There are so many unique animations that you’ll see just once and so many sound effects or musical phrases that pop up from the soil of Omori’s vast soundtrack, like a jubilant sunflower or doomsaying earthworm, then wriggle back away again, forever. It’s a lovely, clever detail in a game so thematically concerned with nostalgia.
Later, Omori will use similar tricks to traumatise you. There are great moments of subtle comedy that rely on the player’s experience with other games, but not out of parody – these aren’t references, they’re riffs on design language that use your own familiarity to toy with you. Whatever it needs to best create a scene, convey a feeling, or just surprise and delight the player with some unexpected glitch in its established rules.
It’s patchwork in the way it constantly introduces new twists on its animation, UI, art style, audio, or combat. Omori casts a melancholy shadow over its brighter moments, even as it maintains hopefulness in its worst.Ĭonsistent through all of this is an imagination and care that makes so much of Omori feel handcrafted. You’re in them after all, being yourself, and ruining everything. Something often unspoken about self doubt is how it taints all your good memories. You’ll spend most of your time in the brighter moments, even if you’ll never quite shake the feeling of unease. Omori is about trauma, but it’s also about escape, recovery, reconciliation, and friendship. The game is interwoven with strings of existentialism, but those threads are part of a big, comfy, colourful sweater of an RPG, albeit one spattered with pizza-sauce stains of impending dread.
Omori is often about fear, but you can ignore the ‘Horror’ and ‘Psychological Horror’ tags on Steam. Alone, dashing between mirrors that keep blinking out of reality, and surprising myself with fleeting, shocking proof of my own fading presence in a world I half knew wasn’t real anymore. All is warm laughter, sung in the stream-of-consciousness hangout humour that the game will continue to do so well. In the opening hours, I play Hide and Seek with Omori’s friends in the park, getting to know every name and quirk.
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