I’m not the biggest fan of horror.
Since birth, I’ve always been a bit paranoid. The Bloody Mary Creepypasta made me too afraid to even shower for a couple of weeks, and for years after I learned of it, I was still too scared to go into the bathroom with the lights off. The days after I watched videos on the Five Nights at Freddy’s lore, I could not take a walk at night without turning my head to see if someone or something was following me. Horror just wasn’t my thing.
But slowly, times changed. I got older, more isolated. I was scared of the dark, but then it slowly became my sanctuary. I had been terrified of the terrors of life, now I was experiencing them firsthand. Psychological horror and undecipherable intrusive thoughts became a much more prominent part of my life. A gun in my hand, faces moving past me, gunshots, a hard impact to my side, useless, powerless.
The beauty of psychological horror lies in its focus on the mind. While modern horror games focus on the realism, graphics, as well as jumpscares, Psychological horror is entirely based on the mind, which means you can go as wild as you want to. You can try and replicate a deteriorating mental state from the outside looking in, but ultimately, the most effective and captivating method for capturing that internal struggle is through the terrifying place that is someone’s mind.
Enter Omori, a 2020 Indie RPG game made and developed by OMOCAT. As a member of the dying turn — based RPG genre, Omori was a game destined for mediocrity. Not since Undertale had such a format been done, and Undertale, well, let’s just say Undertale was a little out of reach. How would you expect a game that took 7 full years to make to compare with such an iconic game?
And, well Omori didn’t quite compete with Undertale. I mean, Undertale’s dominating influence on social media is quite literally a subject by itself, and yet Omori’s use of psychological horror while incorporating gameplay mechanics to add to the story of Omori separates itself. It’s not just another attempt at making Undertale, instead, it’s a story that stands on its own as one of the most horrifying yet realistic depictions of mental illness and guilt.
Today, we’ll be talking about my personal journey with Omori, what it means to me, and why you should care. I’ll also be diving deep into spoilers for the game, so here’s your major spoiler warning.
This is how a psychological horror story became one of the most beautiful and agonizingly bittersweet games that I have ever experienced. This is how I fell in love with Omori.
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Welcome To White Space.
You have been living here for as long as you remember.
Omori opens on the sound of cassette tapes, then white, the sounds of 4 notes continuously repeating itself over and over again. You have a laptop, a box of tissues to wipe your sorrows away, your cat, mewo, and a journal, filled with drawings of abstract and concerning art. Your drawings. It’s at this point, yes at the start of the game, that I knew that I was witnessing greatness.
One of the main ways Omori separates itself from other games is the note it opens on. Horror games either focus on a complete subversion of expectations or just start from dark and scary imagery. Omori, on the other hand, maintains a simplistic and innocent tone to the game while also establishing that there is something wrong. The 4 notes that continuously repeat, Omori’s black and white color in contrast to the bright colors of his friends, the fact that his victory face is completely just neutral. This, along with the masterful opening sequence, a stranger’s words printed on a crumpled black piece of paper with a loud machine sound in the background. Don’t worry, everything is going to be okay.
See, Omori doesn’t let you forget about its psychological horror tag. The entire first part of the game, while seemingly innocent and wholesome, carries a bitter taste in your mouth. You’re tensing up for the moments that never come, and you’re waiting for it. And as soon as you’re about to forget about the game’s psychological horror tag, the game immediately jump-scares you with a picture of a broken violin.
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These moments display some of Omori’s greatest strengths, the feeling of being placed into that situation. Previously I had wrote about Genshin Impact and how it plays around with your character already being an established character in its world, but in Omori and it’s unique way of implementing symptoms of PTSD means that the playable character is stuck with the main character, and learns more and more about himself despite having been established already. You don’t play as a character who knows more about you, instead, you learn more about the world you live in while at the same time feeling the exact horrors and traumas that the main character Sunny goes through.
It feels insane to me how the OmOcat team managed to recreate what mental illness felt like. Often, the biggest flaunts are with how realistic games feel with the graphics or the ability to recreate how a place looks, but in my opinion, we should’ve been recreating how it felt.
And Omori accomplishes that. Deliberate game mechanics in order to make the player feel guilt, or disgust, are sprinkled everywhere. One of the key features to get out of Omori’s dream world was to stab yourself in the game, and the worst part about it is that you, as an extension of Sunny, get used to it. You get used to hurting yourself, to the point that when it comes to cutting open your cat or stabbing yourself, when given the opportunity, you would easily harm yourself.
Omori is disgusting. It’s cruel, horrifying, and traumatizing, but it’s also beautiful. Through your journey venturing throughout the emptiness of white space as well as the terrifying imagery of black space, there’s a voice, reminding you how to persist, how to calm down. A voice of hope that guides you forward. Sunny’s mind, in repressing memories, tries to build a perfect world again where everyone is happy, but he can’t do that without first accepting his past, accepting his trauma. In the end, what brings them together is their hope, their suffering, and that hope that they might come to understand Sunny.
The culmination of all this comes together in a final battle where Sunny confronts Omori, your dream world incarnate of yourself. It’s a battle of fight against flight, a battle between the traumatized subconscious mind and your hope, your hope of forgiveness and love. And no matter how many times you beat Omori, over and over, Omori does not succumb. These self hating thoughts will never succumb. You lose to Omori, and then you’re hit with a question.
“Do you want to continue?”
This is a brilliant choice of words. At this point, you are probably tired of all 30 hours of your playtime, like Sunny is tired as well. It’s both yours and Sunny’s final stand.
You click yes. Sunny stands up, posing with his newly mended violin, the symbol of all his repressed memories and trauma.
Sunny and Mari’s final duet is probably one of the most heartbreaking yet also beautiful pieces of music that any media has to offer. It offers you the beautiful memories of Sunny’s past, his friend’s happiness, but with a bittersweet afterthought, as if to say you will never get these moments again. But even so, even when you did something so horrible and caused the people closest to you so much pain and trauma, it’s still hopeful, a parting gift from your sister Mari. “You’ll forgive yourself, won’t you?”
