It’s a little slow, but it’s very playable. This, alongside multiple endings and secrets, can easily fill out an 18 hour story into a forty hour place to just hang. A Tamagotchi/Pokemon game where you challenge other kid’s ‘Pet Rocks’.

A pizza delivery dayjob that has you trying to decipher skittish pencil scrawls to find the correct addresses. Minigames are scattered throughout the world, too. In combat, an elemental triangle of emotions act as both magic and status effects. Exploration is draped in a light metroidvania form, where every fear Omori’s friends help him overcome opens up more of the world. Someone dredged up a lifetime of memory, precious and awful, to write this.Īll this might suggest a flipbook of disparate set pieces, but there’s a solid, crunchy RPG with some vast, puzzle-filled dungeons and chapter-spanning side quests here as well. Someone stayed up late for years animating this. Someone sat at their synths and composed this.

One that constantly had me thinking that, heck, someone drew this. All games are made by people, but Omori has the kind of DIY fingerprints of a hand-labelled CD from your favourite punk band like no other recent game I can remember. None of us should, but it’s tragically easy to forget until another report of crunch at studio X gets dropped into our laps. I shouldn’t need such reminders that games are made by people. I found myself suitably awed when I realised that there’s a different picture for each friend tagging each other friend. You reach one such puzzle, tag a friend in, and a hand-drawn Polaroid flashes up. Early on, you’ll gain the ability to switch party leaders, with each friend having different tools for solving environmental puzzles. 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.

Omori poster