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 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.