Official art of The Girl
Veins is a Yume Nikki fangame by UminoAoi, the creator of Dream of Gluttony. It is unique among YN fangames in that it has a defined plot and characters, rather than leaving them vague and told through symbolism.
You play as an unnamed purple-haired girl who leaves her room to find a dark void with six IVs and a boy, Daniel, who claims to be her friend. The girl has forgotten her past, and Daniel informs her that she must discover it in order to leave the world.
The girl must inject IVs into her veins to travel to the various worlds in the dream, find all the effects, and escape, with Daniel tagging along. Hopefully, she will also discover how she and Daniel ended up here in the first place.
Can be downloaded here
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This game contains examples of:
- Art Shift: Most of the game has the typical Yume Nikki style, but the RPG World suddenly shifts to a typical RPG Maker game.
- Bittersweet Ending: The girl and Daniel are Dead All Along, but are able to move on from their pasts and be happy together.
- Bloody Handprint: The red building in the Violent World has the protagonist leave bloody footprints.
- Body Horror:
- The nurses have a giant eye for a head, and the doctors and patients in the hospital area have heads with red-purple inflated skin and visible veins.
- Gin in her event is briefly shown with something appearing to be bursting out of her head.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Each of the veins leading to the six worlds has a different color. There is also a violet vein at the end of the first-person maze.
- Crucified Hero Shot: At the end of the first-person maze, a girl who looks just like the protagonist is shown crucified to a giant cross. She openly compares it to the crucifixion of Jesus and wonders if she died to repent for her sins. Disturbingly, only the protagonist can see it- when she asks Daniel about it, he claims to see nothing. It is later revealed that this was one of Daniel's past murders of the heroine- whether he was lying when he claimed not to see it isn't clear.
- Exact Words: Daniel mentions being the heroine's childhood friend and that they met in the park, and that someone had left him with her and they played together. While all this is true, he neglects to mention that he was a rabbit and the "someone" was a nurse giving it to the girl, who was a subject of human experimentation.
- Facepalm: Daniel does one in response to the Amnesiac Heroine wanting a medal for remembering his name long after he told her.
- Foreshadowing: Many of the Events and Conversations hint towards the true nature of the dream world.
- The dream world is filled with hospital symbolism, much like .flow, and the chasers are nurses. This represents the hospital where the heroine was experimented on.
- The Tomb event has the heroine look in the basement of the church to find two coffins. Upon seeing them, she walks away, scarred by what she saw. While never confirmed, it is likely that the coffins had her and Daniel inside them.
- The Hospital Director event has a bunch of bunnies in a bloody room occupied by a statue of the Hospital Director. Interacting with the bunnies kills them. This likely represents the Hospital Director being responsible for Daniel's death.
- Daniel playing as a hare during the bonus doll-playing scene/Child's Room Event foreshadows him being a rabbit.
- Completing the Music Labyrinth event gives a picture of the heroine lovingly holding a bunny in her lap. This is a scene from the real world, and the bunny is Daniel.
- The conversations all take place with the characters on both sides of a caged bunny, like Daniel was.
- In one of their conversations, Daniel mentions that the heroine read him children's books. This might seem odd since they are both teens, but not when you consider that Daniel is a rabbit, and pets are often treated like children.
- In that same conversation, the heroine says she will punish Daniel for her mean jokes by withholding carrots from him. Rabbits are often stereotyped as loving carrots.
- During another conversation, the girl outright asks Daniel what it would be like to be a rabbit, to which Daniel responds that he isn't one- which is later revealed as a lie.
- Gangsta Rap: One conversation with Daniel has him break into one of these, with him even calling it a gangsta rap.
- Gratuitous Spanish: The heroine jokingly calls Daniel "Danielo" during some of their conversations.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Daniel has been killing the girl every time she comes too close to realizing the Awful Truth about her past, and every time he does, she reappears in her room having completely forgotten everything, to which he approaches her and agrees to accompany her in trying to recover her memory. Then she gets close to finding it and he kills her again.
- Immortality Immorality: The whole game happened because of the Afterlife Project, an attempt by the Hospital Director to cheat death by creating a dream world where people can live forever- to that end, he conducted experiments on an innocent girl and several animals.
- The Maze:
- The aptly named Doors Labyrinth has doors leading to similar-looking rooms.
- The Syringes Labyrinth is one big room with several paths connecting to other paths.
- The Syringe Maze in turn leads to a first-person maze where you must choose the correct path.
- The Matrix world is of the invisible walls variety.
- The Music Labyrinth is a homogenous variant, with identical rooms and only one of the four exits leading to the right path. The answer for each room is written in the center, but you will need the Glasses effect to see it or it will be too small to read.
- Mirror Scare: In the Hospital, one room has a mirror. If the heroine interacts with it and then turns away, her reflection will stand here for a second before disappearing.
- Multiple Endings: Two, depending on your actions:
- If you just get all the effects, you unlock a door in the center of the nexus, and go through it. At the end, Daniel suddenly kills the girl. The girl then awakens in her room and leaves, having forgotten everything again, and Daniel shows up, saying the same thing he said to her in the beginning, revealing the "Groundhog Day" Loop.
- If you kill all the clones before entering the door, then after Daniel kills you, an extra chapter plays revealing the truth- the girl was a subject in an experiment by a hospital director to use dreams to achieve immortality, and Daniel was a bunny she bonded with who became trapped in her dream when she died and didn't want her to realize the Awful Truth. She comforts him and asks him to move on.
- Number of the Beast: In the red building in the Violent World, tiles are laid out in a 666 manner in the middle of a room.
- Timed Mission: The guillotine room in hell puts you in a jail cell with a blonde man and gives you a 14 second time limit to do something. Subverted as there is nothing you can actually do.
- The Reveal: The true end reveals the truth of the dream world that the girl and Daniel are in. The two of them are dead, and were subjects of experiments by hospital staff to create immortality through a never-ending dream- Daniel was a rabbit in life who bonded with the girl only to die. He has been killing her when she finds out the truth because he doesn't want her to leave him.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: The first-person maze must be navigated in first-person as, instead of moving with the keyboard, you are asked if you want to go left, right, up, or down and must choose.
