The rave area.
LcdDem (Lucid Dream with every other letter removed) is a Yume Nikki fangame made by the Japanese composer known as Koronba. It's known for its gentler, more serene atmosphere and boasts one of the most well-received Yume Nikki fangame soundtracks out there.
You play as Chie, a girl in a tiny room with no apparent exit excepting a balcony. She can only play her depressing Famicom-esque game NEJI and sleep. Once asleep, she enters a Wide-Open Sandbox lucid dream world. Like the original Yume Nikki, there are many hidden effects to find, but the primary goal of the game is to seek the thirteen orbs scattered throughout her mind.
While the game was finished at v0.030, Koronba has removed all traces of the game from various websites (going as far as to delete entire webpages he had complete control over) and has asked that everyone else do the same and never think about or even talk about it ever again. (According to [1]
tumblr post back in 2013).
This game provides examples of:
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Like Yume Nikki, there is one called the Sewers and it's one of the biggest areas in the game, however, it's also the most hidden.
- Acid-Trip Dimension: A standard for Yume Nikki fangames, this game has its share of these words, such as the Rainbow Tiles World, which is a void with colorful tiles that make noises when you step on them.
- All Just a Dream: Par for the course, everything in this game is naturally all part of Chie's dreams except for the real-world portions.
- Blackout Basement: Hexagon World, as of version 0.030, is very dark and requires the Moon effect in order to see it well.
- The Blank: A good number of characters you encounter have blank faces, particularly the boy in the library. Well, most of the time.
- Chie at the end lacks a face, too. As well as earlier than that in the nightmare event.
- Brought Down to Normal: The effects are actually craft supplies in real life.
- Clock Tower: One of the more memorable areas is a tall tower, at the top of which is a giant clock and an orb.
- Cosmetic Award:
- The Parka effect, obtained after navigating through a door maze and climbing several long flights of stairs, is purely cosmetic.
- And then the same thing happens again in the tower found in the ice floe area, this time with the Yukata effect.
- This may in fact be a motif; the same thing happens with the Goldfish Bowl, found in the door-warping, cliff-hopping, ladder-climbing maze of the Mining area.
- Downer Ending: Chie wakes up but she leaves her room to find her apartment ransacked and someone she knows dead on the floor, to whom she tries to wake up, before sinking down and crying.
- Dream Emergency Exit: Chie pinches herself to get out of the dream. Subverted in the ending, when her pinching doesn't work.
- Dream Land: Naturally, every location except Chie's apartment is this since she can only visit them in her dreams.
- Dream People: Everyone in the game except Chie and the dead figure at the end qualify, since they all appear in Chie's dreams. Weirdly, some of them appear to be fairly normal looking.
- Dream Within a Dream: Sometimes, if you use the bed while in the dream world, you'll enter another dream. This can show you how many orbs you've collected.
- Going to bed while dreaming can also trigger the axe nightmare event.
- The Pajama effect makes Chie fall asleep within her dream in order to warp to the Nexus.
- Empty Room Psych: There are at least two doors that can never be accessed, as they are blocked by npcs.
- A lot of rooms can be pointless dead ends filled with nothing but furniture.
- Eyes Always Shut: Chie, like the other protagonists, always has her eyes closed.
- Eyes Do Not Belong There: The boy in the dark forest area by random event becomes a large blob-like monster with two enormous eyes covering its body.
- Foreshadowing: Once you kill someone in the dream world, they don't come back, even if you wake up and go back to sleep. There's a good reason for this: in the ending, there is someone who is dead in Chie's home, and unlike the other times, it isn't a dream.
- Flying Seafood Special: Surprisingly subverted. Schools of fish fly over the protagonist only in the legitimate underwater area.
- Girl with Psycho Weapon: Chie looks like a normal young girl, but she becomes this once you pair her with the axe. This is especially so for the Nightmare event, where you are forced to kill a double of her with the effect.
- Gotta Catch 'Em All: In this case, the objective is to collect glowing orbs. Although effects are still present, finding them does not progress the game.
- Guide Dang It!: Depending on where you enter the Tile Maze, you can only enter one or two areas. This isn't mentioned anywhere else, and the large size of the maze makes things more confusing.
- Hikikomori: Possibly averted, as Chie's room doesn't even connect to the rest of the house - she couldn't leave even if she wanted to. Except in the ending, which seems to imply she just wasn't seeing the door.
- Journey to the Center of the Mind: To find her memories, Chie has to explore the reaches of the worlds in her dreams.
- Killed Off for Real: A surprisingly large amount of characters die forever if you kill them.
- Lighter and Softer: Compared to its precedent, the horror elements have been toned down quite a bit, the ending however subverts this.
- The Maze: Many, all of which have become significantly maze-ier with version 0.030. One of the most notable is the Tile Maze, which is a large maze with winding pathways that is this game's counterpart to Yume Nikki's Hell.
- Mind Screw: Chie has two doors leading out of her room, one to a closet and one to her balcony. So how did she get in in the first place? In the ending, the closet is inexplicably a door, leading one to believe it actually had been a door the whole time...
- Why do the effects cause corresponding craft supplies to appear in the real world...?
- Mini-Game: The borderline impossible NEJI, a game on Chie's console where you play as an astronaut who destroys meteors.
- Mood Whiplash: Go ahead, Chie. Kill that creature on the park swing. It's not like the whole place will go dark because of it.
- The ending, compared to the rest of the game, is a sudden jolt. Chie discovers a dead body in her apartment, and she tries to pinch herself awake, but nothing happens since it isn't a dream this time, causing her to break down and cry.
- My God, What Have I Done?: It's likely that Chie had something to do with or knew how that other person died, hence why she cries over the body at the end of the game.
- No Name Given: Chie is the only character with a name.
- One-Hit Kill: Using the axe on almost anything kills it in one hit.
- Subverted with the head in the spongey eye monster area. You can attack it 5 times before it vanishes.
- Random Event:
- If you sleep in the bed inside the dream version of Chie's room, there's a 1/6 chance that 1 of 2 things will happen: you'll either see the orbs you have collected, or you will enter the Nightmare event, where Chie has to chainsaw her clone.
- In the Night Woods, an odd noise will randomly play, which is based on a counter. If you enter the library as it's playing, its colors will be inverted and the boy inside it will be replaced with an odd creature.
- Every half second, there is a 1 in 3001 chance of the stones in Atlantis World to flicker.
- Repressed Memories: The game or what can be considered it's plot is interpreted to be this and that the orbs are her memories, considering the ending, where Chie's room has a door and she leaves her room.
- Scenery Porn: A lot of worlds look beautiful, such as Stained Glass World, which contains vibrant structures made of stained glass set in a starry void.
- Sequel: Parodied in a way with LCDDEM 2 which has you playing as the game's creator. You can do nothing but play NEJI, which ended up being integrated into the main game anyway.
- Shout-Out:
- Rainbow Tile World is likely a direct reference to the similar rave worlds of Yume Nikki and many of its successors.
- Similarly, there's a large maze of many glowing reddish tiles highly reminiscent of Yume Nikki's hell maze.
- The Teleport Maze, a trope of this genre which has appeared in Yume Nikki, .flow, and Yume 2kki.
- Solemn Ending Theme: A solemn piano piece for a solemn ending. Spoilers, obviously.
- Spooky Silent Library: One of the areas is this. Although a certain event needs to be triggered for it to become spooky...
- Surreal Horror: While the game is far less frightening than Yume Nikki, there are still many scenes with surreal horror that may be unsettling.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: Chie has what appears to be a closet in her bedroom. In the ending, it leads to a hallway. This implies that she had only been seeing it as a closet.
- Under the Sea: Atlantis World, an underwater reef area with lots of coral and fish.
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment: If you kill the sleeping child in the weedy building, you will become trapped there. Killing the eyeball creature in the park is also not very pleasant, since it causes the area to go dark.
- The Walls Have Eyes: One of the buildings in the pink box area is a hallway with large eyes staring at you.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: Just like most other Yume Nikki fangames, you're given lots of large places to walk around.
- Womb Level: One of the orb locations appears to be inside a uterus. Said orb is also called "Fetus".
- Wrap Around: A lot of areas loop when you reach the other side, much like the original Yume Nikki.
