strange? Why is it that some art needs dedication? Time for the love to gestate? Should that not be the sign of bad art? I don’t think so, but there was a time when I did. At one point, I believe I even said that art that disengages an audience might as well not even exist. I would never say that now, of course. I recognize not only that art is entitled to be adverse, but that adversity is sometimes what stokes enjoyment. People seem to obsess over art that is confounding or difficult. Be that a labyrynthine novel or cacophonous fugues, or, well, Yume Nikki, a game that eludes understanding. Games being difficult often literalizes this: when a game is difficult to beat, people often attach themselves to it in a new way. But Yume Nikki isn’t difficult in a traditional sense. It’s not a twitch reflex game and there’s no combat, and barely even success or fail state. The difficulty comes from interpretation; it is a perplexing and confusing game who’s true intentions and meanings are arcane and unclear. That is in part why it has such an enduring legacy. We get into a kind of Stockholm syndrome with art that refuses to be easy. There are lots of reasons for this, from the joy of creating meaning and discovery, or a sense of pride, but I also think that a key element of that is that it allows us to take time. It asks us to be patient and allow our feelings and responses to take time to develop. Sometimes love is a slow burn. That seems more natural, wouldn’t it, to derive love from developed relationship to something rather than an immediate instinctual spasm in your ganglia. Affection is just as often at first sight as it is stoked slowly over a fire. It can take time to ignite it, time to develop that relationality, to allow the interplay in your mind between you and the object. Sometimes it’s a slow burn.

Yume Nikki wasn’t like that, in any case. I loved it before I even tried it. Again, it precedes itself. It’s like I had to love it before even playing it. It was always-already a favorite. There’s other things like that for me: Greenaway’s The Falls, Vision Creation Newsun, Kentucky Route Zero, Borges, In A Silent Way, Irvin & Smith’s EXILE, Obayashi’s House, Slaughterhouse-5, Woman in the Dunes, the list goes on and on. I’m pretentious, I know. But you get it. Sometimes you decide that you want to love something, and it lets your love in. Maybe that’s stupid. I don’t know. When I think about Yume Nikki, I feel like it’s obvious that it has to be a favorite. That it’s obvious I love it. Maybe that’s dishonest. I try to suppress mentalities like that. But maybe it’s dishonest to pretend that I’m not driven by that kind of impulse all the time.

I struggle in general with music criticism; that old adage about dancing about architecture. Any time someone begins talking about good or bad music, I begin to get lost. I hate music reviews. They make me furious. Even on the off-chance I agree with the assessment, it turns my stomach a bit. I tried writing album reviews last year, including for a Cardiacs album, and while I did get something out of the process, it kind of formed a knot in my intestines. I know that no one cares about my music takes. That was thoroughly hammered into me in high school. But it still feels like begging. I keep private when it comes to music most of the time. I don’t talk to people about it much. It saves me the embarrassment and I can feel as cocky as I want in my head.

Why are games different for me? I’m not sure. I have, for some reason, gained a meager following on this site. I enjoy the validation, but I hate the way I leech onto it so easily. Maybe they’re not so different after all; I’ve seen my fair share of infuriating game reviews, and had the misfortune of reading Tevis Thompson’s work. It just so happens I play a lot of games, and don’t read as many books or watch as many movies, and have no inferiority complex around them. But I worry I turn myself into a cliche. I am constantly worried I am somehow phony or my prose is somehow purple.

I’ve moved to writing more on Medium (you can read this over there by clicking here) but the attention marketplace is brutal and I am, unshockingly, desperate for validation. When I have no friends to reach for, no partners to reflect with, sometimes I just want to throw myself against the screen and scream, “For the love of God, look at me.” I avoid posting things sometimes because I’m afraid no one will care. A desire to be perceived tends to conflict with my equally strong desire to not be judged. I am torn, the empty space between two sides of paper ripped in twain.

“...I didn’t think anything and I didn’t say anything to myself, I did what I could, a thing beyond my strength, and often for exhaustion I gave up doing it, and yet it went on being done, the voice being heard, the voice which could not be mine, since I had none left, and yet which could only be mine, since I could not go silent, and since I was alone, in a place where no voice could reach me. Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of. Yes, now I can speak of my life, I’m too tired for niceties, but I don’t know if I ever lived, I have really no opinion on the subject.” - The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett

Beckett’s trilogy is a challenge. I would say it is nearly unreadable for most people. It consists of three books: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable. He said of his play Not I, a fever dream of a monologue, that The Unnameable is an expansion on the subject. And, as linked by a trilogy, the theme seems to come into focus: the interminable din of interiority. Other themes emerge, of course. Theology is as often a subject of Beckett’s work, too, making a kind of emergent quietism. A professor of mine mentioned, as well, that the politics of Beckett’s work are often underemphasized, but undeniably present on examination. While better known as a playwright (and, in truth, probably where he is best; his novels are good but he really shines on the stage), Beckett’s prose is distinct, typically marked by an uncompromising structure and pessimistic solipsism. A specific brand of solipsism, too: an overbearing sensation of isolation, not out of skepticism but out of duress, where the extent of the universe and the self is horribly contained.

So many of his characters are trapped in small rooms, staring out windows or writhing in beds. If we read Madotsuki’s dream diary, perhaps it really would be a lot like his stuff. Beckett’s work in general so often finds characters immobilized in some capacity: stuck waiting, stuck in dirt, stuck in a trash can, locked in a room for some reason, staring out the window. What immobilizes them? And as for myself? I am stuck. My feet are impudent soldiers. I have a window, but I do not look out it often. Madotsuki will not leave her room. Her name literally means “windowed”. Madotsuki perhaps would fit in well with Beckett’s narrators, had she a voice, had she words.

Allegedly, when asked about one of his last works, What Where, Beckett said, "I don't know what it means. Don't ask me what it means. It's an object.” I admire this willingness to distance from the facet of his work, even though Beckett was apparently unhappy about its state. Sometimes, when we are making art, we aren’t privy to the exact machinations that take form in it. Cecil Taylor, the free jazz pianist, describes the creation of music as a trance-like state, almost like “levitation.” What Where does have overt themes and intention, but Beckett still felt distance from it, a level of inscrutability, a willingness to call it an object outside of him.

Now, I am reminded about one of the few things KIKIYAMA tells us about Yume Nikki: “There is no particular story or purpose. It is simply an exploring game.” Do we take them at their word? Nabakov said about Gogol that “he has nothing to tell you.” How literally do we take KIKIYAMA’s description? Is it lacking in purpose both in meaning and in mechanic? Is interpretation of Yume Nikki even worth doing?

There is this paradigm often that sees art as a key to understanding each other, a unique passage into someone else’s humanity. This is fraught. For one, art is a meditated construction, and that meditation is a form of moderation. Not all art is going to be someone bearing their soul. Even if we take it as such, media mediates, it transforms and transfigures. All art has its own distortion and reframing of whatever sensation was indelled into it. But even with all that, everything is still subject to interpretation and misinterpretation. I bring myself to the text and twist it everso slightly or everso much. That doesn’t mean we can’t try. I can try to understand what KIKIYAMA was trying to say, what they felt, who they are or were. But I’ve played Yume Nikki quite a bit. I’ve seen the dreams and heard the music. And I can say that I don’t think I know much about KIKIYAMA.

Misinterpretation is everywhere. All interpretation is misinterpretation. Some are further off the mark than others. The classic adage from Beckett, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It’s misinterpreted as a quote about endurance, courage, spirit. It’s not. It could be about many things, but isn’t about that. It would be clear from the first glance at the full text of Worstward Ho! And if there were games that embodied this quote, it would not be a roguelike or a Soulslike, it would be something like Yume Nikki. Something incoherent, inscrutable, cryptic, confusing. Something that says nothing and says it often. Worstward Ho! inhabits language, and Yume Nikki inhabits games, and they are unfathomable in their own ways.

Now, here’s the irony: I havent actually finished Beckett’s trilogy. I’ve read Molloy, but was unable to finish the second two books, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. I want to, of course, but I have brain problems that prevent me from doing so so easily. I’m able to understand the themes, the outline of it, but I cannot say I have indeed read them, at least to completion. Similarly, the majority of what you read here is written well before I finished Yume Nikki. Perhaps it’s the same reason that I didn’t finish Beckett’s trilogy that I can’t fixate on Yume Nikki. They are filled with nothing, by design. They are so quiet. When it is quiet, I am left with myself, my thoughts, my pangs. I do not want to dwell on them. Times like these, yes, make it worse, but it’s always there. So my eyes go bleary and I cannot focus. So I haven’t finished them. Is my interpretation incomplete? I’m not sure. I go back and forth on this. On one hand, there is a lot of meaning you can make without experiencing every inch of a piece. But on the other hand, isn’t any interpretation of a piece going to necessarily be lacking if there is critical information you may be missing? But where do you draw the line? Yume Nikki is non-linear, sprawling, and lacks a critical path. Is “finishing” it really in the spirit of the game? It’s an exploring game, after all. But in trying to make sense of it, do we need to seek out a more complete picture? Do you have to finish Yume Nikki before you can make anything of it?

Once again, I remind myself: “the danger is in the neatness of identifications.” Is thinking you need to finish it a symbol of that neatness? I insist that I must heed this warning, some of Beckett’s first words as he entered the literary scene, which asserts that identification and classification, despite being clean and reliable, is not sufficient on its own for interpretation. These words have haunted me ever since I heard them. I cannot escape their shadow. I always feel it cast over me. Resist the urge to equivocate the actions: to catalog and enumerate, and to interpret. Dreams, in particular, are vulnerable to this. How much pontification has been dedicated to the interpretation of dreams? From Zhuangzi to Jung, from biblical hermeneutics to new age pondering, everyone seems to have an opinion on what dreams mean. But over time, I’ve grown more and more hostile to the fetishization of dreams. Perhaps I dream differently.

One thing I never really understood about surrealist art is how it purports often to be derived from dreams. My dreams do not look like Salvador Dali paintings. Matter of fact, they don’t look like any kind of paintings. They’re weird movies with meandering plots and memorable architecture. I can always remember the architecture in my dreams. I never understood why. Surrealist imagery instead invokes to me a different sensation; typically one of mirth, actually. They often feel like the realization of a collage, an amalgam of stuff, a Bosch-like tableau. My dreams, too, are slapdash assemblies, but not of objects. They assemble emotional beats and ideas. “Kettle logic” after all (logic premised on contradictions) is was outlined by Freud to describe the logic of dreams. Perhaps if I literalize my dreams, it would be surreal to an outsider, but as the dreamer, they make a kind of perverted sense.

Yume Nikki is explicitly surrealist in that sense. It is explicitly about dreams, perhaps the most quintessential subject of surrealism. For me, there is almost something Dadaist about it, though less politically inclined. And, in truth, surrealism in general, as I have been told, has historically been more political than its evolution belies. Surrealism, like Dadaism, was often used as a tool to disrupt the status quo and the paradigms asserted by authority. It is a shame that in many ways surrealism has been disconnected from these roots, at least in my experience. So much surrealist art I have seen isn’t concerned with the status quo or politics. It’s usually concerned with interiority and perceptions of reality. Yume Nikki feels what way at times, for sure, but there is something else still. Perhaps it’s because, like surrealism challenged the status quo of what art should look like, Yume Nikki challenges the status quo of what a game should be.

There is a very direct comparison to make with LSD: Dream Emulator. They are almost shockingly similar games. Both are ostensibly about exploring dreams. And they both operate on a similar logic. Objects and spaces seem to defy sense, both mechanically and metaphorically. The rules of the world are similar, objects and places leading to objects and places, full of strange, surprising images with an undertone of horror. And there is a large overlap between their fandoms. But I can’t help but feel there is something fundamentally different about them. I struggle to name the difference. Maybe it’s mirth. Maybe it’s the direct presence of Madotsuki that is absent in LSD. Maybe it’s the quietness. Maybe it’s their similarity that makes them so different.

Comparisons are dangerous. Like identification, they can serves as thought-termination in the guise of interpretation. In fact, it is a form of identification, just one across the aisle. We identify similarities and corrolaries. In comparing, we can receive a warm glow in are chests, knowing that we have drawn a line between two disparate dots. But that act of comparison doesnt need to be the end of the line. Comparative studies are powerful and revealing, but they serves as a canvas. Each piece is their own dimension on a plane, and it is in their interplay, how they reside perpendicular and orthogonal to one another, how they intersect and diverge, that is where we can paint something beautiful. That is where we can learn. And maybe that’s why, despite their innumerable similarities, I find myself completely unmotivated to compare LSD and Yume Nikki: the space they make is flat.

I find myself making comparisons very often. A teacher of mine told me he viewed it to some degree a strength, a sign of critical thinking. But I often worry it’s a flaw, endlessly pulling from wells and mills of reference. Do I speak in references? Why is so much you read here dense with allusion and citation? I’ll gladly summarize a wiki article. It is so easy for me to cough up a Simpsons quote. I loathe reference humor, but the connections always spring out of me, strands of twine, prehensile, strangling thumb tacks. I worry it is a sign that I am so bereft of character that I can only quote, cite, and graft. I am skeptical of this fear, but it’s still there.

I mentioned him as an unmentioned earlier, but like dreams, this piece is allowed to contradict itself: David Lynch is perhaps the most popular and distinctly surrealist figure of the era. A peer of mine in a class once compared Beckett to Lynch, which I sort of balked at, and that comparison irks me to this day. Their main similarities are that they are both “weird” and they are both skinny white guys with gray hair. The closest thematic parallel would be an interest in quiet, but while Lynch is interested in quieting the questions, Beckett wants to quiet everything. Beckett’s absurdism does not, to me, appear comparable to Lynch’s almost orthodox surrealism. (Though, I must confess, my initial reading of Waiting for Godot arguably read it as a surrealist text; “Was I sleeping…?” initially read to me as a Cartesian query.) Routinely explored in Lynch’s work is the relationship between dreams and reality. For him, dreams are portals to other worlds and scrying pools. Personally, while I like Lynch as much as the next terminally-online queer, I find this subject consistently dull. I am not moved or fascinated by the interpretation of dreams, because I do not ascribe value to them. I do not percieve them as more than hallucinations. I don’t have this kind of mystical or metaphysical attachment to dreams. I always have interpreted them as stampedes of images, stews of thoughts, an unclear montage. For me, I think of a dream more like the way Christian Metz thinks of a camera shot. “Here is a thought. Here is an image.”

I have had dreams that have affected me deeply, of course. Disturbing, delighting, melancholy and bittersweet, terror and tittilation. I will not share them. Absolutely not. My dreams have also served as creative inspiration, too. A lot of ideas I have originate from dreams, or hypnagogic muses just before sleep. But I wouldn’t call my work surrealist, not in this dream-like sense. It’s rare that I am interested in disrupting the perceptions of reality within my work. Dreams feel a little played out, like sex and suicide. But I don't know. My cynical and skeptical proclivities leave the oneiric in the humdrum.

That’s perhaps the reason I find myself more respectful of mysticism than orthodoxy. Because it is personal, I am not asked to believe their interpretation, only respect it. I am extensively atheist; I do not think there is any god or gods to become one with. But I find mysticism, whether that be Sufism, or the Kabbalah, or whatever, or even faiths that encourage this like Quakerism or Buddhism, while still within the confines of their respective faiths, typically turn to a form of epistemology founded more on direct experience, rather than on institutional frameworks. That is, at the least, respectable to me; after all, I can’t really challenge what someone else has experienced, even if I would interpret the same experience differently. This is what they call “universal priesthood”, I am told. If Fayerabend wants us to bring epistemological anarchism to science, why not bring it to faith, too? Where we are all engaged in a process of discovery, just this time with the spiritual?

Still more ironically, I too respect Talmudic scholarship and the like in this other way. Religious scholarship requires a lot of dedication. Perhaps it’s my Jewish blood flaring up, whatever that would mean. (I mean, hell, kabbalah is also the subject of rigorous study. (Kabbalah wants to have it both ways sometimes: both the mystic experience and the mastery of identifications. (Though I’m no Kabbalist.))) The endless scrutiny and careful interpretation at the very least calls forth a careful reading. Theologians often end up citing Derrida and Habermas, and some key philosophers of communication in the 20th century, like McLuhan and Ong, were deeply religious. Religion, after being about the divine, is about the transmission of that knowledge. A careful eye ought be brought to that transmission, no?

These both have their issues, of course. For one, direct experience is unreliable beyond the self. That is why, in part, we have the story of the oven of Akhnai in the Talmud. At the same time, scholarship often devolves into apologetics; in the rigorous study of a religion, one inevitably encounters propositions that can only be justified through faith. But apologetics insists that there is no faith at play, that there is empirical and rational justification for everything they believe, a dishonest denial of faith itself. These two angles are in conflict: one, in unverifiability, and the other failing to verify itself. And there’s a key thing these both share: the disconnection from others. Often including the world around you. That was Spinoza’s main drive, after all, celebrating the divine through the study of nature, and there’s a story of how Feynman marvelled at the scholarship on display in the Talmud, but was bothered by how little the rabbis showed interest in the natural world. Mystics are often so focused on the abnegation of the self that they become enamored with its destruction, not giving anything else attention. Religious scholars are often holed up in a monastary or yeshiva or whatever little religious hovel they’ve made. Should isolation truly be so essential for spiritual knowledge? Does turning away from others really give us access to anything more profound?

In general, I am torn between ecstasy and study. Both appeal to me. I desire both rigorous analysis and experiential knowing. But these are often incompatible in the same breath. One can have both, but only apart from each other. But more often, I find myself without either. But I share this with them: I am often alone.

It is tempting to go one way or the other with Yume Nikki. Either we decode and demystify everything we can, or experience it as a kind of ecstatic experience. I believe, in this case, the latter is more fruitful. Of course there are hundreds of wiki pages and forum posts identifying and analyzing every corner of the dreamscape. But Yume Nikki is an exploring game. The state of exploration, of discovery and experience of images and sounds. Is it perhaps missing the point to dissect it? The danger is in the neatness of identifications.

But how about the in-between? As Martin Buber asserted, it is possible to both consider the tree and be in relation to it. How can I hold them both? But what about something else? Neither the ecstatic nor the catalogic. Instead recognizing it as an object? How can we access this golden mean? Or is it not a mean at all, instead a new vector to experience it through? How, in the first place, do we go about interpreting Yume Nikki? Do we interpret it as we would a dream? As we would scripture? How can we interpret it as an object?

A great deal of interpretation of Yume Nikki will rely on the interpretation of the image. Non-verbal storytelling is pretty common in games, but I would hesitate to call what this game does storytelling. Most of what we experience in the game is disjointed, connecting only by space. We have to rely on disjointed images in a medium where visual language is yet thoroughly established. This makes interpreting Yume Nikki a particularly challenging endeavor.

Peter Greenaway’s filmography, if it could be said to have core mission, would be to rethrone the position of imagery in cinema. This can be seen as an extension, I think, of his early formalist work, which positioned the structure of cinema first, too. The Draughtsman’s Contract acts as a thesis statement of sorts, a statement of purpose. It is a period drama of conniving aristocrats in which the protagonist’s tragic flaw is his failure to acknowledge the potency of symbolism. He is revealed as the pawn in a game when the symbol of the pomegranate is explained to him, a thought he was not only oblivious to but was ignorant to even the consideration of. In Rembrandt’s J’accuse! (a film entirely dedicated to analysis of a single painting), the ever-snobby director, himself an artist, says it outright: “the interpretation of the manufactured image in our culture is undernourished, ill-informed, and impoverished.” He might be right. I am not sure I would call myself visually literate. I am not sure I am good at interpreting paintings. Maybe I ought to learn. Maybe Yume Nikki would make more sense after that.

Film is composed of image, of course, and sound. And no doubt video games typically are as well. But these images are the fiction, the paint, ironically the “text” which Greenaway rails against in its respective medium. The irreducible building block of games, the atom of the medium is the mechanic. In the futile search for the syntagm, that is what we will likely find. But most will find this insufficient for interpretation. It oftent relies on “fiction” (as Juul would put it) to frame these mechanics. The mechanic is fertile for meaning but still needs seeds to be sown. We can try to interpret mechanics on their own, and Yume Nikki is a challenge to this. It is sparse and unclear. Whither conveyance?

For example: there’s a room in Yume Nikki they call the “stabbing room”. In it, there are dozens and dozens of NPCs crowding the room. Only little pockets exist between them that Madotsuki can squeeze through. These pockets move around randomly with no pattern; you just have to be lucky. Or, you know, you could equip the knife effect and start stabbing the NPCs. And that’s what most people do. That’s why the call it the stabbing room. I did not have the knife effect when I encountered this room. So what I did was just hold down the direction I wanted to go, and waited, hoping that eventually the opening would come my way. I remember setting up an arcane solution, where I flipped my keyboard upside down, so the arrow key was being held down (up?) by a battery I had balanced to support it. In either case, no matter how you manage to get through that room, all you’ll find at the end is a weird blue lump. No door, no item, no prize. Waiting that only knows itself in vain.

We can offer an interpretation to this: KIKIYAMA says your efforts were in vain. “And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.” Or, if you stabbed your way through, that your penchant for violence will go unrewarded. We can offer those interpretations, or more. But they do not feel satisfying to me. In fact, when I imagine this room, the more likely explanation to me? I think KIKIYAMA just thought it was funny. There’s an implicit paradigm always here: that meaning usurps aesthetic impulse. So much of Yume Nikki feels like it has no bespoke purpose, like it is just there because the creator wanted it there. Why does KIKIYAMA need to justify any of this with meaning? What if they just wanted them there? Is that enough?

And, you know, the effects, we can make an assertion there. How Madotsuki’s body is malleable in the dream world, how that flexibility could serve as an escape. How she might be dreaming of worlds where she can feel self-actualized. (This is where the trans reading of the game can come in.) It’s a little unorthodox: the effects are not what we often think of as ideal selves. As a frog, or a lamp-post, as a munchkin, or whatever. But they offer a flexibility to embodiment which could be read as freeing. Madotsuki’s dreams offer a unique and freeform space of self-acutalization, where her body and essence are subject to her whims, but they are still trapped within the arcane logic of dreams. Is this revelation the key?

That’s an interpretation we could bring. It has weight, and it holds water. It might even true to how I interpret it. But something about it feels off. It’s not that it feels incomplete, but it feels unnatural. Like grasping for straws. These kinds of formalist interpretations often make me grimace a bit. Even beyond just games, but especially in games. I feel like the narrator in The Beginner’s Guide, so enamored with my own interpretation as to lose sight of reason, to lose sight of experience, to lose track of what Susan Sontag might call an “erotics of art”. Particularly when I feel as though I must bring an application of my own experience or bring in social or political issues. They feel forced, like I’m performing, like I am clawing for an interpration that I can posit holds value, for an audience or interlocutor. That I can find a reason that Yume Nikki is important, whatever that means, to be important. But it doesn’t need to be important. It’s a bare bones game, there’s no boss fights or power-ups. When grasping for meaning in its mechanics, I find my fingers move through water. And so I find little, in the mechanics of Yume Nikki, that I can say I feel as though have bespoke meanings.

So, we can resort to the image. That, at least, we have frameworks with which to analyze. But there is this naive quality to Yume Nikki that make this difficult, too. Tools like composition seem to be in the toolbelt for KIKIYAMA, and if they are, they are used sparingly. The way the game wants to show you things are not typical; the structure of RPGMaker and video games in general operate in a distinct aesthetic code from that of painting or cinema. Our analytic tools can’t be so easily applied across mediums. But even within the medium of games and RPGMaker stuff, Yume Nikki is weird in every capacity.

Let’s enumerate some images: A stairwell surrounded by hands reaching up on long, wavy arms. A neon chevron with a smiley face. A maze of geometric shapes. A dwarf. An empty mall with wandering denizens. A giant, monster with limbs sticking out of it and a quivering jaw. A lamp with legs. A decapitated giant. A dead body on the road. A black-and-white handdrawn desert. A hand with an eye in its palm. These some of Yume Nikki’s most striking images. They all can be interpreted in this immediate sense; I can identify what their subject is. But the second order of meaning, in which I interpret the interrelations of these images, begins to leave me befuddled. And that’s not counting the abstract imagery. A structuralist approach to meaning would find an abundance of signs but an arcane syntax that defies traditional readings.

There’s an area in the sewer where you can look at posters on the wall. They’re weird, awkward doodles, a bit disturbing, lots of strange bodily shapes. Surely, if there was ever a time to interpret an image, it’s when the game throws them in your face. But still they elude interpretation. I don’t know what these drawings are supposed to be. I don’t know what they're supposed to mean. It almost feels like a taunt.

This is the kettle logic of Yume Nikki. Not of propositions but of images. The visual and mechanical languages of Yume Nikki are inconsistent, contradictory, and incoherent.

The constant inscrutability and confusion of Yume Nikki that makes the act of interpreting it so difficult is also precisely what makes it such an enduring work of art, and why interpretation of it often turns inward. We are often called to difficult and challenging art. Sometimes it is because of density, but with Yume Nikki, it is because it is cryptic. It has no shortage of imagery but is bereft of structure. The absence of context, events, make it a rich soil for interpretation, despite it being almost impossible to interpret in the first place. It is the impossibility which calls meaning making forth from the inside.

“As long as there is time, there will always be longing. And once all longing has ended, the world will no longer need time… And those without longing will no longer need the world.” - Face in :THE LONGING:

:THE LONGING: is a game I have written about before. You are a shade, created in the palm of a massive stone king, and the king asks you to wake him up in 400 days time. You have a few choices of endings. You have a lot of time to consider them. I will not explain them too deeply: a hopeful ending, a handful of tragic endings. I chose an ending many would describe as the bad ending. The shade, torn between a desire not to succumb to the king’s wishes, and knowing that nothing awaits it above the subterranean kingdom, throws itself off a cliff into the abyss. I chose this ending, knowing I could choose something else, knowing that I could give the shade a better life. I made that choice because it felt more honest to how I was feeling at the time.

At the end of my little write-up on :THE LONGING:, I said: “As I write this, my longing has not finished. I am still wandering the dark kingdom. Searching for an exit, for fulfillment, for an escape, for purpose, for something to do. Maybe I am speaking in metaphor here, maybe not. Time marches on. Let it march. I shouldn’t dwell on it any longer. It’s time to move forward.” That was a lie. I keep telling myself things like that. It’s never been true. It’s always been a lie. I’m still here.

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, I’m fine. I’m fine, really. This isn’t a cry for help or anything. Like Danny says in Beeswing: “I have bad days, and I have better days.” I’m just describing the bad days. Some of this was written on bad days. Other parts, good days. Trace it, if you can. Words can be deceiving. But I’ll tell you: don’t get the wrong idea. I’m fine. I’m used to this. This has been how I have felt for as long as I can remember. I’m fine. I’m safe. But all this is a part of being honest and saying what is inside me. At least some of it.

Time is often understood by event. Bergson would perhaps assert that “event” is antithetical to the essence of time, as it implies some instantaneous and indivisible moment. But duration, even if a legitimate understand of time, ends up being punctuated by the event. It is disrupts the heterogeneity of time by being cleanly divisible by our mind. My point being that, within the confusing ontology of duration, the event situates duration in some form of intelligibility. In other words, time makes more sense when things are happening. That was my main takeaway from :THE LONGING:. Blink, isolation goes on, happy as the day is long and it drag its slow length along.

Time and plot are similar. They are understood, again, by event and continuity. Yume Nikki is almost entirely plotless, and as such it’s chronology is disjointed, if it exists at all. No events happen for the majority of Yume Nikki. Things occur, sure, but events? Not quite. An assembly of objects and images and sounds that are unsituated in time and plot. But I say “almost entirely” because the final moments, the ending of the game, retroactively constructs a plot. There is an event, and the event thus situates the game’s reality in time and plot.

Today, as I write this, I learned how Yume Nikki ends. I don’t exactly know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t shocked. Suicide has become a trope in a lot of art, which makes me feel bummed to say. It is used as a cliche, a signifying gesture which depicts a vague state of affairs. It often feels cheap. Death is a card in an author’s pocket so they can command the audience to feel something. It feels cheap. But that is the ending, we can’t act as if that trope doesn’t manifest itself in the ending moments of this game. A game so profoundly dense with inscrutability abruptly shifts to a profoundly easy to understand image: a blood spatter.

I hate confessional soul-bearing art. I hate what I’m writing now. I’m sorry. I do not want to see my own soul, let alone someone else’s. I don’t want to hear about your queer experience or your mental health problems. I’m too busy drowning in my own. You should write about them, no doubt, sing, paint, make games about them. I think they are necessary and good. I want you to make them. But I’m probably not going to like it.. There are exceptions, but they are rare. It’s almost like twee for me. It’s too clear. I need muddiness. I don’t even like poetry that much, honestly. I like writing it. I don’t enjoy most poetry I read or hear. It eludes immediate sensation and I am made to have to apprehend it. When too am I afforded the sublime? I see the soul born and I write this, which I hate.

“I took a walk, I got tired,
I turned around and I got almost home
but then I got tired and turned around again
I wrote this down, I erased it
I was filled with remorse for both
erasing it and also for writing it down” - Less than One, They Might Be Giants

They Might Be Giants are probably ipso facto my favorite band. Between them and Pink Floyd, they have been with my the longest (the latter a bit senior), and both I have an unimpeachable place in my heart. Cult rock bands like TMBG, or Cardiacs, or Guided by Voices, or The Fall, or what have you, tend to have a fandom of people who are immensely committed to their work. And that commitment tends to result in a rigorous and constant encyclopedic record of their work and history. I think a big part of that has to do with the immediately recognizable idiosyncrasies of these groups; they are immediately recognizable as different, even if the causes of that difference aren’t clear. But it tends to be the only place you can go for that specific vibe. Sometimes this is described as being “weird”. Such things get applied to games like Yume Nikki. Since they defy expectations, and experiment with imagery and subject matter that isn’t typical, the only word we can offer is weird. I’ve expressed my frustrations with this category, and John Linnell of TMBG has, too:

“I think that we, y'know, have had this periodic problem where we try to do something that's interesting and new, and it comes off as weird… but we're really not about being weird. Once you're familiar with what we're doing it's not weird at all… it's just something interesting and new.” - John Linnell

It’s of my opinion that John Linnell is one of the greatest lyricists of all time. Of the writers that have influenced me, though he has not published a book of any sort to my knowledge, he is easily one of the most paramount. Dense with allusions, wordplay, unreliable narrators, jokes, just constant biting wit. I struggled to pick just one little lyrical excerpt from his work to put on display here. There are so many choices. Open Mike Eagle, in an interview with Vox, identifies the band’s ability to voice sorrow with mirth as a deep influence on his work, and I think this is undeniably a pervasive quality of TMBG’s music. And certainly songs like “It’s Not My Birthday” and “The End of the Tour” brought me comfort in my sadness. Are these sad songs?

I would not, at first, categorize Yume Nikki as a sad game. There is unease and disease, but it is only in its final moments does a sense of sorrow truly set in. That image retroactively permeates the game, casting its shadow on the experience. Like this event retroactively creates plot, it retroactively instills sorrow. But it makes sense, a bit, doesn’t it? Madotsuki’s life is a montage of flickering dreams, a parade of strange images with no overt meaning. When she is awake, there is little to do. And when there is finally so little to do in her dreams as in her room, when the possible selves she can imagine are gone, what else would her option be? Go outside? Heavens no.

Suicide is hard to talk about. It turns into an acorn in your throat the second it comes up. When we talk about it, we talk about the act. The act itself is a painful subject. But I believe we focus on it because it is easier to talk about than the real issue: the state of being suicidal. I cringe when someone says something like “suicide is an epidemic”. This sentence makes no sense to me. Suicide is not a disease; it is an action. The conditions that cause that action are the epidemic. This substitution defers the issue to the symptom. I believe this is dangerous. But I understand the impulse: the state of being suicidal is an ugly and uncomfortable subject. Camus called it the “only serious question”, and it is a difficult question, at that. How do we justify to ourselves that life is worth living? Another way of asking it: is there a good reason to wake up? Everyone is going to go about that differently.

Emil Cioran perhaps was the most precise writer when it comes to the subject. I ought read more of it than the occasional excerpt. We could look to Durkheim for his methodologies or modern therapeutic approaches, and there’s immense import there, but as a personal subject, Cioran’s writing on suicide addressed the subject with a clarity and a bite that serves as an unguent. I always remember this: “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” His writing, full of quips that are deeply pessimistic and depressing, for what it’s worth, did not ever shy away from the emotional state of being suicidal. And that’s important, because that, after all, is the problem. Suicide is not the issue; being suicidal is. Ironically, it’s a bit comforting.

せまいせまいあなぼこで
夢を見せあうぼくたちは
あの世もこの世もいられない
あの世もこの世もいられない
ああ神様　子どもの神様
ぼくらはあなたの遊んだ砂場の中ですり傷だらけです

Inside a cramped, narrow hole,
the two of us show each other our dreams.
We can't be in that world; neither can we be in this world.
We can't be in that world; neither can we be in this world.
Dear God-the god of children,
we are covered in scratches in the sandbox where you amused yourself.
穴ぐらぐらし [Hole-Dwelling], Kikuo

I am trying to remember who or what said it, but I remember the assertion that death is in great part the absence of community. It’s a kind of exile. And what is it, from The Sunset Limited? “You can't be one of the dead because that which has no existence can have no community. No community! My heart warms just thinking about it. Blackness, aloneness, silence, peace, and all of it only a heartbeat away.” A thought I keep coming back to lately is that grief is tied to the severance of communication. Community and communication: they share roots, literally and figuratively. I struggle to find any community I feel truly comfortable in. There is always a sense in me that I do not belong. When my social anxiety gets a hold of me, and I manage to forget all the joy socializing gives me in service of anguish over some embarrassing foible, I write an apology letter in my mind to everyone I’ve ever spoken to, and I vow never to speak to anyone ever again.

I can’t help but find myself, now, thinking about moon: Remix RPG Adventure. Love-de-Lic’s debut game (and arguable magnum opus) satirizes and deconstructs the genre of the JRPG. Yume Nikki does much the same, by taking the skeleton of the JRPG and interpreting it as something almost unrecognizable. I could spend a long time talking about moon, but I will spare you most of it; after all, I’ve already spent a long time talking about other random things. For me, though, one of the key themes of moon is the, for lack of a better term, extensivity of games. A game designer friend of mine said one of the biggest revelations for him was when his partner asked him what happened after people were finished playing his game. Games are not one-way streets, and the experiences we have inside and outside of them mingle together. The plea “open the door” serves a unique meaning in moon in this way. Madotsuki, meanwhile, will not open her door. Happy days. Blink! Isolation goes on. Inside a cramped and narrow hole. The game shall not extend into reality. This is the room. This is the game.

I do not think I’m agoraphobic. I am told it is most frequently exhibited by a fear of being unable to escape. I don’t really feel that compulsion of egress, I don’t think. But I wonder, sometimes, why I struggle to do anything other than stay in the dark. I know I have depression. I know I have social anxiety. I know I have ADHD. It’s hard to explain my horrible schedule as the product of something other than a sleep disorder. I might have other mental quirks, too, yet undiagnosed, existing in a pocket of undecidability. Maybe I have OCD, hell, maybe I have autism, I don’t know. The doctors I ask shrug and they often disagree with each other. It’s impossible to know sometimes. I keep asking myself if I’m faking it. If I’m just a lazy, pathetic worm who is enabled by a handful of vectors of privilege to be so pathetic. I don’t know.

Why did I write any of this? Who is this for? Is this what you want? Is this what anyone wants? Is it what I want? Is there an audience for this? Is this what people want? Am I feeding the mosquitos? Will anyone read this? Is there a good reason to read this? Does this make anyone happy? Who is fulfilled? Would this be worth doing if I knew it couldn’t save me? What does that mean? What is this? Are these questions doing anything? Am I learning anything? Are you? Is this worth doing? This endless, deliberate tanning? This sopor for succor, this animus ex logos? The rotten? What do these words mean to you? Is there a reason, a good reason to keep writing this? Or is it time to stop?

I will say it again. There are always hidden silences waiting behind the chair. They come out when the coast is clear. They eat everything that moves. I go shaky at the knees. Lights go out, stars come down, like a swarm of bees.

I understand why Madotsuki stays in bed so much. If you don’t get out of bed, the day never has to start. I wouldn’t say I spend a lot of time asleep, I don’t think I sleep more than the average person. But I have always had trouble falling asleep. When I was younger and had to wake up at the crack of dawn for school, I would be running on a couple hours of sleep typically. I would spend hours in bed, music playing sometimes, in the dark, alone with my thoughts. My horrid thoughts. So I found things to do. Things to imagine. It’s not daydreaming. For the majority of my life, nearly every night, before bed, I close my eyes, and imagine a different life. One where I am loved, where I feel love, where I am successful, where I am self assured, where I do not hate my body, where I am living a life that feels authentic. I imagine worlds where I do not have to stay in bed and dream of better lives.

I keep telling myself this is the last time. This is the first time. That I’ll finally get out of this hole. That I’ll change. That I’ll get better. That I’ll get on track. I keep telling myself that. I keep telling myself that. It’s never been true. It’s always been a lie. I’m still here. I can’t stop stopping. I can’t move. My body and my soul is paralyzed in styptic. I hit my head. I gasp. I writhe without sheets. The past is repugnant, the future is unthinkable, and the present is unbearable. The honest truth is a desire to give up. But giving up is an execution. So nothing. I keep telling myself this is the last time. This is the first time. That I’ll finally get out of this hole. That I’ll change. That I’ll get better. That I’ll get on track. I keep telling myself that. I keep telling myself that. It’s never been true. It’s always been a lie. I’m still here. I’m not sure if I’ll ever finish Yume Nikki. I’m not sure Madotsuki will ever leave her room.

I am called to revere Elden Ring out of spite. I once heard someone I no longer speak to for various reasons say, upon seeing a then new trailer, that they wish FromSoft would making something interesting like King’s Field again instead of this. Now, I was playing the King’s Field games for the first time when they said that, and I happen to love those games a lot, and I certainly want them to make another one or something like it, even though they never will because the games industry is full of cowards. But I also happened to know that this person had never played King’s Field, and were probably only saying it out of a smug sense of superiority. And this made me angry.

Yes, yes, the familiar gang is here. Yet another lowly warrior usurps the eternal cycle. The fallen order, the god-kings, corruption, the moon, the flame. Invasions, summons, messages, bloodstains. Tragic sidequests, Patches is there, and multiple endings. Magic is blue, holiness is yellow. You can parry and backstab enemies. You upgrade your weapons to scale with your stats. You dodge roll and stagger. These are familiar. They are played out, to a degree. And yes, they are not exciting in that old way. But I don’t really care, because I’m a “fan of the genre”. I am enthusiastic about the new things that come from this company, and the genre they’ve inadvertently spawned, and I’m always ready for innovation. But that doesn’t preclude me from finding joy in the familiar. Because it was never the uniqueness that mattered most.

There’s this kind of jealousy surrounding the Souls series. The fans (myself included) view them as special, unique, and precious gems. When something besmirches their name, it is a disgrace, because there is something transcendent about these games that we hold sacred. But as the series has become a prototype, a whole genre sprouting from its seedbed, the things that made a game like Dark Souls special have become no longer so special. How many games can we find that are trying to be exactly like it? Those qualities, whether it be difficulty, inscrutability, atmosphere, even specific mechanics, they’re not special anymore. How quaint does Super Metroid feel now? How cliche is The Shining now? Are The Beatles run of the mill? Is Seinfeld funny anymore? It’s like the old joke: “I don’t get the appeal of Hamlet. It’s just a bunch of famous saying strung together.”

It becomes difficult to vindicate why these games are good. So, we get jealous. We get protective. “No, you see, these games are special. How else could I love them so much if they weren’t? They are doing something different. They are beautiful in a way only I can understand.” Everyone thinks they are the sole prophet of Dark Souls liking, and that everyone else is some misguided mystic. I do, too. But I know I’m fooling myself. I know these games are mortal.

See, I’m not sure these games were ever that special to begin with. I remember, years ago, sitting on a couch playing Demon's Souls, and wondering out loud how they made this game, how they reached something so specific. And he said to me that "it had to have come from someone with a vision". As years go on, I find that statement less and less true. They were and are unique, sure. But they didn’t come from nowhere, sprouting from Miyazaki’s forehead like Athena. They were made by people in a company making a software product. Elden Ring was building off of Dark Souls, which was building off of Demon’s Souls, which was building off of King’s Field, which was probably building off of Ultima Underworld or something, and yadda yadda. Iteration is underrated. I think what ends up getting underrecognized, ironically, is that these are good video games. It’s not because they’re special. They haven’t unlocked a secret to games that no one else can know. These games don’t have to be special to be good. They can just be good. Which they are.

Anyway. I liked Elden Ring. I thought it was fun. I thought it was cool. I liked exploring its world. I liked crawling through its dungeons. I liked fighting bosses. That’s enough for me. And so you might ask, “Is Elden Ring even that special?” And I’m going to say, “Who cares?”