“Am I Nima?” has a genuinely great gimmick that plays upon the horror of implication and interpretation

I just so happened to play the demo of indie psychological horror game, Am I Nima?, and the way it interacts with story and gameplay has far too much potential not to discuss. For those who haven’t heard of it, there’ll be some slight spoilers though most of them will be relegated to general mechanics and light backstory.

Let’s start out with the titular gimmick: think of the game as Infinite Craft meets Who’s Lila?. You start the game with two words at your disposal, Nima and Stranger, but through combining these words (“following trains of thoughts” as the game puts it), you expand the vocabulary used to communicate with others. As a baseline, this is already an extremely unconventional premise with a lot of potential. It sets up some great puzzles and secret interactions which are a great addition to any psychological horror game. Even with that said, though, I didn’t realize the true promise before playing the game for myself.

As any good horror writer will say, the "monster" is most scary when you can't see it (or, in this case, when its implied), and since the “prompts” are single, often conceptual, words, they are rife for interpretation. Playing into this, the combinations are based on our protagonist’s personal connections rather than general knowledge, giving us great insight to our MCs state of mind. For example, I can take Stranger + Nima and get Mom. Literally the first combo you create, and it already implies so much. Primarily that the Mom is an absent parent which automatically gives us an idea of her character and backstory. It also helps that, in-universe, the MC is suffering from memory loss, explaining any strange behavior and adding to the game’s pervasive sense of unease. 

As a more complicated combination: Nima + Grief = Dad. Well, that’s not good. Even further in, the terms grow more abstract and strange: Nima + Swimming = Blood + Rock and Nima + Power turns into… Rebirth? I’ll point out that you can gain all this story without dialogue. Said dialogue, along with interacting with the environment, CAN cause prompts to pop into your head—yet again giving insight into the MC's relationship with the world—but you could genuinely learn most of this from the moment you gain control. It’s a simple matter of getting creative with your thought process.

With that groundwork laid, the story begins to earn its “psychological horror” tag. Nothing I can say will really get across the feeling of combining prompts to reveal words like Homicide, Pills, or Cut. It’s such a unique dread that most horror games fail to inspire… and that’s only the combination aspect of the game. 

The other main mechanic, dialogue, is similarly harrowing at points. You don’t construct sentences. Rather, you give the MC a prompt and they extrapolate from there. It’s completely valid to play along and (try to) act normal, but there’s nothing stopping you from calling a rock a shark (an actual example).

There’s very little guidance outside of context clues, so I was surprised when Pain was a usable prompt when speaking to Mom. I did just that though, and a real chill ran up my spine when the prompt inspired the response of, “You hurt me.” It’s so out of left field that it left me reeling for a moment. Another of my favorites is randomly inputting the MC’s name to trigger the question of “Am I Nima?” (ha, she said the thing).

All in all, this game has such a unique sense of horror, and it’s been a long while since a demo has gotten me this excited. I pray that the devs make use of the immense potential here, but I’m very hopeful so far.