🎮 Yumeiri

Written by Renkon

Yumeiri by 石乃浦骨董店 (ishinoura) is a turn-based RPG set within a dreamlike world of memories and emotions. Originally released only in Japanese on mobile as ヒュプノノーツ (Les Hypnonautes), it was re-released on Steam and Switch with new scenarios and visuals, and perhaps most relevant importantly for our purposes, an English localization. I was immediately attracted to its simplistic hand-drawn artwork and encounters filled with childlike whimsy, but found myself quickly spiraling into a far darker and more involved game than I could have anticipated. Yumeiri pulls no punches as it slugs you again and again with the cruelties of our real world.

You receive a mysterious package in the mail: a high-tech pillow that will let you experience lucid dreaming.

Yumeiri bills itself as a one-dimensional game in that you can move back and forth along a line, presented as flipping through the pages of a picture book. Rather than exploring a sprawling map and defeating monsters and demons, here instead you move through the characters' memories, and encounter childhood terrors, bullies, and the crushing banality of adulthood.

"Welcome to Match the Witch's shop!"

You are guided through the game by the mysterious Match, a girl wearing a pink and white dress, holding a short rod topped with a heart, and wearing large, face-covering sunglasses. She pops up on occasion to offer advice and sell you items and equipment, accept your strange childish gifts, and most importantly, to remind you of your quest: to remember her and the relationship you two once shared.

Although there are no branching paths, you can walk back and forth between pages to encounter different scenarios. Each stage of the game represents a chunk of your character's life, such as childhood, adolescence, working life, and so on. If you "die," you are returned to the start of the chapter to try again.

"You did it! You gained 15 experience points."

There are two main types of encounters. The first are the equivalent of a skill check in a pen-and-paper role-playing game. You might be asked to draw a straight line on a piece of paper, and if you have enough Ego, you can clear it for some easy experience. Later checks might be more difficult, and you'll have to think about skipping ones that you'll likely fail, or risk it and hope that you gain some points in your weaker stat. If your Intelligence is too low, you might want to skip taking a math test and instead flip back a few pages to an area where you can grind on something easier. Some of these encounters even allow you to recruit temporary allies to help you, so you will probably want to engage with as many of these challenges as you can.

"You encountered Celery!"

The other type of encounter are more typical turn-based battles. These, much like the linear map, are stripped down to their barest essentials. Your main three options are to Fight, doing damage using whichever stat the enemy calls for, highlighted in red at the bottom of the screen; use Items, some of which can heal you or even unleash special attacks; and try to Escape, at the risk of failing to do so and taking damage.

"They bought it for you! You gained 30 experience points and 1 Ego. Robot has become your companion."

Speaking of those items that let you do special attacks: they are permanent and can be infinitely reused, but at the cost of using up some of your precious Time. I mentioned above that you can (and probably should) flip back through previous pages in order to grind up on experience and other resources before taking on tougher challenges. The catch is that you have a set amount of Time per chapter, and each page flip forward or backward uses it up. You get a fairly generous amount of time, and you can see at the bottom of the screen the rough distance to the end of the chapter, but this limitation is always hanging over you. And naturally, you'll want to pound on bosses with your special attacks, so you will want to ration your Time as much as possible to account for that. Much like in reality, life is short and your Time here is finite, so you'd better make it count.

"You rested on the bridge. You recovered 4 HP."

This is one of clever little ways that the mechanics of the game feed back into the theme of cycling through the memories of life. There are the more obvious aspects, like when you go to battle against a literal manifestation of your character's depression, or fail an impossibly high skill check because your character just doesn't have enough Hope. The game can be punishingly difficult, and that too is the point; the frustrations that your characters feel getting past this mental roadblock is represented by you, the player, having to replay the same chapter and see the same encounters again and again. Just as in life, sometimes you need to bash your head against a problem dozens of times before finding your eureka moment and being able to move on.

The characters of Yumeiri often face bitter struggles, but also experience moments of tenderness.

I enjoyed my time with Yumeiri, even though there were moments that got quite dark and heavy. It is not often that a game's mechanics and systems rather than dialogue and exposition can move me to feel such complicated emotions for my characters, and to be so in tune with both the despair and joy that they felt as they overcame their problems. I highly recommend diving into the mirrored reality of dreams in Yumeiri.

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