If you asked me 10-12ish years ago what my favorite video game was, and I was allowed to give a hipster answer, I would've immediately said Yume Nikki (translation: Dream Diary). That was a strange freeware Japanese pixel horror cult classic game made in RPG Maker, which had you play as a girl who walked around in a bunch of different dream worlds. "Horror" isn't a perfect descriptor for its genre though. It's mostly just very surreal, and when you're wandering around you generally don't have anything threatening you. (And, even when there is, it's all just a dream to begin with.) What made the game special for me though was how it conveyed atmosphere, themes, emotions, and ideas without really ever telling you anything. What do the dreams mean? It's left for you to decide, but a great deal of the game still felt very deliberate. This was back in the golden age of creepypasta, so there was a ton of discussion for this game to be found online. And I devoured all that discussion, and joined in it myself at times. Ah, sweet memories.

Anyways, at some point Yume Nikki was brought to Steam (through which you can download it for free), and a new game announced. A new game? What was that going to entail? It turned out to not be a sequel, or a remake, or a spinoff -- but rather, a weird sort of "reimagining." Basically, the devs made a new game like Little Nightmares or Limbo/Inside, but filled it with imagery from Yume Nikki. And the end result is... mixed. A lot of people really hated this new game (titled "Yume Nikki -Dream Diary-... which means Dream Diary Dream Diary). But I think if you go into it with an open mind, you may find it to be... all right. Yeah, this isn't a great game, but I think that's okay.

I'll get this out of the way first: Dream Diary does not really capture most of the unique atmosphere of the original Yume Nikki at all, instead going for a much more basic horror-focused experienced. Everything is now out to kill you, and you have to do a bunch of awkward platforming to complete each level. Controls and animations are stiff, everything's a bit janky, puzzles are not very clear.

But all that said, there were still moments in this that stood out to me. It was fun to revisit dream worlds I knew from the original game, but now in 3D. There are certain locales where it's clear the devs put a little more thought and care into, making portions of the game a more memorable experience.

Two things that I think helped a lot for my time with this game: 1) I played this on the Switch Lite, generally before going to sleep. That really adds to the mood, actually lying in bed and about to doze off myself, right? I really wish I could play the original Yume Nikki on the Switch tbh... And 2) I played the "2.0" version of this game, which added a good amount of content and apparently fixed a ton of bugs that the original had. I can understand reviewers being harsher for the original version. It's bad that the devs released a glitch-filled mess, but it's also nice that they took the time to fix as much of it as they could despite this being an incredibly niche game.

My recommendation at the end of the day is to first play the original Yume Nikki game. And if you really dig it, I'd say this reimagining is worth picking up during a sale.