Nidana

About

Nidana is a single player simulation game with a horror theme. It was developed by lvl374 and was released on July 27, 2025. It received positive reviews from players.

She continues to dream. A first-person dream simulator where you explore a corner of a dream.

Genres & Tags

Play Modes

Single-Player

Skip User Reviews

87%

Audience ScoreBased on 71 reviews

graphics10 positive mentions

gameplay3 negative mentions

The game features striking, hypnotic, and unique abstract visuals that stand out as a digital art exhibition.
It offers an evocative and immersive atmosphere with a minimalist color scheme and eerie ambient soundtrack, creating a haunting experience.
Short but well-paced walking simulator with occasional light puzzles, appealing especially to fans of avant-garde or conceptual art and surreal experiences.

The gameplay is very minimal, primarily walking with few meaningful puzzles or interactions, which may cause boredom or frustration.
Visual effects such as flickering, lack of anti-aliasing, and high contrast black and white patterns can cause eyestrain, headaches, and may be unsuitable for photosensitive players.
Technical issues including poor optimization on some systems, frame rate drops, and lack of mouse lock in multi-monitor setups detract from the experience.

graphics
37 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
27%
65%
8%
The game features a striking, psychedelic black-and-white art style with surreal, abstract visuals that evoke a trippy, liminal space atmosphere, praised for its originality and immersive spatial artworks. While the graphics are consistently impressive and visually satisfying, some find the environments repetitive and lacking in polish, which may cause the visual appeal to diminish over time. Overall, it offers a unique, museum-like experience best appreciated by those with an interest in experimental art and spatial aesthetics.
- “Nidana is an art project and walking simulator that features abstract visuals resembling an LSD trip on top of another LSD trip.”
- “The visuals are a loose liminal black-and-white art style, emphasizing stairways, cubes, and spherical meshed objects aggressively rotated.”
- “Super clean and awe-inducing visuals that are utterly gorgeous.”
- “Coupled with the samey visuals, it can start to stagnate surprisingly quickly as you meander through mostly empty environments with not all that much different to look at after the first two or three areas.”
- “This game offers nothing besides some pretty one-note visuals.”
- “It doesn't really try to tell a story, and the graphics and environment, its only real selling point, are interesting at first but grow old quickly.”
music
10 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
40%
30%
30%
User opinions on the game's music are mixed: while some praise its eerie and atmospheric qualities that enhance the ambiance, others find the soundtrack repetitive, monotonous, and lacking meaningful progression or interactivity. Overall, the music contributes unevenly to the experience, with occasional moments of engaging audio overshadowed by extended, one-note ambient noise.
- “Not exactly what I'd call horror, but the excellent and eerie soundtrack and impermanent world definitely gave it a somewhat creepy atmosphere.”
- “Great ambiance and atmospheric soundtrack.”
- “The game itself shows that off extremely well, not to mention its ambient soundtrack which fits it perfectly.”
- “Soundtrack is very repetitive, not much of a gameplay or interactivity, too long for its own good, especially with all the walking around and frustratingly not understanding half of the objectives.”
- “Additionally, the soundtrack itself is also very one-note and more of a white noise that doesn't contribute much to the atmospherics of your environment.”
- “All this backed by a nauseatingly mediocre soundtrack that never evolves, punctuated by synth_bleep_with_reverb 1 through 3, and a helping of white_noise.”
story
9 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
33%
34%
33%
The game's story is minimalistic and ambiguous, often described as aimless or dreamlike, lacking clear plot or character development. While some appreciate the visual storytelling and atmosphere, many find the narrative hollow, confusing, or elusive, making it feel more like an abstract experience or tech-demo than a traditional game with a coherent story.
- “Loved the visuals and the story that I want to think I kinda got it.”
- “Later part of the title is much more distressing, and surprisingly - not using the puzzles, it doesn't really surprise you this way, but with the visual storytelling it provides.”
- “This 'game' kind of just doesn't go anywhere, there are a couple of things which are barely even puzzles, but mostly you just walk around, which is fine, if the environment or story it told were good.”
- “There also isn't really an attempt to tell any sort of story with the main character that you have to endlessly chase until the end of the playthrough - arguably it does resemble a dream where very little makes sense, but it also feels a bit hollow and overall comes across more like a tech-demo disguised as a game.”
- “If this game wants you to feel like you're just stuck in this world going around aimlessly conveying a story with every achievement system... I would say it falls flat.”
- “It doesn't really try to tell a story, and the graphics and environment, its only real selling point, are interesting at first, but grow old quickly.”
atmosphere
7 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
57%
43%
The game's atmosphere is generally praised for its unique, eerie, and haunting qualities, enhanced by a psychedelic and minimalist art style. However, some users find the soundtrack repetitive and less effective in contributing to the overall mood. Overall, the ambiance is considered a strong and distinctive aspect of the experience.
- “This game is very unique, with great atmosphere and visuals.”
- “The psychedelic yet minimalist art style is mind-bending, and the light environmental puzzles tied in perfectly with the atmosphere.”
- “I found the atmosphere incredibly haunting.”
optimization
7 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
43%
14%
43%
Optimization is generally poor, with some users noting disastrous performance issues and lack of features like anti-aliasing, though others report smooth gameplay possibly aided by driver or GPU factors. Compared to similar titles, this game lacks the refined optimization and rendering quality that could enhance the overall experience.
- “Performance is great, ultrawide support is good though I wish there was an FOV slider.”
- “Also, I'm running it through Proton (9.0.4) on Linux, so there might be more overhead, or maybe there are GPU optimizations and driver improvements that make it a very smooth experience.”
- “Manifold Garden has a lot of similarities in how pronounced the lines and shapes feel with the more flat plane-centric approach to 3D geometry, but that game has a lot more care put into the optimization as well as rendering of the game itself.”
- “The optimization is disastrously bad.”
- “Poor optimization and lack of anti-aliasing.”
- “This game really just misses the high quality performance and tech behind Manifold Garden to elevate the experience further.”
gameplay
5 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
40%
60%
The gameplay is criticized for being overly lengthy with repetitive visuals, limited interactivity, and unclear objectives, leading to frustration despite some appeal for walking simulator fans. While the game features intriguing trippy visuals and an eerie soundtrack, it lacks the polish, engaging mechanics, and progression seen in similar titles, making the experience less satisfying overall.
- “At least Dark Souls can reward you with good gameplay mechanics when it doesn't hold your hands.”
- “Combines trippy visuals that ride the line between liminal space, cyberpunk, and sacred geometry, with an eerie soundtrack, and gameplay that doesn't overstay its welcome.”
- “Soundtrack is very repetitive, not much gameplay or interactivity, too long for its own good, especially with all the walking around and frustratingly not understanding half of the objectives.”
- “I'm very much a fan of walking sims, so the lack of extra mechanics doesn't bother me, but the same visual tricks in every area are repeated over and over with no build-up, progression, or change simply to pad out a 2-hour runtime.”
- “Unlike Antichamber and Manifold Garden, this game lacks the graphical polish, gameplay feel, and other qualities that make those previous two games very satisfying to play through.”
grinding
1 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
Grinding in the game is widely regarded as tedious, uninspired, and ultimately underwhelming, detracting from the overall experience.