Ami's room is a traditional RPGMaker game that tells the story of a boy, his sister, and his friend. It dabbles in the concepts and mental illnesses like schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and impostor syndrome. (And maybe a hint of DID.)
It's a very short game. You can get through it in less than four hours if you have a knack for puzzles, faster if you focus on the story and use the official walkthrough for puzzles (which I personally had no trouble using). It has an amazing visual style for both the pixel art and the dialogue portraits/digital pieces such as the background and whatnot, and the music/ambient music sets the tone and better helps to elicit the feelings it wants you to feel in the respective sections. It's definitely in my top 10 as far as eerie, empty sounding soundtracks go for the longer, more dreary parts.
The game takes heavy inspiration from Yume Nikki, that or it's just coincidentally very similar. Where this game and Yume Nikki part is Ami's Room has an actual cohesive storyline while also being a decent amount of a walking simulator, whereas with YK there's just no payoff at all. I would wager that there isn't a lot of payoff to Ami's Room either, with mistakes or confusing gameplay mechanics ringing hollow and leaving you feeling dissatisfied at having to reload your save, being frustrated that you didn't save before a point where the game kills you (which, in a few instances, you have no way of knowing) and leaving players confused, sometimes baffled at what to do.
Without spoiling anything, an elaborate math puzzle and one with vestigial locations that you don't have to explore come to mind. You'll be presented with a door that you can step into—or not. There's a random chance for it to lead to one room, another, a third, or simply say "it won't open" when you wander into it. Let's say you get in the first time. Great! You can wander around for a bit. You go back out, and suddenly can't go back in. This says to you that you should look elsewhere, and you do: to no avail. One of the random chance rooms has story-critical content in it if you want to progress the game. Worse off, you can get the same result multiple times in a row. I believe the most times I had to interact with a door to get in was about eight. If it's locked on the first interaction, you think to look for a key, especially if you've found one in the other segments. You'll never find one.
[b]Spoilers from hereon.[/b]
In regards to being symbolic, there was a lot that I had trouble resonating with. Ami suffers from paranoia and schizophrenia and otherwise has the mind of a child. When you play as her in game, the world looks like one big drawing, with the recurring "enemies" or "bad people" that "won't leave Ami alone" being children's depictions of devils or demons. I like this on the one hand, it shows that Ami is very developmentally stunted or never received the proper care to be rid of such a thing, and that she has regressed so heavily that she can't help but see the world in this childish, almost evil delusion.
On the other hand, this is incredibly on the nose. Subtlety is not this game's forte, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. What makes the blatant story cues bad in my opinion is how much time you have in between, how little direction you get, how confusing it all is just to get from point A to B even in the more straightforward scenes. Each of the endings don't feel particularly satisfying, each of them feeling vacant or even meaningless. They don't fill you with emotion or suddenly have everything make sense—it's one big "what just happened?" Followed by: "Why not anything else?" It raises questions that have no answers without a serious dive into what makes the game what it is, and even then the ones you get don't make very much sense or seem hardly relevant.
Ami (Pierre's sibling) died, Pierre is reeling from the trauma, Willow is his friend trying to comfort him. Where in each of the endings is all of this elaborated upon? Why do we need to feel sad about Ami? For Pierre? What about Willow? We get very small, insignificant chunks after another that don't better help us to attach to the characters, and the randomness about everything (as each scenario is a "dream" you have a random chance to start each time you go to bed as Pierre) doesn't lend us any assistance in that respect. It all feels transitory and of little value.
At the same time, it isn't completely unsatisfactory. In a way, all of this works to create and interesting way to perceive all of it, maybe even how it's supposed to be received: confusing, constantly changing, and empty, because that's (in essence) the storyline we see here. The closure we get from the endings is only accomplished after finally figuring out what made us confused in the first place (the puzzles etc.) and it draws a parallel between the player and Pierre in this instance, how not understanding any of this leads to the same problem of constantly dreaming and refusing to leave your room, shutting down socially and mentally until an answer finally appears.
Overall, I feel like Ami's Room could have used more love and careful detailing on its gameplay and story. A slightly less non-sequential take a la Hello Charlotte would be a great start; introduce us to Ami (or Pierre's perception of her) and Willow (ditto), have there be sudden blank spots that leave us wondering what's going on, short moments in the real world where Pierre looks at the door, reaches out for the knob, and then decides to go back to sleep.
Or do the opposite, start with complete nonsense, but work our way up to the understanding, just as we did with the puzzles. Making everything random and just as equally confusing ruins the much-needed buildup and suspense and satisfaction we get from the end of it all, which is great if that's your intention, but I'm unsure if that was the developer's goal behind all of this.
Overall, I recommend Ami's Room. I don't think it should be free, but I don't think it should be super expensive, either. I look forward to trying ujumiru's other games (Cage of Etha, The Doll's Window, and eventually buying May Angels Fall Down) to see how they've improved or how their other plotlines differ. I really, really cannot overstate the art style and sound design again, they are really, really damn good.
