What's Different/.flow/Yume Nikki

Yume Nikki was a bit of an oddity. It didn't really have any action, or any puzzles, or any plot - all it had was a huge, strange dream world for the player to wander. And that was all it needed: its focus on exploration and its unique atmosphere made it a cult classic. Some compared it a horror game, but it didn't exactly try to scare the player. It just presented them with a variety of strange environments and let them decide for themselves whether to be amused, amazed, or afraid. It did, however, inspire many "fangames" with similar formats, one of which was more clearly a horror game...

Complete with unsettling beeping noises.

It had a lot of straight-up references to Yume Nikki, too.

I must admit that I initially misjudged .flow (pronounced "dot flow"). I initially played a couple hours of a beta version, and although I enjoyed the freedom to explore (as I always do), I started to see it as cheap horror. Yume Nikki had its fair share of blood and body parts, as well as a couple of mild jump-scares, but it was usually tense, unnerving, oppressive - anything other than outright scary. As someone who likes to be unsettled but not shocked, I loved that. But where Yume Nikki had eyes peering at you from within dense forests, .flow had bloodstained hospital walls. Where Yume Nikki's music was atmospheric, .flow's was harsh and creepy. Like Yume Nikki, .flow had recurring themes, but those themes were rust, parasitic plants, and facial injuries. So I shied away from it.

.flow's gameplay is initially the same as Yume Nikki's - you enter the dream world, explore, search for effects, and then wake up to save or to play the depressingly simple minigame. This pattern holds until you get all the effects, and then you can access a short, cryptic ending. But there's more left to the game, and if you keep exploring, you can eventually find a longer and much stranger ending.

What's this?

This format was particularly clever given when .flow was created. At the time, Yume Nikki fangames were popping up all over the place, and many of them copied the original formula to the letter. This meant that .flow was easily mistaken for a straight-up clone. But if you dug deep enough, you'd find out that that wasn't quite the case, which added beautifully to the game's ambiance. A player would expect the game (and the fear it induced) to be over, but then find themselves pulled back in, uncovering even darker secrets.

Even at the start, though, .flow sets itself apart from Yume Nikki in a couple of ways. The game opens with a scene of the main character floating in a void, with occasional bursts of static. When you press a button, she appears to disintegrate, and then you see her standing in her room as usual. Yume Nikki has no equivalent event, and there doesn't seem to be any continuity between the void and the bedroom, so the scene seems oddly out of place. And then, in the bedroom, the main character enters her dream world by using a computer, rather than by sleeping. These details are meant to catch the player a bit off-guard, and to set the tone for the rest of the game.

Neurons? Circuits?

One of Yume Nikki's strengths is that it doesn't so much tell a story as lead the player to do so. It had no concrete plot, but the game world was full of seemingly symbolic elements. So it's no surprise that players often tried to come up with backstories or motivations for the silent protagonist based on what they saw in her dreams. .flow is similar, but hands the player a few more concrete clues as to what's going on. The game never spells it out, but it's widely accepted that .flow's main character suffers from some kind of disease - the sheer volume of hospitals, illness-related events and creatures bleeding from their faces makes it seem rather obvious. In that context, the "rust" that the game is coated in also starts to seem like a metaphor for something unhealthy, to say nothing of the plants growing on people's bodies. It's not entirely clear what happened in the main character's past, but the game narrows the options down a bit - just enough that many interpretations are possible, but all of them are unsettling.

One more thing to note about .flow is that the areas in its dream world tend to be smaller than those in Yume Nikki. Yume Nikki was content to let the player get completely lost and wander for hours on end, but .flow is a more focused experience, and has a quota of unnerving sights to show the player before they can be allowed to relax. That's not to say that there's no relaxation to be had, but the more pleasant areas are few and far between, and exist to provide a break from the tension of the rest of the game.

Mechanically, .flow is barely any different from Yume Nikki, but the tweaks it does make are cleverly chosen. Horror was a part of Yume Nikki, but it wasn't the focus - with some adjustments, .flow brings horror into the spotlight, without losing the focus on exploration. It doesn't just improve on the formula, it twists it into something different, that works just as well. And despite all the gore, it's deliciously subtle about it.