What Did We Play Yesterday?

The Yume Nikki countdown announced the release of a new game on 02/23/18 for $20.

In its original form, RPG Maker darling YUME NIKKI was a divisively controversial work among fans. By contrast, YUMENIKKI -DREAM DIARY- is a collaborative show of the utmost respect for auteur Kikiyama’s seminal release.

I'm comparatively new to Yume Nikki English fandom so I'm not sure what controversy the blurb refers to, but this appears to be an authorized fangame that, "combines influences from the original game and other recent indie juggernauts to create something wholly unique." The devs worked with KIKIYAMA but it's evidently not a sequel.

This might be a good time to catch up on fangames. I enjoyed Yume 2kki, which is the defacto fangame I think. It's worth noting Fleshchild was recently cancelled. I was very enthusiastic about that one. It's included on fangame lists but it was so different I would call it YN-inspired at best. I think the unfinished game is worth playing or watching a Let's Play but it's a PITA to run so my notes may be helpful if you have trouble.

I never made an official No Man's Sky post, and since I've got almost 70 hours logged I shall do so now. Long post, but it's a complicated game with a lot of THINGS so it's not easily summed up.

I went into NMS with a first-person create-your-own-story attitude and that has served me well. This game encourages user-created stories and I have many specific memories of gameplay moments. I remember the first time I was shot out of the sky by pirates, the first time I encountered a pearl and decided, "I'll poke that and see what happens." (Spoiler: Sentinels happen.) I remember sheltering from a massive ice storm in a cave system and getting lost. I remember the first time I found a large gold deposit and thought I was Rich, Bitch (ah, the naivete of youth). The mundane, day-to-day of gameplay is rendered memorable in this way.

I keep meaning to set up my NMS screenshot queue on ren-plays. There are beautiful planets to be found in the vanilla game. I ended up building a base on a nice lush planet with purple and green grass and white beaches, inhabited by peaceful mushroom creatures, with caves containing vortex cubes. A solid find. The planets do need work, there are no proper forests, for example, because they apparently had to reduce terrain density for PS4 (once again, I shake my fist half-heartedly at console players). There is a sameyness that is unavoidable for a procedurally-generated world of this magnitude, but something always pushes me to see what's in the next galaxy. I questioned the quintillion world thing before, but I take it back. There really isn't a game that I'm aware of that provides an exploration experience like this. I've obtained the Sigma and Tau warp engine upgrades (there are 3 total) so I am able to go to more advanced galaxies but they are not clearly marked as such once you can access them, so all I can say is as I slowly and infinitesimally move toward the galactic center the planets get more interesting and dangerous.

The current state of the game rewards farming/crafting much more than rare resource hunting, but I find hunting more fun. The exosuit cargo compartments hold large stacks (5 special items or 500 common items per slot), which is essential if you want to do serious pearl, gravatino, or cube hunting.

Easy money is equipping the scanner flora/fauna upgrades, with the Sigma and Tau upgrades I now get over 100k from scanning most new animals and around 20k for new flora. This just emphasizes how special resource hunting is undervalued in a really unfortunate way, and it's mainly the thrill of the hunt and the challenge of outsmarting/escaping the sentinels that kept my interest, I certainly don't do it for the money. At this point I can bring in about a million per planet just from casual scanning, which is enough for basic upgrades and saving up for multitools but is a drop in the bucket for the better ship and freighter purchases.

The randomness of everything can suck. I still don't have Atlas Pass v2 or v3 (an infamously common problem) and I'm still looking for Theta upgrades for flora/fauna scanners and the warp engine. There's no rhyme or reason, you just find things when you find them, and sometimes that's over 100's of hours of gameplay. There's lot of arcane theory about blueprint placement, theoretically you get a bigger boost if you have Sigma and Tau touching Theta. Okay, but that's... random and somewhat non-intuitive? And I don't think it's officially documented anywhere, it may very well be Player Lore. On the positive side, I stumbled across a wrecked 65 million unit ship when my current ship was worth about 5 million units, which was quite a trade-up. You can get lucky.

One big problem with No Man's Sky is you can end up in situations where you are stranded somehow or cannot progress the main questline. These are design problems, not player problems. The main questlines need to be completed in the galaxy they start in. In retrospect this seems straightforward, but a lot of players, including myself, did not consider the ramifications of making 50+ warp jumps to other galaxies thousands of lightyears away before deciding to complete these quests. Quest locations are not saved in the teleporter and backtracking in a game this size is sometimes impossible (see: blackholes). My distance and the general availability of Thamium9, which is required for warp fuel, means I need to start a new game to attempt the main quests.

NMS has a Survival and Permadeath mode. Survival is a completely different game, and if you don't understand the differences you will die a lot. You start on a more challenging starter planet and at least a klick from your ship. Just getting to the ship requires some planning and smart use of terrain and resources. It is entirely possible to start a game that cannot be survived due to lack of resources. Life support degrades more quickly and the scanner takes longer to charge, so not only do you use resources faster, they take longer to locate. Once you make it to the ship the launcher requires 200 plutonium for each use so it must be fully loaded for 1 boost. This makes surface flight prohibitive at first, and if the player doesn't realize this they can get stranded permanently.

Sentinel difficulty is much higher and you are guaranteed any sort of lush planet will have aggressive sentinels that attack on sight. Therefore, if you land on a lush planet and you don't have extra plutonium reserves, you are screwed if you can't survive long enough to find enough plutonium to refuel. It took me a few tries to figure this out. The best strategy, as far as I can tell, is to buy as much fuel as you can afford at the space station, pick a nearby planet that you hope doesn't have too many environmental hazards, and immediately set up a base. That way you can establish a teleporter. Pirates are aggro as shit in Survival and will attack you over the most banal resources. I really hated Survival mode until I realized I just had to treat it like a completely different game.

Permadeath is worse, and of course, when you die you're dead. (Me word good.) I would really only recommend that to people who don't mind replaying the starter planet bit over and over, because you will replay it over and over, but I can see why some people might enjoy that.

I ended up starting a new Normal game to play through the main questlines. The good news is I understand the game now and know what to do, so getting off the starter planet was a breeze. The problem is I now have to grind through the starter equipment until I get find the upgrades I need to get things back up to decent strength, and with a game like this, there's no telling how long that will take.

On the one hand, I'm curious about the main questline, but on the other hand, I shouldn't have to start over like this and that takes the wind out of my sails. I can appreciate the game for what it is and I enjoyed my time with it, but there are a lot of things about it that I find personally frustrating. I would recommend it to people who are into sandboxes and exploratory games and don't get too upset when things break.

Yume Nikki just launched on Steam, and the news page links to a countdown site for the next Yume Nikki project. The counter has less than two weeks remaining.

The listing has been up one day and the community is already getting fired up.

If you've never played the cult classic that launched a thousand fangames, now's a good time.