i’ll give it a shot
if most video games are empowerment fantasies, i think horror games are disempowerment fantasies–genre staples like limited resources and enemies that need to be avoided rather than fought directly are about taking power away from the player. yume nikki relies on a different, more fundamental disempowerment, taking away the player’s ability to reason about the effects of their actions. in one of the first rooms you can access in the dream world, there are these weird purple drooling guys–you go up to one of them and hit the action button and a distorted version of its sprite appears in the background. did that do something? why is it a thing? it’s an unsettling interaction. if the game was any more of a game–say if it had battles or traditional puzzles scattered throughout like other rpg maker games–it would take away from this sense of unfamiliarity
random events abound, which is another way YN takes away the player’s ability to reason about the world. the uboa event probably wouldn’t be nearly so iconic if not for having such a tiny chance of appearing. YN is completely unconcerned with whether its content is seen, which is why the famicom glitch event is triggered by an unmarked tile at the bottom of a massive empty dragon quest dungeon… 1/3 of the time. cracking open the game in rpg maker reveals many maps extend beyond what the player can see. everything contributes to this sense of a world that does not exist for the player’s sake and refuses to yield its mysteries; haunted software.
there’s just enough of a “plot” to inspire imagination, i think. e.g. playing a shut-in girl and looking on at an inaccessible picnic of the hawkish girls who chase you around in your dreams communicates a lot with very little:
there are more games along these lines now (beyond the numerous YN fangames obviously)–i think PT is probably the most famous at this point? but YN was one of the first and it has its own distinct aesthetic of short ambient droning loops, parallaxing void instead of floors, use of ancient mesoamerican imagery, and all the weird locales like the stairs of rising hands or the docks maze or the pink sea or the drawn world or or or–anyway it is pretty singular to me. also it’s one of the coolest things anyone’s made with rpg maker
