At the end of October’s contest, one of the winners selected the review prize and asked me to play and review Omori.
Omori is an RPG where you start as a boy named Omori in a strange, white area and leave through a door into a colorful fantasy world where his friends are waiting for him.
When one of their friends disappears, they set out on a journey to find him.
…At least, that’s part of the story. That’s not a particularly accurate explanation of what the game is about, but it would be hard to say anything else without spoilers. So for the spoiler-free parts of this review, I’ll try to focus more on other aspects of the game.
As an RPG, it features a turn-based combat system in which emotions play a role. Certain moves and items can change the emotional state of your party members or of enemies.
At first I worried this would get confusing, but it really just means there’s a rock-paper-scissors approach to which emotional state you want to be in. For regular encounters, I usually didn’t worry about it at all.
There are also lots of side quests, wacky characters, and secrets to find. Before I played Omori, I’d gotten the impression from things I heard that it was a depressing game, but it actually has a lot of humor. It also loves wordplay, like having a dessert-themed desert. A good portion of the game is actually pretty lighthearted.
Those warnings didn’t come from nowhere, however. While it might be lighthearted at times, Omori deals with much heavier themes than you might expect at first glance. It has some fairly upsetting moments, as well as segments that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror game. There are definite psychological horror elements despite how it looks.
I enjoyed both the humor and horror, and I also had fun exploring and doing side quests. The story, I have mixed feelings on for reasons that don’t actually deal with major spoilers, but I’ll spoiler-tag them anyway.
Click for Omori spoilers
In particular, once I played the first real-world section – which was a fun surprise; I’d already figured the other parts were taking place in some sort of imaginary world, but I didn’t expect the real-world parts to be playable – I found it hard to stay invested in the story outside of that. I had trouble being compelled by the search for Basil in Headspace when I knew the events in the real world were what mattered more.
I appreciated Headspace for its symbolic meanings and some emotional moments, and I had fun because of the humor and dialogue, but I found myself not having as much of an attachment to the story there.
Which might be an odd perspective when it’s all a fictional story I’m experiencing by playing the game, but it still affected how I viewed things.
The adventure in Headspace also felt like it didn’t go anywhere. That also decreased my investment in it, and to some degree I feel like that’s an intentional effect, since it makes sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that I had entire swathes of the game where I was having fun with battles and side quests and humor but feeling barely any engagement with the story and characters even though they’re the same characters I was invested in outside of Headspace.
(I know there’s an alternate route in which you never leave your room as Sunny, and I wonder if that route would have made me more invested in the Headspace story since I wouldn’t be as aware of it not being “real” or if I would have even less feeling for it.)
To some degree it feels like two games, and my feelings toward each are different, which makes it harder for me to talk about the game as a whole.
Anyway, I was very interested in the main story and its characters, and the final section had me hooked. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll go back to see other endings, although I intend to at least look up the game’s alternate route sometime.
Omori is definitely an interesting experience. For me, it’s also a somewhat disjointed one. It’s a game that’s sometimes a lighthearted, funny adventure, and other times is a more serious story with horror elements. The RPG elements are fun, and there are a lot of interesting secrets. If my thoughts seem like they’re all over the place, it’s because I’m still trying to get a good grasp on how I feel toward a game that has aspects that all feel so different from one another. Even so, I’d say it’s worth playing to see for yourself!
Last month, Golf Story successor Sports Story finally got a release window after years of silence.
