Oh OMORI! What a well crafted game. I fully intended to write a "first hour" review, but I couldn't have written it honestly since I got sucked into playing over three hours before I bothered to check the time.
OMORI is a beautiful game. Kickstarted in 2014 and released in 2020, the years of development really show. The art and sound, animations, characters and story are made painstakingly with love.
Come for the cute pixel graphics and hand drawn battles, stay for the emotions evoked from you as you puzzle together the memories of trauma and anxiety, and root for the emotional salvation of the children.
OMORI pieces together tropes from games and stories about dark emotion like fear, anxiety, and repression. But it does so in a fresh way that just works. You teeter between a whimsical, playful world of playgrounds and imaginary friends to cold headspace full of nothingness, to the real world with unresolved issues. You teeter between the suburbian afternoon with children, riding bikes to the hobby shop and struggling with oppressive guilt driving toward suicide. And it works.
The game is not without its faults however. This is going to sound more harsh than I mean it, in the context of a video game. OMORI is not fun. And that's ok. Some powerful films are not fun. Viewing the Mona Lisa or the Terracotta Warriors is not fun. These things are enjoyable though, awe inspring, and worth it.
That said, this is a video game, and we expect them to be fun. I don't want to get into the Are video games art? debate, but I do want make a point assuming video games as an art form.
If we assume "video games == art", then they have to be one of the most, if not the most inaccessible art form. Could someone who has never played a video game or even someone who has never played a 2D RPG pick up OMORI and really appreciate it? I doubt it. I doubt they would even finish the game.
I thought about how I could sum up OMORI's faults and I landed on this phrase: "It's too much work". If you don't agree, you probably haven't played long enough to place the photos.
That said, it was worth it. I enjoyed it. I recommend it. I will remember it and I will ponder it. But I'm not going to replay it and do all the side quests and collections. Sorry.
Ok, let's break it down.
Battle
This is a weakness of OMORI. The hand drawn art is the best part of battle. Battle is fairly typical menu selection. You have Attack, Actions, and Items. Actions have interesting descriptions but in reality you will find the best one or two for each character and spam them.
There is an emotion mechanic that is kind of like elemental weaknesses. Sad beats Happy, Happy beats Angry, Angry beats Sad. There are other effects but generally you just keep Sad off the enemies and ignore the rest. Don't hear me wrong, you can do a lot more, you just don't need to.
Ultimately, I think my issue with battle is that the boss fights are so interesting but every other battle is a chore. This mostly has to do with another battle mechanic that I dug even though it needs some iteration to truly shine. That is the Teamwork. Your team earns Team points for being hit and can perform extra actions when it is a characters turn. On a character's turn, you have a few seconds to optionally select a skill at the cost of team points. Each character has three different skills to select that fit their battle style. The main character has an ultimate attack which is quite powerful. So much so, that my strategy on most bosses was to stay alive and chip at boss health while charging to the ultimate attack as often as possible.
I would like to see this mechanic iterated on in other games. It adds a pretty cool real time aspect to the turn based system. It's mostly uninteresting outside of boss battles though. (Originally I wrote "useless" instead of uninteresting, but that's not true. It's at least and extra attack in the first round of every fight. That's definitely useful. It's just uninteresting.)
Art and Sound
Five stars! Six stars! How high can I go? The mix of cute, whimsical pixel art and hand drawn, sometimes exciting, sometimes creepy art is superb. It's like a science experiement where you mix oils and they sort of blend together to form something new but retain their own identifying uniqueness. It's beautiful.
The sound and music is similar. It adds to the mood instead of distracting. Sounds effects are generally well chosen for their interaction. They fit with each environment respectively, dream world, real world and headspace. If I have to nit, there's probably a lot more swooshing from the toys-as-weapons than necessary.
Story
This is the hardest section for me to write because the story is excellent except for one major issue.
You control an anxiety-ridden shut-in boy who emerges from his home (or not ;) ) to face a physical move to another town. This forces him to come face to face with people and places that remind him of repressed trauma and memories.
The story plays out in three settings which I will call dream world, real world and headspace. Two of these are of, course, not real and used as coping mechanisms.
The quest is to find your friend Basil in the dream world even though he is not missing in the real world. But the real story is simply uncovering what trauma happened in the past and mending the wounds with yourself and others.
It's truly gripping. Yet, I have this one major issue. There's so much extraneous fluff in the telling of the story, that many times the game feels like work to get you to the next part. I really feel the game could have been half of the length and told the same story with as much power over the player's emotions.
Other: Grind and Progression
There's not a lot to say on grind and progression. You don't have to go out of your way to grind, but you do need to fight a lot of enemies on your way through, which feels kind of grindy since the battles are very much the same every time. This provides you with levels fairly often and new skills every few levels. Each character can use four skills at a time and I didn't have a difficult time selecting between them. They generally get better as you progress.
Conclusion
Great game, must play. I can't stress that enough despite what I said about the game not being fun. It isn't, and that's ok. It's dramatic and emotional and it deals well with difficult topics in a playable way.