Dec 212022
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.
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!
The early-game surprise you mentioned in the spoiler section was one of my favorite moments! I had tried to avoid learning too much about the game beforehand, and that twist (at the end of a very long epilogue) felt very satisfying to me.
I agree with what you said about the two main parts of the game in this section. In some ways, it feels like half-RPG, half-Adventure game. I view the RPG parts as an exploration of the main character himself and his psychology, since he is so expressionless and hides his emotions and feelings so much in the rest of the game.
Yes, that makes sense, and I do feel those parts worked well symbolically, it just created a sort of odd disconnect for me.
Merry Christmas. 🙂 I mostly just wanted to say that, but the game looks interesting.
Thanks! Merry Christmas to you, too. It’s definitely an interesting game.
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