Yume Nikki takes you inside the dreams of a Hikikomori who may or may not be mentally disturbed beyond repair. It's no surprise that it's loaded with scary stuff.
As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
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Original game
- Pictured above is Uboa
. To elaborate, you encounter him by going to Poniko's house and flick the light switch off, which has a 1 in 64 chance of causing Poniko to turn into him. This can take anywhere from two or three tries to many minutes, to the point where he may appear when you least expect him, at which point he lets out a low-pitched scream that persists until you touch him, which takes you to this strange black-and-white area full of massive Eldritch Abominations, where you're trapped until you pinch yourself awake.- It doesn't help that, not unlike a classic Eldritch Abomination, Uboa's name in the coding is written with a combination of characters that don't normally go together in the Japanese language: "ウボァ."
- You might get a glitch where, if you close the game after Uboa appears, the droning background sound will still be playing and cannot be stopped.
- Seccom Masada-Sensei's spaceship. Masada himself is always at his piano if you leave him alone. Now, in this game, when you kill things, they let out a high-pitched scream, no matter what they are. Killing Masada takes this to a whole new level, not only because he had No Mouth and STILL SCREAMS, but because after you kill him, his piano is still playing.
- The Toriningen—specifically, the ones with purple eyes that chase you around, can't be shaken off, and if they so much as touch you, they literally send you to Hell. It doesn't help that most of them get this way after you knife them. And if you think just because you got away from one without waking up is going to keep you safe, think again. You piss one off, they all get pissed off.
- Just the damned Hell maze itself. It glows red, is That One Level due to how freaking hard it is to navigate, and it has several Toriningen of its own.
- There is a Toriningen in the Candle World that, if pissed off, will chase you at an extremely high speed; the only way to outrun her is to have exploited a Good Bad Bug that allows you to move eight times as fast.
- If you get caught in the Number World, the floor changes. If you have any idea about hiragana - the floor is screaming.
- Some events in Yume Nikki show up fullscreen. A particularly nasty example is the FACE (video at link has flashing lights). It's exactly what it sounds like: the screen goes black, then a bizarre, abstract, creepy face fills the screen. Even the way you get to FACE is creepy on its own: you stab a zipper-thing on the wall, and it bleeds. It's also the only thing in the entire game that wakes Madotsuki up that isn't caused by Madotsuki herself, which only makes it even more ominous.
- Some other faces in the game mix "silly" with "horror" like a weird cartoon. There are a couple of these half-buried in the White Desert. Both are doorways. One's looking at its own stretched-out ear, and seems worried. You enter through its ear. The other one wiggles like Jell-O and is making a silly face. You enter through its gaping mouth.
- The entire White Desert. Everything's monochrome, it's easy to go around in circles or get lost, the only sound is an ominous clapping that appears irregularly and far between, and even for a monochrome area, it has an eerie cartooniness to it that just makes it freaky as hell.
- The Takofuusen, a giant octopus-like balloon that flies across the desert while galloping sounds can be heard. It appears very rarely.
- The Thing With The Quivering Jaw. It's big, it's hideous, it has limbs where there shouldn't be, and it does nothing but stare at you with its razor maw quivering.
- Monoko, the dead-looking girl with five arms and what seems like a melting eye. Like the FACE above it shows up fullscreen.
- Monoe, although lesser example since she's looking perfectly normal... except for the stylized slanted eyes.
- Footprint Passage Number One. Pitch-black background. White footprints are the only visible things... apart from a few hideous monsters in the background. Then you'll find an oddly-colored lump, which, when interacted with, makes the hideous monsters vomit blood while deforming to be even more hideous. You get there by stabbing a horrible monster in a red maze often deemed "Hell", or by passing through the world made of eyes, hands, and disembodied ghosts.
- Ever freaked out because you had a game cartridge crash? The feeling is replicated by the "Famicom Glitch" event, which is triggered by interacting with an innocuous-looking wall in an empty room with creepy grinning faces on the walls. This causes a completely blank dialogue box to appear, and once you close it, it keeps reappearing endlessly. Then random tiles in the room start glitching out, making it look like the faces on the walls are bleeding. Eventually, the game suddenly freezes with a nasty stuttering sound. See a video here. To make this event even more disquieting, it happens in an empty room in the lowest floor of a dungeon.
- The Eyeball World, especially at night. Perhaps the scariest is the garden of hands just waving themselves in the air.
- The Famicom dungeon. First somewhat creepy red faces that appear to be vomiting blood, then the rather scary grinning purple walls, then, the black/white fusion of both.
- There is a part, that is necessary for the witch effect, where the player has to sit on a train bench. There is a creepy demon with the eyes of a maniac sitting on the other bench. If, after acquiring the effect, you come back to the train (perhaps to kill the demon), he will already be gone; instead, TWO other maniac-looking demons will appear right where the player sits.
- The Stabbing Room. It is a room accessed by stabbing an NPC in the Numbers World that blocks your path. The reward? A room full of NPCs.
- Kyuukyuu-kun. It's a long multicolored (primarily red) creature found in the stairway in front of the door for the FACE event. It has a small arm that rubs up and down the stairway's handrail and has a constant dazed smiling expression. What makes this even creepier is that the room that Kyuukyuu-kun is found is dead silent except for the sound of it rubbing the handrail.
- Weirdly enough, if Madotsuki equips her kitchen knife Kyuukyuu-kun begins to rub the handrail even faster.
- Many fans interpret that the creature is intended to be phallic imagery as the door leading to the room resembles a zipper.
Dream Diary
- The remake's official site has some nice artwork of several characters drawn in a quite realistic style. Kyukyu-kun already looks somewhat menacing, not to speak of the detailed psycho Toriningen with bulging eyes and lots of little fangs.
- When you meet Poniko she is working on something on her desk. She's got a desk lamp on, but flicking the main light off still ticks her all the same. After messing with it enough times, the entire room goes dark and you're forced to walk up to where Poniko is. Once you do that, Uboa's face is splattered over the screen and Madotsuki wakes up in shock.
Manga
- At one point, we're actually given a close up of a Toriningen - and it is not pretty.
- In Chapter 5, we get to see Poniko, who promptly turns into Uboa. Unlike in the game, she attacks Madotsuki and steals her effects.
- After this occurs, we see Madotsuki angry for the first time. Immediately upon waking up, her first thought is to acquire a weapon, not to defend herself from Uboa, not even to reacquire her stolen abilities, but to exact revenge against her. "I'LL KILL IT! I'LL FUCKING KILL IT!"
- Also in Chapter 5, we discover that something intangible is manipulating Madotsuki's memories and abilities in the real world, apparently with the goal of preventing her from ever reawakening.
- The dream worlds in the game, as bizarre as they often are, are usually stable and consistent. Not so in the manga. The hub, in particular, originally has massive Incan-inspired statues floating in its sky. As the manga progresses, they seem to have collapsed, leaving the hub in a mess and its doors at least partially buried. There also seem to be a lot more elements from other parts of the dream world bleeding into areas they weren't present in in the game, although this may be the intentional work of Mars-san.
- In the game, most elements can be portrayed as innocent if bewildering with a few exceptions (Uboa, FACE, etc.). In the manga, things are surprisingly conspiratorial. For instance, Poniko/Uboa and Masada form a tenuous alliance and discuss confronting some sort of opponent, and Mars-san seems to be actively making it harder for Madotsuki to reach it, sending Toriningen and other obstacles to obstruct her. The manga also heavily implies that other humans entered and became trapped in the dream world.
Pinch yourself awake and go back to Yume Nikki.
