Games Like Yume Nikki: Dreams, Doors and Quiet Dread

Yume Nikki, made by Kikiyama in 2004 and still free, has no dialogue, no fights and no story told to you: Madotsuki goes to sleep, and you walk through door after door of strange and sometimes frightening dream worlds, collecting Effects that change how she looks. Few games copy it exactly. The ones here share its dreams, its quiet or its sense of a mind you are wandering through.

OMORI is the best known of its descendants: a quiet boy and his friends explore a bright, pastel dream world in a turn-based RPG, while the sudden horror and the waking world, where he has not left his house in years, slowly reveal why. It is longer and talks far more than Yume Nikki, and it deals with grief, depression and suicide.

For something closer to Yume Nikki's free, wordless wandering, Soul Void plays in the browser in Game Boy-style pixel art: you drift through the strange landscapes of a void full of lost souls, helping the ones you meet on your way home. Two free Japanese RPG Maker games translated by vgperson carry the same spirit with more puzzles: in Bevel's Painting a young artist steps into her own glowing canvas, a world of paint where everyone speaks a made-up language, and in Blank Dream a girl wakes in a Mirror World of themed realms full of ways to die; it deals with suicide head on. Hello Charlotte EP1, also free, sends a puppet girl into a TV world of static and dead ends, and Pocket Mirror ~ GoldenerTraum, the remake of a cult RPG Maker game, has a girl with no memory wander a gothic, dreamlike mansion of strange inhabitants.

If what stayed with you was the nightmare rather than the dream, Neverending Nightmares wakes you from one nightmare into the next in black-and-white crosshatching, Midnight Scenes: A Safe Place spends an hour in the bedroom of a young man whose nightmares come for him, and Decarnation pulls a Paris cabaret dancer into riddles and monsters born of her own mind. Milk outside a bag of milk outside a bag of milk is a short visual novel in which you are the voice in a girl's head as she tries to sleep, her world drawn in red as she sees it.

For dream logic in three dimensions, Paratopic cuts between a smuggler, a birdwatcher and a killer in low-poly scenes that make less sense the longer you look, and Anemoiapolis: Chapter 1 and Dreamcore are wordless wanders through empty malls, dream pools and endless suburbs, the liminal places Yume Nikki's worlds often feel like.

If you only try one, play OMORI for the fullest dream world, or Soul Void for something free you can wander tonight.

Questions