[Vidya Gaems] Am I Nima Demo Impressions

Spoiler disclosure: Did my best to spoil as little as possible in this article. I'll go over the first character interaction and honestly very little outside of that. Consider this mostly spoiler free :^3

I usually do my best to play as many Steam Nextfest demos as possible but I was a little late to the party this time! Thankfully this year plenty of the demos didn't go away after Nextfest ended! Playing them after the fact felt like leaving up my Halloween decorations in November, which is exactly what I do so it's very fitting. =^)

One such demo I played really captivated me! Every Nextfest demo I've played so far has been enjoyable, but the game Am I Nima by HO! Games was one of those experiences that reinvigorated why I love this medium so much. My enthusiasm for cool new games is something that refuses to drown in the ocean of "gaming is just not the same anymore, man" YouTube recommendations. And that is especially true when cool shit like this continues to make me excited pretty regularly.

A young girl in a very cartoonish rounded art style is looking into a mirror and smiling

The atmosphere and vibe this game exuded from the screenshots alone had me intrigued. The color palette of the 3D environments reminded me a bit of the Gameboy camera. It feels nostalgic but a little off and unsettling, like the finer details of the world you're dropped into are obscured, bathed in a not quite greyscale light. I try to go into most narrative experiences with as little foreknowledge as possible, so all I knew going in was what I could briefly absorb in the screenshots, and the tagline from the steam page which reads "Am I Nima is a psychological-horror game where you must convince your mom that you really are her daughter. Combine words together in your brain and use them to talk. Get her to trust you."

A child's bedroom full of posters of marine mammals and penguins, as well as an unmade bed and with a stuffed animal on top. There is a bedside table, desk, and bookshelf in this room as well as a child's drawing of two people holding hands hung up on the door. Everything is lit in a sort of green monochrome lighting.

The "convince your mom that you really are her daughter" and "get her to trust you" parts of that had me already so curious. ARE we really her daughter? Are we hiding something from her? Is she hiding something from us? Can we be trusted? Can SHE be trusted? Once a game's basic premise has me asking all these questions I should already know it has me in its grasp.

Then the opening had me in an even tighter grasp! A voice in the darkness seems surprised that something "worked" and that we're breathing. Then we wake up tied to a chair in a basement with a disheveled figure shrouded in darkness staring at us. Again I'm flooded with questions in my mind that I NEED answers to and am absolutely reveling in the unsettling creeping atmosphere.

This is where we're introduced to the core mechanic of the game. To the right side of the screen is our character Nima's brain, which is initially populated with two words, "Nima" and "Stranger". We're told to combine these words in our mind together and as a result we get a new word, "Mom". All of the words we've obtained are now stored in the left side of the screen. There is a search function for when you get too many words that I didn't notice until halfway through my playthrough, and a series of categories you can sort the words into that I didn't notice until I put the screenshots in this article. =^) We take the word "Mom" and place it in the little outline of Nima under her brain, and it gives us dialogue relating to the word.

A screenshot of the game Am I Nima during a story interaction. It shows a list of words on the left side of the screen, a picture of a brain on the right side with a few words scattered within, and a silhouette of the protagonist Nima under the brain. In the center of the screen is an older woman looking a bit disheveled staring towards the player character across a table while a bowl of rice porridge (congee) with a fishbone sticking out of it sits on the table.

This is the fundamental gameplay loop and the way that this story unfolds. Later on you'll get to explore around Nima's room, interacting with and examining objects that trigger the creation of new words for you to combine. Combine the right words for some very interesting dialogue options in the next character interaction.

There is an incredibly unsettling tension in every scene. Why has this woman tied up her daughter? Why does she need to "test" us to make sure we really are her daughter? Nima's inner voice consistently chimes in to let us know we need to play along, and that she isn't to be trusted. Are we to be trusted? We don't even seem to know who we are. Are we really Nima or are we playing the role? Are we justified in deceiving her?

At a base level, the narrative established does it's job perfectly. I was LOCKED IN and my brain was going a mile a minute with the addition of every new detail. This is in addition to the incredible art direction, eerie atmosphere, and a strong sense of tension in the writing that had me feeling on edge for the entire experience. But the place where this game truly shines the most is in the WAY that the narrative unfolds through the mechanic of combining your keywords.

This screenshot of the game depicts the disheveled mother character peering into the room from a hallway that is barely lit. Her gaunt face is just barely illuminated by green light in a few places and she is looking down towards us.

One of the reasons that the story of a game like Dark Souls is so incredible to me is that it takes advantage of the interactivity of games in a way that non interactive mediums just can't. I don't hate games that take a more cinematic slant, but I will always gravitate a bit more towards a story-driven game that DOES take advantage of that in a fun way. And that is exactly why I fucked with this game so hard.

A movie's narrative is like an amusement park ride that you're strapped into and you experience on a track the same way as everyone else. But the way the narrative unfolds in Am I Nima is more like an escape room. You're thrown into this environment you know nothing about and have to piece together your way through the experience by examining everything in the room. And along the way, you might pick up on details others didn't, you might FIND things in the room others didn't. You might open locked boxes in the room that other players didn't and find some really neat hidden details. ;^3

Combining the words "Mom" and "Happy" gives you "Work". From this alone you get a little bit more of an idea what the mother character is like. Work makes her happy, and combining those words didn't give us ANYTHING else. This means to Nima at least, that work is the ONLY thing that makes her mother happy. I didn't exactly need that context clue to tell that the mother might be a little neglectful, she has her daughter tied to a chair in the basement for Christ's sake.

A grainy screenshot of the game depicting the disheveled mother character holding a knife and peering down at us. The lighting in this screenshot is a bit different from the others. Instead of a green light it's a sort of very light orange lighting.

But holy shit how cool was it that even before the dialogue in game tells us the mother was a workaholic we were able to intuit that ourselves through the way WE interacted with the game? It might seem so simple, but that on its own made me want to write this article. It's little simple things like that which fill me with a sense of "goddamn video games are cool".

I refuse to spoil anything further because I believe you should experience this game yourself, but there were so many more awesome little moments like that in the demo. There was a point where it let you examine Nima's room and just combine words before the next story interaction. Sitting there on stream with chat suggesting words to combine, all of our imaginations stirring, getting the input of how multiple people interpret why words combined the way they did was incredible.

What I'm trying to say in this fucking long winded but still short thing I wrote on my website, is that Am I Nima is really something special, telling an extremely gripping narrative in a way that only a video game can. Goddamn video games are cool! Please play this one!

I hope I'll get the chance to stream a few more demos, but this vod (shameless self promo) shows my first impressions of the following demos: Demon Tides, Nekomancer of Nowhere, Kero Quest 64, and (of course) Am I Nima. I am looking forward to this game so much and will be forever glued to whatever these developers work on. Wishlist Am I Nima on Steam here, check out my live streams here, and if you enjoy what I do, please consider donating on my Ko-Fi page here. Donations are not expected or required, but they do help while I'm unemployed =^) Honestly I'm just happy that you even read my silly website and got this far down the article! =^D