A Night With Nophenia
This piece is split into two parts. The first is a short, cleaned-up version of the transcript I made while wandering through Nophenia for nearly three-plus hours. The second is where I look back on those notes and try to figure out what it all adds up to.
If you're only here for the second half, you can scroll straight to Part II - Connection Established. (Cowards.)
Part I - The Exploration of Unending Dreams
12:30 AM
Nophenia is a 3D dream explorer in the Yume Nikki lineage, and it had been out for only a few weeks when I opened it last night. That session lasted about half an hour, and like any other dream explorer, there wasn’t much to do other than soak in the vibes. Still, there was a nagging feeling that there was more to this game than I initially assumed, and so, here I am today at the perfect time for a replay. I’ll open a transcription tool and just record my raw thoughts as I go through this game, trying to see if it has a story or, at the very least, something I previously missed.
12:41 AM
The game starts you out in an ordinary bedroom. I say ordinary, but the first thing you’ll probably notice is the countless, kind-of-weird-looking drawings thrown on the ground. Other things are there too, a closet, an electric guitar, a TV, a cupboard, and a computer. But the drawings will probably catch your eye first. Oh, and there’s a boarded-up door that you use to enter the “dream world.”
12:47 AM
The first level in the game is always the same: a train station. But that’s not important. What’s important is the thing you immediately ritualise in this game, pressing the escape button to check your keitai (flip phone). It becomes, almost immediately, the most important object in the game for you, as it isn’t simply a way for you to press pause or check the in-game options. It also functions as a story-feeder. As you move through the levels, the phone accumulates one wallpaper at a time, and its information page (credits) (manifesto) switches its character count between 698, 699, and 4 characters. Tucked into the very bottom of it is also a short dedication: something about a person named Charlotte, with the name "BurntFishie” in parentheses. The word BurntFishie is also hyperlinked to a suicide prevention helpline. I don’t think much of it for now. It’s important to check this phone as you move through the levels. It gives, if I’m correct based on my previous session, messages that add to the experience.
01:00 AM
I’m going through a level called the Gutter, and it’s certainly a very “gutter-like” level for sure. Green hues, water going somewhere, drainage pipes, some even larger than a truck. You can catch glimpses of the outside world, coloured in an apocalyptic red. There are also metal gratings, side bars, platforms, bridges coloured red, all reminding me of Silent Hill 1’s otherworld. Interestingly, this Gutter also has an apartment complex, and you can see slight hints of life through the occasionally lit windows.
I move a little farther and notice a noose hanging from one of the pipes. I take its picture - did I mention this game has a really cool camera feature?
01:20 AM
I’m stuck in a level called Digital Nurture now, unable to find the exit in this dark space, and I notice that my character always seems to glance somewhere when I’m walking around, at nothing that I can see. It feels very real, as though she has some autonomy of her own, opinions about these places that I was only visiting. The way out, amusingly, came from simply following a trail of confetti leaves that were kept dropping from the brilliantly lit confetti tree in the middle of the level.
01:35 AM
I come across my favourite level from the previous session. A whole field of spider lilies, red and shining even against the blood-spattered ground. The distant moon watches my every move, and a quiet piano cue is the only soundtrack accompanying me. There’s nothing else here, but I could literally spend the rest of my life just sitting here doing absolutely nothing. It is breathtaking. It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in a game all year long.
02:00 AM
Shit, I’m already feeling tired and sleepy. The last half hour was a blurred mess, levels going by faster than I could log them. A market district revealing a miniature Kowloon. A snow-covered field with a stack of hospital monitors and a river of blood. A highway with a red umbrella lying in the middle of it. An eye-test level called Vision with a mountain-sized megaphone I wasn’t allowed to scale, much to my displeasure. A swimming pool based on that one liminal space photo we all know. For a dream explorer, though, it’s strange how so many of these levels share a somewhat domestic vocabulary. Apartments, parks, garages, train platforms, suburban streets, a field of flowers. Despite their rarity, all of them feel like places where somebody could actually have lived.
02:15 AM
I am making my way through a Windows 98 screensaver maze when I remember that I should check my phone.
The first message is finally here.
You took our lives.
Gone as soon as I closed the screen.
02:26 AM
The next one arrived.
You killed us both.
It came right as my notion that this dream explorer was mundane was destroyed, by the way. I stepped into a level called time, standing atop a wall clock in a massive skybox, with more wall clocks receding in every direction. One unblinking eye, like one of those biblically accurate angels, judging my every move. I’m supposed to do some platforming now, I think, so I start running and jumping from one clock to the next, unsure of where to go or what the exit is. I trip and fall. On the way down into nothingness, my character’s head comes apart, showing the bare wireframe of the character model underneath.
02:30 AM
I am in a parking lot when another text arrives.
You killed her.
I’m getting the hang of these ominous texts already. I am more surprised by how my character keeps asserting her will through small, meaningful actions. She refuses to take certain exits outright - just shakes her head and stands there. She physically flinches at the sight of the bloodstained doors - or maybe that’s my sleepiness playing tricks on me. I don’t know. It felt…as if she had feelings about these places that predated mine.
03:00 AM
The imagery within the levels has been escalating now. I went through a Minecraft-style level featuring a small house, a maze of garages with a chained bed hanging from a tree in the middle of it, a sunflower field that reminded me of Boku No Natsuyasumi’s summer, an empty field with, uh, a giant eldritch gloopy octopus behind the treeline, a giant chessboard where the pieces seen from a distance resolved into the silhouette of a person. More of the game playing tricks on me.
A house shaped like a strawberry, no, it was a strawberry, sitting in a level straight out of Mario 64. An underwater level called Depths with a striking image - a piano covered in algae and green, sunken at the bottom of the ocean, still playing itself when you get close to it. I also realise that I have been playing for far longer than I anticipated. My previous session, before I got booted back to the start screen, was only 20-something levels long and about half an hour in total. It’s about to be three hours now. I’m so fucking done and tired.
03:01 AM
I’ve reached the Snowy Quarters, and I am sitting on a swing set. A tree stands tall in front of me, with a noose hanging from one of its branches. I sit and stare at it. I check my phone, waiting for some more accusatory texts. There’s nothing. I feel alone. Maybe I’m just emotionally drained at this point, but something about this level almost makes me tear up. I sit only for a few minutes, but it feels like an eternity.
03:15 AM
I’m still at the Snowy quarters, and after some searching, I found the exit.
Huh?
The game has booted me back to the start screen. But why? I was waiting for the final two levels to show up from my last session. A hellish level I cannot describe called ??? followed by a foggy dead-end. Why am I at the start screen now?
I start the game again, and I’m back in the bedroom. Nothing here has changed, so I’m just going to take the exit. Hopefully it’s no longer the train station.
03:16 AM
I’m no longer at the train station. I am in a train car now, almost as if I’ve finally been allowed inside the train I’d previously missed. Fish of every kind drift past me, and white flowers blanket its windows. Electronics, photographs, and encased butterflies are strewn about the place, even things from my bedroom. Despite my use of the word strewn, all of it feels oddly kept.
03:17 AM
Moving a little, I see a white figure at the far end of the carriage. I try to photograph her from afar, but obviously enough, the camera wouldn’t take the shot. So I took a screenshot from my PC and walked towards her. When I reached my destination, the screen was enveloped in white light, and after it, I saw my character lying in her lap, resting peacefully. No words are spoken, but it felt cathartic seeing this, as if she, too, had grown tired alongside me searching for something, and at the very least, she found something. This screen is accompanied by "to be continued.” Maybe this game was a demo for something bigger? Who knows.
03:18 AM
I am once again in the train car, and the girl is gone. I check my phone one more time, mostly out of habit at this point. Three straight hours of “no signal” or ominous messages have trained me not to expect anything else. But this time, the phone said, "Connection established.”
??:?? AM
I’m frankly not sure how long I stayed in the car. I keep checking corners to see if something is still waiting for me. Nothing was. My character refused the exits, and the exits themselves seemed to loop back on themselves. I didn’t want to leave yet, but eventually I did.
That’s where the night ended. I looked up who BurntFishie was and went to bed soon after, ignoring my transcription. I think the sun was coming out, but I didn’t bother to notice. I just didn’t care.
Part II - Connection Established
When I look back on the three hours spent with this game and the 11,000-word-long transcript that came out of it, I think I found something here. But to give it shape, to understand it, I need to talk about the phone first. It’s weird how, when I first began playing this game, I thought of the Keitai as nothing more than just narrative dressing. But, as I said in the previous part, you form a habit, a ritual of checking it at every level. Check it, find nothing, check it again in the next level anyway. I did that for every level, multiple times even. Most of us who have experienced loss know this feeling. You keep checking your phone out of habit, not because you expect anything new, but because some part of you keeps hoping anyway, hoping for something unnamable almost.
I’m not sure if the game intended that sort of reading out of this, but by the time I was in the train car and found myself checking the phone again and again and again and again, even after the “Connection Established” message, this is what came out. The imagery of many levels has clear pointers to death, grief, and guilt: blood, nooses, hospital monitors, spider lilies, a chained bed, with allusions to memory, ordinary places, nature, cameras, CRTs, and the phone’s slowly filling wallpapers.
When I start thinking of grief, memory, and guilt, I also start thinking about the messages that keep popping up. They never really felt like they were coming from someone else. It felt as though they were our character’s own thoughts. Thoughts that she kept wrestling with while searching for something within the dreamscape. It feels more real because of the slight hints of autonomy the game gives her. She knows something we don’t. She has a past we are not privy to, she refuses certain exits, and she looks over her shoulder every now and then at seemingly nothing.
When my character finally entered the train car and came across the ghost, the person she was probably searching for all night long, I didn’t really brace myself for answers then. The ghost didn’t speak either, she never even accused me of anything. She simply waits for us to approach her, and when we do, she pulls our head onto her lap. There was never supposed to be any guilt, no punishment awaiting me. Just stillness and sadness for what’s lost. I think a lot of games forget that explanation and resolution aren’t the same thing, and you can have one without the other and still feel complete. This one does not forget that, and I felt happy about it.
It’s interesting, the message that showed up at the very end of the game on our phone. Connection Established. It only appeared on my phone after the embrace, after endless wandering, after facing the countless self-accusations, after complete and utter exhaustion of the soul, and after finally meeting the one in whose arms we can rest. The wording never suggests that we solved some mystery, it only suggests that a connection, a relationship, that was long gone has now been formed yet again. All night, what my Wolfgirl was searching for, perhaps, was simply a missing connection.
Going through my transcript, I find my own behaviour throughout the game quite amusing too. When I first started, my thoughts were very clinical, and I left remarks that read like critiques of everything I came across. But by the second hour, as sleep started to take hold of me, most of that disappeared, replaced by simple descriptions and just soaking in the vibes. I just stopped trying to solve the game's story, I think, as I discovered that it had a lot more waiting for me than just a few dreams.
Then, my pitiful self at the end of the game. Everything was said and done, my character had found the resolution she was looking for, I got the message on my phone I needed, and yet, even after all that, I stayed in the train car, searching every nook and cranny, looking for an exit, some continuation, checking my phone again and again and again to see if something else shows up.
Nothing ever does. It’s not supposed to.
I think I should have read more into "To Be Continued” than I initially did. Scratched into the train’s walls above the text were tally marks. You use them to count days while waiting and enduring for something. The message, at first, looks like a hook. More content, maybe a sequel, maybe some hidden levels waiting for me. But I guess, for me at least and now that I've cleared my head, it reads as something else.
Life continues. Grief continues. Love continues.
With all that said, I clearly went into this game the second time expecting to solve something, and I came out not needing to anymore. Again, completion and wholeness, it turns out, aren’t the same thing. Nophenia never gave me the first one, not really at least, and now, as I write this, I’ve stopped minding that. I'm sure there is more to this game, and it will require another run. I never did find out where those last two levels, “???” and “Fog”, went either. But, somehow, for the first time with a dream explorer, I’m okay with leaving it unexcavated for now. When I'll look back on this game, days later, years later maybe, I’ll only remember the image of lying in a ghost’s arms and two words that found their way into my three hours of playing the game only at the very end.
Connection Established.
For Charlotte
Charlotte, BurntFishie for the people who knew her that way, was a real person. A trans kid, seventeen years old, who loved many things, and was still engaging with them till the very end, on the last day of her life. Last year, around this season, the world lost her, maybe in part due to the cruelty of people hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. Too early. She was just a kid who had her whole life ahead of her. Somewhere down the line, lane, the developer of this game, made Nophenia and, in a small corner of it, folded her name in there.
I want to be careful here and warn even those who play this game in the future that it's easy to let this single fact swallow everything else in the game. Everything being read as specifically about her. I don’t think that’s okay, and I don’t think the game asks that of anyone either. Nophenia, for me, is a game that talks about grief, yes, but it doesn’t insist on whose grief it is. It only remembers one specific person by name, separately and quietly. These two different gestures, sitting side by side, should not be submerged into one.
Whatever you read into the ghost, the wolfgirl, the embrace on the train belongs to the game’s fiction. It’s not a reading of Charlotte or the people who loved her. She’s simply someone the game chose to remember in a single sentence that need not explain itself further. I only know her name and a few things she loved because someone decided that her name was worth keeping in a game. I’d rather end here, knowing that much and knowing it’s true, than have finished Nophenia without ever learning it.
To lane: I do not know you or how you know Charlotte, but I hope you realise that you’ve made a wonderful game in Nophenia, and that at least one more person will keep Charlotte alive in his memory. I hope you continue to make even more such brilliant works in the future.
So, for Charlotte, for BurntFishie.
One final thing
Hi. If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading! Like many dream explorers, Nophenia, I think, does have a certain degree of randomness built into its structure. The places I found, the order I found them in, and even the things I saw may not match someone else’s experience. This…thing I wrote wasn’t meant to be a definitive reading of Nophenia, only an account of one night spent wandering through it. If you decide to play it for yourself, and I hope you do, I hope you come away with your own observations and readings, or lack of them.