The Disappearing Girl
On the trail of the mysterious, pioneering altgame Yume Nikki.
It was 2008 when I first played Yume Nikki, and I was in my freshman year of high school. I had just gotten my first laptop—a shabby pink Dell—and was getting my first truly unfiltered taste of the internet beyond my family’s shared PC. That means Myspace, GaiaOnline, Livejournal and more. Somehow, I stumbled upon this surreal little RPG Maker game. By the time I had gotten around to playing it, the game had already been “completed.” Kikiyama, its enigmatic, anonymous developer, had stopped updating the project in 2007 after intermittently adding things to the game since 2004. In 2008, the very year that I discovered Yume Nikki, Kikiyama disappeared without a trace.
