Omori is a reminder of why I love stories. From that whimsical feeling of adventure in a brand new world with characters you know nothing of and seeing parts of yourself in each of them, to the feeling of elation as you come to the end of a journey knowing the lasting imprint that’s been left on you.
The theme of escapism is one that I’ve always been fond of as it’s been a heavy part of both my adolescence and adult life and the theme of grief, being something I personally have not experienced to the same magnitude of these characters, is something I can sympathize with. Omori has one of my favorite atmospheres in fiction, and a large part of that is attributed to the audiovisual storytelling.
From the start the soundtrack paints a very upbeat but melancholic tone that stays with the game going forward, with many scenes making me feel genuine anxiety and dread and even moments with no sound that gives an even stronger sense of uneasiness. The level design is even more amazing. Since we are effectively traversing through someone's mindscape, the world is designed perfectly to showcase the creative mind of the adolescent, both the dark and light. It gets cranked tenfold come the final portions of the game, where certain levels are genuinely horrifying. My personal favorite sequence in the game is when you are finally piecing the truth together with the remaining pictures in the photo album and I still remember the feeling of dread as I slowly began to piece things together myself.
Yes, Omori is a dark game. It tackles many heavy subjects, but it’s one of the most hopeful depictions of trauma I’ve seen to date. We are not without our scars, but burying them does nothing but cause it to smolder inside you until you cannot contain it. There are times where you feel lost or at a standstill while the world continues to spin and it can be extremely overwhelming, but Omori lets you know that it is okay. Sometimes we can forget that there are people that care for us, and it can cause us to dissociate ourselves from the world around us. But there is always someone to take that burden off of you, if only even a little. Omori is about grief and how we all deal with it in different ways internally and externally, but it is also a story about reconciliation with our mistakes and the affirmation that we can be better.