Heyo! Do you have any stories about finding Yume Nikki / playing it for the first time? And how much context did you have going in?
I don't remember specifics, but I know I must have found it back around 2010-2012. I was deep in the RPG Maker trenches and combed tons of websites to download as many free-to-play games as I could. This was back when I was in middle school/early high school, and I used to stay at a friend's house all the time over the summers. We would stay up all night playing tons of those things. It was the perfect compliment to the creepypasta scene that was happening around the same time too, we'd read those and watch Marble Hornets and play RPG Maker horror games and it was fucking awesome. As I mentioned, I don't have speicific memories of Yume Nikki in particular, but I do remember deliberately keeping it on my computer when I would flush out the games we were finished with. Throughout my life I'd keep returning to it and bit by bit it became an important game to me. It's one of those "death by one thousand cuts" type of relationships, which seems to be different from the relationships with it other people seem to have. No YouTubers to influence me, no internet forums to plant a bug in my ear, just a kid looking for cheap thrills during summer vacation. Now it's one of my favorite games ever.