Yume Nikki is a distillation of what I love about the medium of video games as a way to convey feelings and stories through an interactive lens. It is so far removed from what I normally play- games with clearly defined goals, settings, things they want you to feel and think about explicitly. All Yume Nikki asks of you is to explore the things that have been put on screen for you, and bask in the atmosphere and experience the wonderful and bizarre visuals and sounds that came to Kikiyama’s brain. Even with the discovered “goal” of the game being to find all of the effects scattered throughout the maze like and consistently difficult to navigate maps, and guidance via the friend who had me play this-because I certainly wouldn’t have had the patience to wander for hours to find these things, seeing the sights and smelling the roses of Yume Nikki never once got old. This is an experience that left me with indescribable emotions and thoughts, some I don’t think I will ever understand outside of just stating that this game is one of the coolest things to experience out there.

Sometimes all a game really has is atmosphere and good presentation. That’s okay on it’s own, these aspects are top notch in this game (with the exception of some pretty lame jumpscares), but I was still left feeling let down by the disappointingly unengaging gameplay experience of Kuon. This feels exactly like a group of developers who were not confident enough in the player being able to make it through the game with the provided limited items, so they slapped on an overpowered infinite heal button and a melee weapon that kills everything to compensate. The gameplay is not scary or tense like it’s contemporaries- there is no worrying about surviving and thinking about resources in Kuon. You encounter something, you mash square until it dies and then hold R1 to heal up afterwards. It really does baffle me and pretty much defeat the reason I enjoy the survival horror genre so much.

All of this said though- put up with a pretty boring and repetitive gameplay experience for the two main campaigns for a few hours, and you will be rewarded with an epilogue that had me in awe and coming off the game quite a lot more positive than at those first few hours. It’s so impressive and shocking as a twist that it almost got me to forgive the middling experience otherwise- but really, I just think it’s an excellent ending for an overall messy video game.

This game feels like some kind of ultra cute reward for my years of being so intensely obsessed with Resident Evil. Crow Country takes so many tropes and aspects from my favorite video game series- a lot of the exact same sound effects (which threw me for a loop), the RE3 style electrical wall outlets and red barrels, the way the game so accurately captures the look of the pre-rendered backgrounds and CGI from those PlayStation games- it is all so lovingly crafted to evoke the classics. Crow Country never particularly scared me, but what it did make me feel was the joy of being so damn happy to be celebrating this beautiful genre of video games.