I played this game twice in a row (Sunny route and then hikikomori route) around the beginning of 2021 and convinced myself it was a masterpiece. Now, I'm not so sure.

The pandemic had been a challenging and lonely time for me. Around the time I played this, I had been living alone for about half a year. I had friends nearby, but they were still busy with school. Rarely did I get to interact with anyone. Dated someone for a couple weeks, got too attached, and then it ended. It was abrupt, but inevitable. Every action I took to be perceived was tainted by my seemingly perpetual post-college identity crisis. On top of all this, I had to come to terms with the realization that most of my old college friends - the people I dedicated so much of my time and energy to - only ever brought out the worst in me. All I wanted was for the loneliness to end.

In hindsight, did Omori actually help me? Or did it just distract me? Did it really give me any kind of insight into broken friend dynamics and emotional repression? Or was I so apparently fragile that even gesturing towards these ideas seemed enough?

To get a bit more technical, let's talk about the dream world segments. What is the point of these segments? That Sunny likes to fantasize? We get that information with just one dream sequence. We don't need nearly the amount of dream content as we get. This isn't a bad thing in concept, but what even happens during these sequences? Do they connect with the real story at all? Do they give the player an outlet to genuinely explore Sunny's emotional and sexual frustrations? Not that I can tell. For segments supposedly based around wish fulfillment, not many wishes get fulfilled. And for as bloated as these sequences are, there's very little imagination. Why spend so much time within the headspace of this fictional character if they're gonna be this boring? Even Alex Yiik, while occupying a game that is arguably much less polished than this, still has a sense of specificity to his character and a fairly interesting (if extremely misguided and toxic) group of friends who get into bizarre, colorful, distressing antics.

But not Sunny. Even in the real world, Sunny's friends are perfect, if just a little shaken up by #trauma+grief. I want to believe the emotional truth behind this admittedly very sincere work with years of effort put behind it, but I fail to find all that much to chew on. Sure, there's plenty of surface-level details and connections between the dream world and the real world, but nothing profound. Not really. "Don't repress your emotions." "Don't hold things in." That's some shit you learn after one meeting with a therapist. Come on.

The real world segments might be the best part of the game, but they're still infected with a lot of the same needless, half-assed, unfunny quirk of the dream sequences. Characters have arcs here, but they all start from a place of goodness. There's nothing to really deconstruct or examine until the trauma happens. No buried toxicity, no passive-aggressiveness - how are we supposed to believe that these middle schoolers had such enriching, unblenched social lives without a hint of drama?

I'm being a little harsh here, but I don't think this game is all that bad. It's polished, it's fleshed out, all of the "uwu suddenly it's scary" parts that people like to complain about work to portray pretty tangible fears (in comparison to something like Doki Doki Lit Club, a fun gimmick game for it's time that doesn't really have anything to say about real life relationships or even the dating sims that inspired it). The endings all have a cohesive thematic through line. Even the true ending, the supposed happy one, has a hint of ambiguity behind its catharsis. You can say that it's lame, that it 'insists upon itself,' that it's bloated and shallow and repetitive. And I might agree with all of that to some extent, but if you spend enough time with this game, you'll see that the creator truly believes whatever it is they put behind it. An unignorable sense of sincerity, clouded by self-conscious tropey-ness and mostly uncomplicated characters. Not sure if it's worth digging through to find - not for everyone - but as someone who nearly turned this game off for good on multiple occasions throughout this playthrough, I'm glad I finished it this one last time. I don't think I'll be thinking about it very much from here on out.

The order in which things happen in this game is complete nonsense lol. I have some writer's notes for the developers, even though we are way past the opportunity to change things:
1. have Caroline's funeral before the submarine investigation.
2. Then go to Manhattan
3. Then go to New Orleans
4. THEN go to Texas
5. THEN the death fakeout (this should be the 2nd Act lowpoint but it happens halfway through the game).
6. THEEEN Venus
7. Then the final level.

this would've made for a much more structurally cohesive story imo. All the pieces are there, they just need to be rearranged. Sorry if this was boring but I had to write it down somewhere because I hyper-fixated on the wonky structure the whole game and it made me insane. Great characters, though!

Funnily enough, I do think this game has unironically aged very well. It becomes more clear as time passes that a lot of the things people were complaining about were very obviously intentionally provocative. Poe's Law hit this game hard, which is too bad since Alex's inner-monologue, while not always well written (a fault of the writer, I'm afraid), still comes across as so egregiously self-serious that I'm amazed just how much this game went over players' heads. Not that I blame the player—this game is a bit of a chore to figure out. The writing is inconsistent and arguably unfinished, and the presentation is extremely unpolished and quite often bad. AND the combat system is tedious as all hell. Everything about this game is very cool and smart in concept, but the execution is real wonky.

Judging from the recent I.V livestream, it looks like they might actually fix a lot of the problems I had with my initial playthroughs. Lines of dialogue that weren't working for me are now given a more stylish visual presentation that makes the intentions of the writing much clearer. Originally, you were stuck with Alex Yiik's perspective and forced to take him seriously. Now, even the game itself refuses to take him seriously. It really levels out the tone and gives the player more reason to be invested. Combat looks faster paced and more distinct from the game's contemporaries. New content has a lot of potential. Ideally, if they had the time and money, I'd say they should rewrite the whole game and re-record voice acting with a professional voice director, and change the way dialogue is presented all around--a lot of these lines would sound a lot better if they were presented in a looser, Oxenfree-esque style rather than the awkward visual novel chunks. I doubt any of that would be possible to implement at this point, but maybe it's something to note if they make a new game after this one. At this point, I'm happy enough with the cut lines and new cutscenes.

Regardless, it looks like the Allanson bros have already grown so much as artists (and hopefully as coders), so I'll likely give this game one more playthrough once I.V releases to see just how different a "final" version of this game looks. For as many problems as I have with it, the Allanson bros are two people I generally admire, and I hope that, if this game never really works out even with the upcoming remake update, that they get to make a truly great game on another day. They definitely have it in them, they just need more experience. I love bein' in YIIIIIK!!!