Omori: The Journey
The following blog post contains spoilers for the entire game. If you have any interest in Omori, do yourself a favor and play the game for yourself. It’s $19.99 on Steam right now, and has an upcoming Nintendo Switch port in the works at a currently-unspecified release date. My honest opinion is you should just play the game now instead of waiting for the Switch port, which I suppose is a mild spoiler on how I feel about the game.
On another note, Omori deals with very heavy subject matter. The content warning shown on the startup screen is something you’ll need to take very seriously. Omori is not gratuitous, but it doesn’t pull its punches either. I’ll add that in addition to the warning shown here, it also depicts instances of intense anxiety as well as self-harm.
One last chance: my review opens with a pretty big detail, and so I’m fluffing up the spoiler warning to make sure linking this review to Twitter or Discord doesn’t allow the preview to show any spoilers. With that out of the way, let’s dive in.
(This blog post uses screenshots, GIFs, and videos from the unofficial Omori wiki and YouTube channels like Hikik, salas misto, Skyden, SunFox, and ManlyBadassHero. I do not know exactly how to create screenshots, GIFs, and videos using only personal footage on my own yet. Hopefully one day I can figure that out.)
INTRODUCTION
Omori’s central theme is “dual perception”.
Before the game begins, the player is prompted to contemplate the empty-looking expression on Omori's face. It is animated, like the rest of the game, with a soft, scribbly kind of squigglevision, giving life to even stationary and still characters. I think it's worth noting, however, that Omori is the very first thing we see, and his being animated this way hints at this empty façade being held actively and intentionally.
To explain this: if we check the mirror on the playground, it prompts an animated image of Omori, or him and his friends, standing in the game's typical animated art style. They wiggle around with a warm, inviting air around them.
Later in the game, partway through the prologue, we take control of a character we are allowed to name. Not only do they have a preset name, Sunny (which I will use to refer to him from now on), but, ominously, we are not allowed to name him "Omori".
After leaving the room and heading to the restroom, we can check the mirror to see what we look like in full. It is a face uncomfortably similar to Omori's, yet taller, possibly older… and completely still.
No animation at all. Even Omori has to animate himself. Sunny has zero problem staying still. It may even be his natural state.
In Omori, mirrors reflect what Sunny perceives the truth to be. When Sunny is dreaming, when he’s in his Headspace, Sunny perceives himself as Omori, and he sees himself with Aubrey, Kel, and Hero on his journey. As long as he is sleeping, this is what is real to him. It’s so real to him it’s even somewhat real to us, as the player.
This is a game about leaving a false reality behind in pursuit of the true one, no matter how much it hurts and no matter how comforting and eye-catching the false one is. The journey to do so will challenge our sense of self, because within the protagonist lies two conflicting beliefs of who he is. It will be difficult. For us, it will be unforgettable.
PROLOGUE
The game begins in White Space. It’s a wide, looping expanse of nothing, aside from a few items: a sketchbook, a laptop, a cat (Mewo), a light bulb, and some tissues. There’s also a door nearby. These scant few details let us know what Omori is like: the sketchbook lets us know that Omori draws, the laptop’s calendar shows us his life revolves around a pretty entrenched routine, Mewo’s “Waiting for something to happen?” inquiry gives us the impression that Omori is more passive than active, and the tissues being described as “for wiping your sorrows away” tell us Omori feels sad on a regular basis. We also know there’s something wrong with Omori: the sketchbook’s drawings are all rather disturbing, the laptop calendar shows that Omori’s sole activities are staying in White Space or visiting his friends, and examining enough of the items leads Omori to find a knife, which Omori decides to equip. In particular, he won’t even leave through the door unless he has it. Picking up the knife also shows us the disembodied red hands that chase Omori and put him back in the center of White Space should he stray too far, as if Omori doesn’t want to end up lost in his own little sanctuary somehow.
The light bulb is the most mysterious item. As white as this place is, it seems to emit not light but rather darkness. There’s no indication about what this means, but since it was in the title screen it’s clearly going to be very important.
When Omori opens the door to hang out with his neighbors on the other side, despite the strikingly alien difference between White Space and Headspace, he’s treated as a friend who comes over regularly. They don’t seem to mind that they’re all pastel colors and Omori is completely black and white.
Their first dialogue boxes let us know who they are. Aubrey is so happy she doesn’t look where she’s going, Kel is angered by a ruined card game, and Hero steps in to make sure an argument doesn’t happen. Two kids who let their emotions get the best of them and an older teenager who makes sure their emotions are kept in check. We later learn their more rounded aspects, like how Kel is actually the more joyfully rambunctious one, Aubrey is prone to fits of anger, and Hero can let his fear get to him, but this moment establishes who they are primarily.
We meet Mari and Basil very shortly after, in a playground. When Basil invites everyone to look at his photo album we gain a much clearer sense of who everyone is: a group of friends who have spent a very long time growing up together. In particular, Kel and Hero are siblings, Basil is Omori's best friend, Mari and Hero are the oldest and look after the rest of them, and Aubrey and Mari are close. Everyone here loves and makes time for Omori… even if it seems like he doesn't actively participate in any of the memories these photos showcase.
This photo album is a good time to mention how utterly beautiful Omori is. In general, Omori’s presentation is incredible. Just look at all these screenshots. The soft look on everyone’s face, the bright colors, the cute expressions, it’s all beyond my capability to fully describe. The utterly adorable squat overworld sprites for the party are great, but also every playground NPC is completely unique, and has their own appealing design to them. Honestly, a picture says a thousand words, and I’d rather they speak for themselves.
Moving away from the static art, overworld sprites of characters have unique little animations for all sorts of moments--Kel pulling Aubrey out of the Neighbor’s Room stump results in him falling back flat on his back, Boss being revealed with a unique animation for “rolling down” the tree they’re behind, and all the different activities you can watch Omori and his friends do by examining sparkly spots like playing cards and building sandcastles at the northern beach. This astonishing level of detail lasts throughout the entire game, and elevates Omori to one of the best presented adventures I’ve had the pleasure of going through.
Since Basil is the one who put together this photo album for everyone, we have more than enough reason to feel upset when Boss grabs him, even if we still don't quite know a lot about him yet. After the fight with them (which showcases Omori’s ability to survive an attack that would kill him at least once per fight), Omori and his friends can all leave for Basil's house, where the game throws a fight with an angry sprout mole so it’s time to talk about the battle system.
The Battle System
Omori's twist on the usual RPG battling is the emotion system. Instead of needing to keep track of elements like fire, ice, and lightning, you need to manage the emotions of your party members and the enemies you face. There are three primary emotions: happiness, anger, and sadness. Being happy increases speed and critical hit rate, but lowers accuracy; being angry increases attack but lowers defense; and being sad increases defense but lowers speed, and also any attacks sustained while sad decrease your Juice (your MP meter). The great thing about the buffs and debuffs applied to each emotion is that it's pretty analogous to how they work in real life. Happy people are quick to act and try their hardest, but can be reckless; angry people get forceful and lash out, but are more vulnerable to what other people say and do; and sad people close themselves off from everything else, but generally are hesitant to act once in that state of mind. It's very thoughtfully considered.
Each emotion is advantageous against another. Anger's low defense loses to Happiness' high critical hit rate, Sadness' low speed can't stop the relentlessly strong attack of Anger in time, and Happiness' low accuracy can't effectively damage Sadness' defenses. As a result, despite the lack of elemental magic, the classic rock-paper-scissors relationship you see in many RPG battle systems is still present in Omori. In fact, it has an advantage over most other battle systems with a similar idea: the resistances and weaknesses of every enemy aren't static. It's generally random what enemies are feeling, but it's always clear by their expressions and their outline: happy is yellow, angry is red, and sad is blue. This means you get the dynamic on-the-ground tactics of exploiting weaknesses without needing to remember which enemy is weak to what. They also stack: party members and enemies can reach, at minimum, a second stage of happiness, anger, and sadness, raising each emotion's strengths but not their weaknesses.
The emotion system works in tandem with the skill system, which is also very thoughtfully considered. Many of them are typical damage dealing attacks, but others revolve around changing other fight participants' emotions. Omori starts with a skill that makes someone sad, for example, but they gain another skill that damages an enemy while also making it and Omori both sad. Omori has another skill that gets increased damage when Omori is sad, so provided you're in a situation where being sad wouldn't put you at a disadvantage, this ends up being an ideal combo. Keeping track of which skills work better in tandem is important, because unlike most RPGs Omori limits the amount of skills you can use in any given battle to four. This means less menu scrolling, but more importantly it means you're not simply looking for the exact right skill for each situation every single time. With less available options, improvisational strategies will inevitably happen, which keeps things interesting whenever an enemy encounter throws you usual tactics off. Omori’s strong presentation continues here, too: not only do all four party members have their own portraits for each level of emotion, but every skill in the entire game comes with its own unique animation--Headbutt has art of Aubrey rearing up to the battle screen before snapping to art of Aubrey slamming her head, Stab has Omori’s knife stick itself straight into an enemy sprite, and Smile has Hero’s portrait transition to a handsome little grin, and that’s just the start. A few skills activate easter eggs: If Hero uses Smile on the second climax boss at the end of Three Days Left, the boss will slap him because at that point they're not going to fall for his irresistible charm anymore, and when Kel uses Flex on the boss that taught him how to do it in the first place, they’ll remark how proud they are of Kel. Omori is very classy with gameplay-story integration.
Those easter eggs aren’t even the best part of this, though. What tops off Omori's battle system is the energy meter. Every party member, upon selecting Attack, can choose to follow it up with a unique action aimed at another party member at the cost of 3 units of this meter. Kel throws his ball at someone, Hero cooks them a meal, and Aubrey looks at them. Depending on how far you are in the game, it evolves: Kel throwing his ball at Omori makes him sad at first because Omori doesn't catch it, but later he learns to catch it and becomes happy. This is brilliant because, like the rest of Omori, it demonstrates the relationships each of the party members have with each other and how they change over the course of the game through its gameplay. Omori understands how much better video games can be when they don't try to make their narratives and their gameplay separate, the way, say, Xenogears does (I love Xenogears, but man did the Wiseman fights fall flat).
Omori himself is different. Two of his follow up moves don't revolve interacting with other party members, instead giving himself an extra attack or tripping the enemy to lower their speed (and, later on, make them sad). However, Omori can use an exclusive follow up move that combines all four party members for a huge attack aimed at all enemies, as long as the energy meter is capped off with 10 units. As cool as this move is, it shows how reluctant Omori is to interact with Aubrey, Kel, or Hero individually. He clearly values their company, but is seemingly unwilling to contribute much to them as much as they do to him or to each other.
Every fight starts you off with 3 units, so you can always start with one follow up move. However, the major way it increases is by a party member taking damage, so to prevent players from simply spamming the Guard command, enemies are consistently tough and hard-hitting, to the point where spamming "attack" and nothing else stops being a reliable tactic much earlier than you would initially assume. That said, Omori is still pretty forgiving. There are no random encounters, so all enemies are found on the overworld, where players can run around them if they so wish. Running away from enemy encounters also has a pretty high success rate, meaning you can usually end a fight if you're not really feeling it. Save points are also placed pretty generously throughout the game, and most of them come with a recovery point for your Heart and Juice. On top of this, Omori is pretty generous with high-quality healing items, so if we let ourselves just use them if we think we could use it regardless of any concerns that we're using them too soon, then Omori dying is almost never an issue until late-game. Lastly, most boss fights, which you can't run away from, are possible to win against even if you don't fight most enemies in the areas they reside in. Being a decent level is obviously important like in most RPGs, but there's enough tactical depth that longtime a longtime RPG fan's habit of fighting every enemy they see gets unnecessary pretty quickly. In short, Omori is tough, but provided we use every option at our disposal, it will never be frustrating.
Finally, the battle system in Omori is presented in a strikingly beautiful manner. Your four party members' portraits each take up a corner of the screen while the enemies reside in the middle, with everything animated in the beautiful animated art style of the rest of the game. Every party member and every enemy has unique art for their feeling each of the three primary emotions, alongside their default expressions. Unique to Omori's party are unique portraits for a second stage of their emotions, like Enraged for anger (seen here with Aubrey) or Depressed for sadness. Omori gets three stages of emotions. So, on top of the battle system always being interesting to participate in, it will never look boring at any point in the game either. Honestly, this is probably one of the most fresh and elegant battle systems in any RPG I've ever played.
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On the way to Basil’s house, he shows us his flowers and how they all relate to the party. This shows how he’s thinking of everyone, further endearing us to him. But when we reach his house… something goes wrong.
The eeriness of the following segment is accentuated by how violently we begin it, and how calmly we end it:
The second the trip to Basil's home becomes more horrifying than expected, Omori is transported, immediately, almost by instinct, to White Space. The door to Headspace is gone, the music is replaced with a steady, visceral heartbeat, and the only thing left to do is "Stab". We get an additional "Stab who?" prompt, as if to drive in just how premeditated this will be, and Omori drives his knife through his stomach. No blood, but we hear the knife enter him and see him collapse nonetheless. Entering the real world, then, is a reluctant, painful reality, more painful than anything else… or at least, anything else that Omori is willing to experience.
Disorientation
What transpires in this segment is brief, yet loud and frightening. Gone are the harsh white contrasts of White Space or the relaxing colors of Headspace. We take control of Sunny for the first time, and guide him through a very dark house. Notes from Sunny's mother contextualize why Sunny will spend the rest of the game in his house by himself, and why the lights won't work (though other electric appliances do work. I looked this up to see if this distinction actually happens--it can depending on how the breakers are affected, but Sunny's mother's explanation doesn’t mention the breakers). We see a big staircase that Sunny just does not want to descend, to the point where he takes control away and backs up from it. Sunny enters the bathroom and we see him more clearly in the mirror, as explained earlier. His resemblance to Omori tells us something's up.
And indeed, Something is up.
Sunny tries to go back to sleep, but he’s too hungry, so he’s forced into the first encounter with Something. He’s afraid. Fear is the last emotion to cover--it has no advantages, only drawbacks, being that it prevents usage of skills and items. This is only relevant in Headspace--here all it does is paralyze Sunny, preventing him from running. His attacks do nothing, while Something attacks us and taunts us as we fall.
After the terrifying encounter with Something in the Dark, Sunny can finally go eat. On the way, we see him refuse to enter a couple of rooms--the one on the right of the stairs, and the sliding door to the backyard…
Microwaving a steak when the power’s out seems odd, but maybe it’s battery powered. It doesn’t go well however, so a trip to the bathroom is in order. He throws up. But now he can sleep...
...but there’s an ominous knocking at the front door in the dead of night. Sunny can actually ignore it, as the game is compassionate enough to assume that we’ve experienced enough horror for one night. But our curiosity is piqued… and who’s at the front door but Mari, of all people. She has the same bright pastel colors as usual, which seem inviting in the dead of night. The game then decides to give you the decision to open the door for her. It gives a lot of weight to this decision.
Now that all of Sunny's most pressing concerns are dealt with, he can fall asleep to dream, once again. He gets in bed, looks around his room, and closes his eyes. As if he's done this hundreds of times before, he's right back in White Space.
As empty and barren as the place is, Sunny clearly prefers it to whatever he just dealt with, and whatever the event at Basil's home made him feel. He gains a map, a hangman game menu, and heads back into Headspace
Despite all evidence pointing to how this is real life, it is easy for us to simply pack everything here away as a momentary nightmare. Even as we see Sunny going back to bed, nothing here feels completely real yet. His headspace, where Omori resides, is more real to us at the moment.
As real as Headspace is to us, however, this segment also complicates things. It is implied that the main question the game is asking is whether staying in White Space is healthy, or the world beyond the door that materializes in White Space is better for Omori to live in. The game had done quite a bit of worldbuilding with each location to make them both feel real, and Headspace in particular included several named NPCs in the playground with their own character traits and quirks, but now it's thrown out the window. Whatever White Space and Headspace are, they both seemingly reside within Sunny's dreams. Neither of those places will matter quite as much as whatever the real world is, and at some point we will have to confront that at Sunny's side.
PROLOGUE - CONTINUED
Back in the dream world, Omori decides to join his friends on a journey to find Basil. Mari periodically shows up everywhere, almost always hosting a picnic and save point to take a breather.
When Omori goes back into Basil’s house, he sees Something floating in the center before it disappears. This is the first mandatory appearance of it in Headspace, and it can be startling. It establishes that Headspace isn’t really a safe haven--at any time, it can appear and remind Omori that he’ll never be able to completely free himself from its presence. Further appearances will only become spookier.
There’s a small exploration segment filled with enemies when Omori and his friends decide to look for Basil in the nearby Vast Forest. He's found nowhere here, but in the meantime Leafie is here to reassure us that killing bunnies is worthwhile and not at all monstrous.
However, it quickly becomes apparent that, if Omori doesn’t conquer his fears, he won’t get anywhere. But since Omori is a representative of Sunny, he ends up being able to overcome his acrophobia like how Sunny did so that he can climb a ladder to an alien planet up in space.
This is more or less what the structure of Headspace will be going forward. After Omori conquers a fear, he will be able to join his friends in exploring more of the dream world.
The Otherworld Arc
Otherworld is very different from Vast Forest, which in turn heavily differs from successive areas. It’s implied that Sunny is most comfortable with the familiar, so to make himself feel brave in his dreams he created a world where the new, and unfamiliar, places still feel manageable enough to overcome any trepidations about exploring. It’s definitely an adventure, but one he can handle… he’s made sure of it.
It’s in this segment that we understand why Sunny retreats into his dreams so often: they’re intoxicatingly creative and fun. Why would he ever prefer the real world to a dream world where you encounter a version of Pluto, the planet, who went rogue and fast travels you through the world? The colors are beautiful, with vibrant pinks, purples, blues, and magentas all over the place. The houses and NPCs are weirder and more wonderful than the playground kids at Vast Forest, like the super fan (ultra fan) who modeled their house after an in-universe celebrity, or the one with a TV for a head, or a space captain who’s sad his girlfriend dumped him so his space pirate crew can’t explore the galaxy. It’s someone tending to this last person who gives Omori and friends the idea to ask him for directions to find Basil, provided they find a mixtape he made for his love to whip him back into a state where he can talk.
This allows Omori to explore the first of this game’s dungeons, the Junkyard. In general, the dungeons are typical JRPG fare, with a mix of puzzles, exploration, plenty of battles, and fun scenarios peppered in between to make your time exploring them all enjoyable. Some areas have their own battle conditions too--for example, Kel here will dig through the trash automatically at the start of battles, and he may or may not find stuff to use or to recycle for money. Omori’s charm is strong enough to the point where I never feel outright bored going through these areas, even if the process of progressing through them isn’t outright mindblowing.
Here is where we also learn that each of the party members has an ability they can use as the leader: Omori can cut down obstacles that can be sliced with his knife, Aubrey can smash bigger obstacles with her bat, and Kel can throw a ball at distant targets from a raised surface. The most amusing ability is Hero’s: with his pretty boy house husband charm, he can sway uncooperative NPCs into doing things the party needs to proceed further. I played the game with Omori in the lead and only switched to the others when needed on my first playthrough, but for anyone replaying the game, I recommend having Hero in the lead as the default. While NPCs have different things to say depending on the party leader, the responses Hero gets are the most entertaining, with many going on about how handsome and responsible he is. It only gets better the further in the dream world you go, especially near the end where you can actually make some parts of the end easier if you keep him in the lead.
I’ll say that these abilities aren’t the most mechanically interesting thing in the world. One could argue that they could have built more interesting puzzles if their abilities didn’t all amount to “switch to them to remove the present obstacle”. But, as I’ll detail much further down the review, the dream world Sunny concocts isn’t trying to be the best thing ever. It’s only trying to be as engrossing as possible. We’ll put a pin in that for now, but yes, character switching is generally superficial, not that that’s a bad thing. It’s nice to have someone else in the lead for a moment or two to switch things up.
We find the mixtape and return to the space pirate captain. Unfortunately, not only did he not want to hear the mixtape, but he reveals himself to be the boss of this segment of the game after threatening to hunt his ex-girlfriend down. Omori has many boss fights, but these specific ones are always the most climactic, and the game pulls out the stops to make fighting them feel grander than the rest of the dream world. In particular, Space Ex-Boyfriend introduces the concept of bosses that can not only lock themselves to one emotion, but can reach a hidden third level (for him, it’s anger, going from Angry to Enraged all the way to Furious). In other words, here the game gets you to stop relying solely on damage skills and start taking advantage of managing your party members’ emotional states.
After defeating Space Ex-Boyfriend, he calms down and when he ends up having no real idea where Basil could be, Omori and friends resolve to go back to the surface world. But by following some footprints, Omori spots a shadowy figure. He follows him, ending up completely alone, and upon reaching a barn he is once again forced to stab himself, and Sunny wakes up once more. Though the fight against Space Ex-Boyfriend definitely felt climactic, there was no indication that after his fight the segment would end. Omori does a great job of never quite telling you a segment is about to transition to the real world, meaning when these bouts of horror-induced wakeup calls happen, they can catch you off guard the way they’re supposed to. After all, when we dream, we generally wake up when least expected ourselves, especially if we were “in the middle of something” in whatever fantasy our brains cooked up for us.
THREE DAYS LEFT...
This next real world segment is incredibly important. For one thing, when Sunny saves here, the save file finally transitions from “Prologue” to “Three Days Left…”, meaning if you’re one of the poor saps who thought they should keep playing until the prologue was over, you can finally take a breather (I try to recommend that people let themselves take a break during this segment, just in case they do what I did and marathon it). Another thing is that it’s daytime now.
The knocking at the door is present, just like last time. Unlike last time, Sunny can see everything clearly because of the daylight. It is less frightening. Maybe, because of his dreams, or because he had already conquered a fear the other night, Sunny can open the door, and address whoever is invading his haunted sanctuary.
It is important to note how much of this is an action. Last night, Sunny was also given the choice to open the door. He had every reason not to, despite the sound of Mari's voice. We can open it, see horror peeking through the other side, magnify it by checking the bathroom mirror, and conclude that opening the front door just isn't a good idea.
The game understands this so much that choosing not to open the door, then deliberately going back to bed, puts the game on a very different path than usual. We'll come back to this alternate path sometime, but right now the important thing is this: Sunny staying inside does not, at this moment, seem like such a bad thing.
But we can still help him make the better choice. He is already willing to consider it, no matter if you answered the door last night or not. As scared as Sunny might be, he knows he can open it, and that he doesn't have to ignore it.
Whereas Mari's voice belonged to an apparition, Kel's voice belongs to… Kel.
The sense of relief that washes over us as we see Kel’s smiling face is coupled with the striking realization that Kel looks very different.
We remember the answering machine in Sunny’s room last night: Kel has actually been trying, persistently, to talk to us for the past few months. For anyone who was doubting before, these segments with Sunny truly take place in the real world: only Kel would do something without having an actual plan, so this person named Kel matches the dream version of Kel.
Sunny doesn’t just prefer staying inside, but he seems to be a full blown hikikomori, which is someone who holes themselves up in their house and does everything they can to avoid leaving the house. Obviously this helps inform why Sunny’s dream persona is called Omori, but I assume I’m blowing absolutely nobody’s mind at this point. Either way, Kel here shows more depth and consideration than his dream counterpart, since he immediately comes up with the idea to go to a shop he and Sunny used to go to together--this way, he and Sunny can spend time together, which he is able to tell Sunny needs.
At this point I’d like to call back to what I said about Omori’s presentation. We can plainly see that it has effortlessly graced the dream sections and both the nighttime and daytime real world sections their own identity. From the bright pastel colors of Headspace, to a contemplative and unnerving sea of blue for Sunny's house at night, to the now much more grounded colors on display here in Faraway Town, the game handles all these different color palettes gracefully. It must have taken quite a bit of work to make sure they were all kept distinct, yet visually appealing.
A big part of the appeal of the parts where Sunny’s awake is seeing things that inspired Headspace when Sunny's asleep. Kel’s pet rock Hector is named after his real world dog, the playground from Headspace is similar to the park next to the shopping center, Kel’s weapon in the dream world is based on a love of sports given that Kel is a basketball player, etc. Seeing Sunny reuse and recycle things he’s familiar with in the real world tells us a lot about him and how he feels about certain things, which is a big part of why Sunny is such a compelling protagonist.
It also tells us that he’s disoriented by going outside… we can see various elements from Headspace scattered around, and interacting with any of them just makes them disappear, as if Sunny is realizing in real time that they’re not there. This disorientation will come up again soon…
It turns out Kel’s brother Hero is in college, and is coming home tomorrow, so Kel resolves to get him a gift. Though he’s not around, it’s nice to have an explanation of why. You'd think he'd be studying to be a chef, but, oddly, that isn't the case.
Kel's not the only familiar face we find. We run into Basil at the park. He wants to talk with someone…
Enter a pink-haired, icy blue-eyed young woman wielding a bat with nails in it. She’s given a pretty big entrance, like with Kel, and the realization can shock us: we’re looking at Aubrey in the present day, the only familiar face who doesn't look familiar at all. Aubrey is almost completely different from the Headspace version, with seemingly the sole similarity being that they both have a similar hairstyle and wield a blunt object. She makes a low blow at Sunny not leaving his house, she rebuffs Basil's request to talk to her, and she leads a gang of violent kids.
Furthermore, she ends up fighting us, if only because of Kel. We're invited to wonder what happened that caused Aubrey to turn out like this in the time Sunny was cooped inside his house.
This is the first real world fight in the game and man does it let us know it. We examine Kel and Sunny’s abilities, and can infer that the best strategy for now (since the option to run away doesn’t work right now) is to have Sunny take a deep breath, have Kel encourage him, and have Sunny attack. We do so and--
We get the wake-up call of a lifetime. Despite the turn-based RPG format, there’s no mistaking it--we just assaulted Aubrey with a knife.
It should be noted that Omori’s not treading new ground here, of course. Many stories, including video games, usually have plots contrasting an imaginary scenario with a real one, and many of them have a wake-up call. What I’m praising here is that this moment is not simply shocking, but rather, like everything else in the real world, it informs us of who Sunny is. He’s someone who needs to take a knife with him outside, who sees real-world confrontation against people he knows as little RPG battles, and who will let himself hurt people under this delusion if they aren’t careful. He hasn’t been outside in years, and we see the toll this has taken on him mentally right here, because if the dream version of Aubrey informs Sunny’s opinion of the Aubrey he’s known for years, then it’s easy to assume that in a right state of mind he wouldn’t even think of slashing her.
Of course, this is conjecture. Reasonable conjecture on my part, but Sunny is also someone that people will have differing interpretations of. Many things about him are suggested, but not definite, so many people will walk away feeling something different about him.
Kel gets rid of Sunny’s knife after the fight, because he knows what’s best for us. Kel, in general, is definitely hotheaded like in Headspace, but now we see how truly understanding and compassionate he is in real life. He’s constantly patient with Sunny, and wants only what he feels is best for his friend who’s been cooped up in his house for years. There’s an NPC nearby named Jay who is implied to know Kel somewhat closely. Because he knows Sunny being out of the house is tough for him, he informs Jay that he’ll catch up with him later. Honestly, Kel is the best.
After the commotion, We talk to Basil. As much as we may want to get to know his real world version, he seems oddly avoidant, turning down Kel's offer to hang out with us, so we instead escort him home. Then he makes a concerningly loud outburst when we try to leave him there. It turns out that the photo album, something which in the dream world was really important, has been stolen from him in the real world by Aubrey.
Her actions are gradually explained through encounters with the rest of her current friends--Kim, Vance, Angel, Mikhael, and Charlie--as Kel confronts them to figure out Aubrey’s whereabouts. They all end up fighting us, but the fights themselves are comical, with the music and Sunny and Kel’s weak attacks making everything feel tongue-in-cheek. Bullies though they may be, they’re just dumb kids who just want an excuse to feel better than someone. But since the album means a lot to not only Basil but to us, we meet with these groups of dweebs to track Aubrey down.
Aubrey in the Church
Despite her tough exterior and violent behavior, she’s attending a sermon. What follows is a very important scene from both a character building and emotional level.
At this point, we’ve met the real world versions of Kel, Basil, and Aubrey. Omori is pretty clearly a version of Sunny who lives in his dreams, and Hero is coming home from college tomorrow. The only person unaccounted for is Mari.
Mari was a constant, loving presence in Headspace as we journeyed the landscape. Learning her fate in the real world is a punch to the gut.
Aubrey became the person she did in the past four years because of how everyone dealt with Mari’s death--whatever they did, from Aubrey’s perspective, got them to forget about her. She loved Mari and looked up to her like a big sister, and when she died she felt she had nobody to turn to since everyone broke apart afterwards.
When Aubrey doesn’t accept Kel’s apology and tries leaving, the name-calling starts. The churchgoers start whispering and Aubrey lashes out. She figures that, because not only Kel but the rest of the procession think she’s a villain, to pick an intense fight right there out in the open to let out her aggression on her former friends.
What proceeds is, emotionally, one of the most difficult battles in the game.
“It Means Everything.” starts playing. This theme, all by itself, communicates the raging turmoil that must be going on through Aubrey’s head. She’s fighting people who she believes abandoned her when she needed their support the most, who she believes do not care about Mari passing away. She’s fighting either against or with the reputation the churchgoers are foisting on her. This track as the backdrop to a bout of violence in the middle of a church makes everything feel heartbreaking.
Aubrey definitely looks angry, and Kel starts the fight Angry. And Sunny… he still feels nothing. It’s impossible to know what’s going on in his head right now, seeing two of his friends hurting each other, seeing himself possibly hurt Aubrey too. It’s not hard to imagine that he didn’t really want his decision to go outside to result in any of this. He finally went out for the first time in four years, and just look at what’s happening before his eyes. Even if Sunny and Kel don’t lose the fight, it’s hard to say that anyone really wins, to the point where both winning and losing results in the game moving forward.
It’s worth noting that many of the fights in the real world will not get in the way of the story even if you lose, we’re free to win if we think we can but fights are just a stand-in for conflict, and the presence of violent conflict will understandably move the game along regardless of the outcome. Fights are just not a situation anyone should be in if they can help it--just like in real life, they are dramatic instances in and of themselves.
I’ll share an anecdote. On my first playthrough, I didn’t have Sunny work any jobs, so he didn’t have any money to afford enough bandages and first-aid kits to survive the fight. Both Sunny and Kel were on low health, as a result. I started the fight by guarding with the two of them, but despite not having the boys fight, Aubrey struck down and knocked out Kel. Maybe I subconsciously decided to roleplay a little, but only afterwards did I have Sunny start attacking. I knew it was doomed--Sunny only had around 60 Heart, and Aubrey’s attacks did around 50 points of damage. In about three turns, I had lost. I remember thinking this could be canon: Sunny only deciding to start hurting his former friend after she strikes his current friend down, even if it pains him to do so. But there’s room for other interpretations too.
Whatever happens, Aubrey just emotionally collapses. She fought her former friends in front of everyone, the churchgoers’ whispers continue to mercilessly judge her, and her sanctuary has been irreparably disturbed. We see her on the verge of tears for the first time--this has been a thoroughly humiliating experience for her.
There is an optional scene afterward. Going to the back of the church, we can find Mari’s grave. Kel bears his soul out as he recalls how it affected everyone, including himself, but most notably his brother Hero, who did not take her death well at all. He stopped caring about things like school, eating, and even cooking, which is a big shock. He was like this for a whole year. Kel tried to help one night, but, well… he got angry.
Kel’s attempts to calm him down didn’t pan out, and Hero only got angrier and started crying. This causes Kel to start crying too, his parents to run in and hug Hero, and Hero to snap out of it and hug Kel to apologize profusely. Kel says Hero got much better after that.
As emotional as this scene is, it serves another purpose: it firmly establishes Mari’s death as being the most important event in the game. It changed absolutely everyone, with the exception of Kel into someone completely different. And even Kel at least changed his friend group from then on, deciding to throw himself into his sports friends to deal with the change. It’s not hard to imagine that what happened with Hero discouraged him from trying to help Sunny or Aubrey or Basil. At this juncture, though, we don’t quite know Sunny’s feelings about Mari’s death yet. It’s what drives the current conflict, however, so we will inevitably find out.
After Sunny and Kel find Basil’s photo album upon seeing Aubrey try to throw it away, they decide to return it to Basil at his house. Along the way, though Faraway Town has a hefty amount of side activities you can partake in should you do a very thorough search of every nook and cranny at all three points in the day: daytime, sunset, and nighttime. The Headspace version of sidequests have NPCs with little icons floating over their heads to let you know they have a sidequest or will help you with one. Faraway Town doesn’t have this at all, so we are encouraged with Sunny to observe the neighborhood with a more careful eye and take everything in. Watching a man try to repair his leaking pipe, helping a woman with getting a new lamp her son won’t get for her, feeding nearby cats with fish, there’s a lot to do and it feels nice to be helpful in a more realistic and down to earth manner than beating up the right bad guy.
The houses in Faraway Town are when the game ascended, to me. Omori could have cheapened out by making Sunny living in his dreams feel sympathetic by contrasting it with how dull real life can comparatively be. Instead, the town and its houses are so immaculately detailed that it feels completely lived-in.
Look at the screenshots I have here and just take in all the little details. The furniture, the knick knacks, the decorations, and even how tidy or clean they are. This is all carefully constructed, intricate sprite-work made to go the extra mile to make sure each house feels like a home. Clumsy Guy’s home is completely distinct from Cris’ home, which is completely distinct from Basil’s home, and it keeps going. Each home has its own feel thanks to all these extra details and carefully assigned color palettes. It speaks volumes just how much Omori cares about making sure that Faraway Town is a real place. And it needs to, because everything that further drives in that Sunny has been living in his own fantasy world for the past four years can only help him on the path to his recovery.
Gathering at Basil’s house, we learn, or maybe remember, that Basil’s parents are almost never home, so he has a caretaker named Polly to help him. After putting together what’s left of the photo album, we learn that Mari was Sunny’s big sister, which twists the knife and also informs us several things about Sunny (before, you could assume her calling Omori "little brother" was a term of endearment). Polly and Kel help make dinner for everyone while Basil decides to entrust us with his album.
Kel nonchalantly drops that Sunny is moving in three days… and Basil has a very strong reaction to this. When he excuses himself to the restroom, we can follow him (perhaps a demonstration of how close Sunny and Basil used to be is his lack of protest when Sunny enters to check on him… in the restroom). Here we see Basil enveloped by… Something. But it’s a different Something, definitely not the one-eyed apparition following Sunny around. Whatever this is, it’s obviously tormenting Basil. He did not know that Sunny is moving in three days and this newfound knowledge is somehow hurting him, to the point where he desperately pleads Sunny to help, somehow.
In response… Sunny leaves. He doesn’t even try to help and we’re not allowed to.
Every real world segment has a couple of plot points to move the game along but they all inevitably lead back to helping Basil. This puts yet another aspect of Headspace into sharp relief--Omori’s quest to rescue Basil now looks like it really doesn’t matter, for better or for worse. There’s a real Basil who needs real help, and the saddest thing of all is that Sunny won’t let us help him. Whatever the case may be at this time, it seems like only he can do it, and he isn’t ready to do so.
We leave his house, say goodbye to Kel, and go back home. This triggers the next nightmarish encounter with Something in the Walls. I’ll mention now that these choreographed dummy fights with Something are incredible at metaphor. Sunny not only needs to calm down to steel himself, but to focus. That giant spider isn’t as giant as he lets himself believe at first, and after the encounter is over, it reveals itself to be a regular sized spider in the field. In particular, a friend of mine really resonated with this fight, because she’s been in stressful situations where it seemed like she couldn’t do anything about it until she took a breather and let herself get a second look at it. It comes with the territory when dealing with trauma.
Sunny’s had a long day, and goes to sleep. At this point, we know that whatever happens in the dream world doesn’t help other people that really need it, but we know that Sunny is not in a good place mentally right now, so all we can do is hope his dreams give him the courage he needs to take a more active role the next day. Maybe then it will be worth it.
After entering, then leaving White Space, Omori is greeted by Aubrey, who lets us know she missed him and likes to think of herself as a couple with him. This is because the game is good at making you care about Aubrey in the real world--this Aubrey is a years old, shallow version of a younger real world Aubrey, and the contrast here is too depressing to think about. Sunny knows how Aubrey really is now, at least in the present day. Does he prefer Aubrey this way? Does he prefer all of his friends to be like how he remembers them four years ago?
As we move on and proceed to explore Pyrefly Forest, we’re invited to think about it.
The Pyrefly Forest Arc
This next segment is pretty memorable. We see the Fear emotion on another party member, Hero, and learn to fight without a healer as we fight the many spider-themed enemies. We find a bear NPC who is actually a very tough enemy, several more of which appear in the castle ahead. The sprout moles end up having an amusing civilization, like this game’s equivalent of Mr. Saturn from the EarthBound games, so they’re not just a cute enemy.
And Sweetheart--well, she’s one of the most popular characters in the game for a reason. Her digitized laugh, her self-absorbed personality, her legion of obsessed fans, her castle radiating elaborate Revolutionary Girl Utena vibes which also worships her image to an absurd degree, and her wanton cruelty with which she regards everything around her (especially her ex, Captain Spaceboy) make her an incredibly entertaining antagonist. The castle segment kicks off with her desiring Hero, only to take his rejection so badly she literally locks the party in the dungeon. After an elaborate adventure to escape, Sweetheart resolves that the only way to be happy is to marry herself, and her boss fight is prompted when Hero reasserts his rejection when she reconsiders him. Her boss theme, “World’s End Valentine”, is by far the most popular track in the game, perfectly matching the chaotic energy of a fast, critical-hit-happy boss fight who can either miss and keep your party going or toast your members instantly. It also helps that it’s eurobeat, which is oddly absent in many RPG fights against nobles like lords or madams or queens and such--you’d think it would be more prevalent given how European-inspired most anime princesses are.
That said, even now, at the midpoint of the game, Headspace begins widening the cracks in its surface. If we take a detour in Pyrefly Forest, we can find a creepy NPC who is thinking what we must also be thinking: that this wonderful and fun dream journey is ultimately all a big distraction from facing some horrible truth that Omori and Sunny don’t want to confront. A Sprout Mole’s drawing, a dark entity who granted Sweetheart her wish, and Something all contribute to the growing sense of unease regarding the dream world. Eventually Sweetheart herself opens the cracks for Omori when she loses and leaves with Space Husband, opening the Lost Library. It’s a collection of Sunny’s memories, with the names blotted out but easily recognizable by their context and the amount of characters each name has (Sunny is the one with one square, since we can name him whatever we want). Warm memories, sad memories, frustrated memories… Sunny hides them all from the rest of Headspace. Whatever is going on here, he doesn’t want to let the rest of the dream inhabitants know. Not even the dream versions of his friends, who somehow can’t follow Omori despite falling down the same hole he did. The library is sad and lonely, punctuated by the theme music, one of the best in the whole game at tugging your heartstrings.
As much of this dream world is a distraction, it also seems to be therapeutic for Sunny in a way. Omori’s journey led him here, and maybe uncovering these hidden memories is what’s needed to help him gain courage for whatever’s next after waking up.
Or, you know, gaining courage to stab yourself awake again. Maybe it was that.
TWO DAYS LEFT...
The “Two Days Left…” segment skews the real world and Headspace ratio a bit. This time Sunny doesn’t spend that much time awake versus Omori spends time in his dreams. Sunny helps Kel buy food for Hero’s return from college and they look for Basil afterwards when Polly asks them about him. Following the sound of his voice, they track him and Aubrey’s gang down in an abandoned clearing that is a clearer basis for the playground in Headspace than the nearby park was. Kel drops that it was the friend group’s old hangout spot. The fight against all of the hooligans isn’t really meant to be won, since you’re fighting against six people with only two (if you let Sunny steal from Kel’s mom’s purse, you monster, you can win the fight immediately with pepper spray, however, which is similarly realistic). What happens next is more important, though.
When her gang leaves her alone with Kel and Sunny, in her frustration with the two of them repeatedly bothering her, she pushes Basil into the lake. She’s shocked, she didn’t mean to do it, but this forces Sunny to go in after Basil to try to save his life since he can’t actually swim.
Unfortunately this resurfaces Sunny’s fear of drowning, so when Sunny goes under the water, Basil is nowhere to be seen and he has an encounter with Something in the Water. After learning to calm down and focus, Sunny learns to persist, as he slowly rises back up to the surface. Since there’s nothing to “confront”, it’s the only eventuality he can rely on, and all he can do is hold on until then. Sunny sees a vision of Mari saving him, but when he comes back to the surface, he sees Hero for the first time in real life. Even if Kel said his name came from a sandwich, he really lives up to his name after saving not only Sunny but Basil too.
After dropping off Basil at his house, we have dinner with Hero and Kel at their house. Even though it’s his first day back home, he eventually asks to go over to Sunny’s house, pointing out that he’ll be around for the immediate future but Sunny is going away in a couple of days. Upon entering Sunny’s house, the group reminisces about the times they spent in it. I want to mention that this scene can feel realistically tense--while Kel mentioned the previous day that Mari’s death put him in a bad funk for almost a year, and that he eventually did get better, there’s a palpable fear of a relapse. If you have Hero in your party during this day, attempting to visit Mari’s grave will have him sadly state that he’s not ready to see her yet. Yet here he is at his old possibly-lover’s house (it’s practically official but nothing about their relationship is actually explicit). How will he react to anything in the house that reminds him too much of her?
Well, Hero goes into Mari’s piano room and just starts playing a nice song. We feel relief: Hero really has gotten better. The boys all sleep in Sunny’s room shortly thereafter, though not before Sunny sees a vision of Mari in the master bedroom. Hero is obviously not completely over Mari’s passing, and Sunny clearly isn’t either. But for now, Hero seems in a better place than Sunny.
Sunny, at this point, is probably very aware of how much he needs his friends. It’s worth noting that this is the first night where he doesn’t encounter Something in his house--even if on a gameplay level this is simply because he encountered it while in the lake, the most danger Sunny perceives himself to be is a mirror jumpscare. They can certainly scare us, but they generally don’t buckle down Sunny the way a proper encounter does. The air around Kel and Sunny sleeping with a small lamp on is nothing but warm and comfortable. Sunny, for once, can get to sleep feeling like he’s safe, maybe for the first time in years.
This series of events goes by quicker than the previous day’s. There’s only a couple of mandatory fights, with the hooligans and Something, and that’s really it. While the previous day’s real world segment did a lot of heavy lifting regarding establishing what Sunny’s town and friends are like now, the focus is more on Hero this time. In general, Hero as a character is there less to be interesting and deep (though he definitely is, just not quite as much as the rest of the group) than he is to be an inspiration. Sunny and Omori both have a very high opinion of him, and seeing someone who Kel told us has gone through a lot of turmoil as a result of Mari’s death being able to sit in Mari’s piano and not collapse into a regressive despair is honestly inspiring.
The next dream world segment begins, and this time it’s on a melancholic note. For the first time, we see both Sunny and Omori together in White Space. Himself how he truly is, and then the persona he travels as in his dreams. Omori gently touches Sunny’s forehead and the latter vanishes. We’re Omori again.
For the longest time we’ve thought that Omori was just Sunny, but in his dreams. This throws that into consideration, as he is now confirmed to be some separate entity, though obviously informed by Sunny as a person and how he views himself.
Either way, when he starts on this dream segment, he’s alone. This is notable because this is the first time a dream starts in somewhere besides White Space: right in the Neighbor’s Room. So Omori clearly wants company but Aubrey, Kel, and Hero are nowhere to be seen, and neither are any of the playground kids. It’s so lonely that, depressingly, Omori can go play hide-and-seek with himself through a mirror you find after it moves around the playground. But going further north leads him to Mari. She says “I’m so glad you found me.”
This is the first time in the whole game where Mari in Sunny’s dreams isn’t on a picnic blanket. She follows Omori as the two of them look for their friends in the water, now that Omori is no longer afraid of drowning. As we explore the melancholic and mysterious foggy boardwalk, she’s gently encouraging.
However, she also becomes the first major character to explicitly point out that there’s something they don’t want to confront. The game heightens our concerns from implicit to explicit--it’s now something the game is going to deal with. But since this is patient, kind, and considerate Mari we’re talking about, she leaves Sunny to figure out how to confront it moving forward…
...not Omori. Sunny.
Staying in this dream world is something Sunny consented to, by letting Omori make Sunny vanish. But deep down Sunny and Omori, if they really are different, both know that Sunny is ultimately the only one who can make the next big step. For now, though… it’s a bit late for that. So we’re stuck in this dream adventure for the next few hours.
The Deep Well Arc
“Stuck” is a good way of putting it. Frankly, the upcoming Last Resort and Humphrey arcs are some of the most divisive in the game. On one hand, they definitely have several entertaining moments in them, and provided you’re not “trying to get the game over with”, they can be pretty satisfying to finish since there’s a lot to them. On the other hand… well we just saw what preceded it. Lingering in this dream world isn’t going to solve anything, so having arguably the longest dream segment placed here has understandably given mixed feelings to many players.
I’ll say my piece. I’ve seen other players understandably annoyed that once again, Sweetheart is a focus in this section. After Three Days Left anticlimactically ended with Sweetheart and Space Boyfriend getting together again (he becomes Space Husband, even), here in Two Days Left it’s revealed pretty quickly that Sweetheart once again broke up with him. She decides that, because she’s perfect, to commission a clone of herself so she can marry it, which is entertaining, but Omori decides to chase after her to stop her from doing so… just because, it seems.
The way I see it, that’s the point. Sunny and Omori know staying here longer isn’t the best course of action, but it’s not that easy to just immediately make the right decision. It’s fairly realistic to expect a traumatized kid to have a hard time letting go of their escapism, even when they know clearer than ever before that it isn’t actually helping with his friends by his side again. That clarity, ironically, makes this adventure intentionally shaky.
Mari comes back, even though we saw her leave in a sad farewell scene, almost because Omori wants to forget that happened. Yet this same Mari also reminds Kel, once he’s reunited with Omori, that this whole quest was to find Basil, which he and the other members apparently completely forgot about. This sinister hint that not only does Omori not want to rescue Basil but actively resents having to be reminded of it grows more and more between the Last Resort and Humphrey. And so Omori just keeps exploring Headspace further and further with almost no concern for Basil whatsoever and comes up with flimsy scenarios and reasons for letting the adventure continue at all. At this point, we and Omori and Sunny are painfully aware that this whole dream journey doesn’t matter. There’s a real Basil who needs real help. But Headspace is this tantalizingly wonderful and beautiful and creative place of retreat. When you’re so anxious about the real world that you don’t even step foot outside of your house for years, what better lie could you hope to believe in? The lie you tell yourself when there’s actually Something more important to confront?
And so the Last Resort and Humphrey are both long, involved dungeons, with an escalating sense of challenge and complexity. One is a challenge as you initially start off with only Omori and Kel, and then you regain Aubrey pretty late, and regain Hero only right before the boss rush against Jawsum and Pluto Expanded. Then in Humphrey, infamously, there are three branching paths to elaborate puzzle and enemy sections, one of which has three branching paths inside of it too! Most concerningly, the fight against Humphrey is one of the longest and most terrifying bosses in the game, as it constantly devours your party more and more and more and it’s… it’s so depressing and incredibly concerning that, whatever the truth is, Omori prefers fighting Humphrey.
In other words, this entire dream section has a consistent running theme: avoidance. While Headspace is generally Sunny’s world of escapism, this time there’s a very proactive effort to forget about Basil.
There’s this multicolor coral reef teleporter maze between the Last Resort and Humphrey called the Deeper Well filled with NPCs that more explicitly draw attention to Sunny and Omori’s repression, and, most concerningly, that it’s happened in a cycle that’s implied to have gone on for years and years and years.
As moody as this section is, it’s only foreshadowing the real elephant in the room: Black Space.
The only way to access this place is by finding hangman keys around the world, which is only possible if you’re as willing to linger around in this dream world as Omori is. But it’s also where the time in this entire dream world ends. Once Omori enters, the Deeper Well says, the world can’t be the same anymore. There’s no going back to it. If players are annoyed with this segment for seeming like it’s getting in the way, the solace that at least there’s keys to find in the new areas is something of a bandage on their concern. Whatever Black Space is, it’s clearly incredibly important given how ominous the hangman game to activate it is. It’s as good a place as any to get Sunny to wake up, in more ways than one.
Black Space
The opposite of White Space, which is the place of nothingness, Black Space is the place of everything. The very depths of Sunny’s mind are home to the darkest and most unnerving scenarios in the game. In this, the game seems merciful: in the Yume Nikki Nexus-style hub room, only a few doors need to be entered before proceeding. But if your morbid curiosity got the better of you like it did with me, you end up doing every single door before the red one. Anyone else can bail the first opportunity they can.
Haunted landscapes, like black-and-white towns, deserted beaches, forever-looping voids of glitchy tiles… Black Space doesn’t pull any punches. Here, the game lets us go wild with interpreting Sunny. As lucid and lurid as these landscapes are, it’s all ultimately the absolute rawest essence of what Sunny feels about everything. The room with the telephone and tally marks in the background, for example, feels like the bottled up anxiety and stress over the fact that he now has a time limit when it comes to moving away, like he needs to do something else first. The beach features Omori scribbling out photographs on the ground when he interacts, like the idea of suppressing and erasing memories is similar to a relaxing day at the beach in terms of the peace he believes it brings Sunny.
Then there’s everything with Something. Unlike some of the landscapes, Something here is pretty difficult to interpret. While it can seem like an antagonistic force, a few rooms feature it and Mari interchangeably, which is concerning, and one room in particular is chilling. After wandering through a distorted tileset map of a black and white backyard, Omori can become followed closely by Something as it starts talking for the first time. All it says is “Sunny… I love you…” as you leave after obtaining the room’s key. In short, as terrifying as it can be, it’s difficult to judge if Something is truly bad despite being a constant source of scares.
The sheer grotesque violence on display here is aimed almost exclusively toward Basil. Basil was supposedly the reason Omori set out on his journey in the first place, yet as we “finally” find him many different times, he dies over and over and over again. More than half the time, Omori is the one leading him into scenarios that result in his death, the absolute most distressing one being where Basil is beaten to death by nightmare versions of Hero, Kel, and Aubrey--I made the GIF but elected not to show it as this section is unsettling enough. The elevator and raft deaths have an eerie connection, however, as both happen while Basil was about to tell Omori something. Does Sunny hold a deep resentment toward him? And is Basil dying purely for attempting to explain the possible reason?
Many of the rooms without Basil or Something instead feature a character named the Stranger. They’ve shown up before and it’s been heavily hinted that they were related to Basil, and considering that Stranger here seems to act independently from the dream version of Basil, it’s not hard to suppose something supernatural is going on with him. The Stranger constantly talks to Sunny, not Omori, and constantly implores him that denying what happened, whatever it is, and keeping themselves to this dream world will only hurt not only Sunny but the real Basil in the long run. The Stranger seems to hold knowledge of the truth, which, from Sunny’s perspective, may be the most terrifying thing about Black Space.
This is most likely why, after the Stranger merges with Basil in the red door, Omori ends up killing him with his own knife. Avoidance in the most violent manner possible.
Black Space’s hub has hard-to-see inhabitants that have the same “shadow with white eyes” look as Stranger, and they all predict, sadly, that “the boy will be killed yet again”. They remark that this has happened several times before, which may make our hearts sink. Even going to this deep, dark part of Sunny’s brain doesn’t seem like it could be helpful for him. If going through all this effort to get him to face his darkest thoughts hasn’t helped Sunny before… what will? As shocking as it is in the moment to see Omori rip Basil apart with his Hands-kun before stabbing him, in hindsight it makes a morbid amount of sense. Omori absolutely, positively does not want this dream world to end--not the Vast Forest or Otherworld or Pyrefly Forest or Deep Well, but the idea of being Sunny’s avatar of his escapism. Basil existing in Sunny’s dreams, knowing that Basil is connected to Something, is a constant threat to this fake peace. The cycle must continue, it is what Sunny knows, and given the implication Black Space has given us by now that Omori acts somewhat independently of Sunny, it may just be what Omori thinks is best for him. So Basil dies.
As scary as Omori has become, though, he’s solely an avatar of Sunny’s when he dreams, as far as we know. The question then becomes… does Basil have to die in the real world? Where it truly counts? Where... Sunny may finally stop avoiding the issue after all?
The one reprieve from Black Space is that clearing it got Sunny to finally wake up (the one time we wake up without a stab, we still needed to stab ourselves in the mandatory and morbid Mewo dissection room anyway).
We hear piano coming from downstairs, and Sunny sees Mari playing on it. She explains that the song she played all the time was for their recital, and she’s sorry that her perfectionism meant that she locked herself away for long periods of time. For the first time, we learn this perfectionism may have affected Sunny, as well, through Mari apologizing for pushing him so hard. If Mari really is the inspiration for Something, then Mari’s kindness and remorse here may inform Something seemingly switching between harming Sunny (the phobia fights) and helping Sunny (the voice during the fights who helps Sunny get over his fears).
Hero comes in and Mari disappears. He talks about Mari with us and scoots us off the bed. The most notable thing here is that he claims to have heard a piano… meaning Sunny may not have just been imagining things.
ONE DAY LEFT...
The game completely stops being an RPG now. As fun of an RPG as Omori has been, much of the depth toward the battle system in the dream world was only an extension of Sunny's escapism. After Black Space, it's not going to be easy to retreat back into his dream world like nothing happened, and it wouldn't be productive even if it was possible. It’s also why the alternate route, where Sunny doesn’t answer the door on Three Days Left, is focused much more on the RPG side of things. Right now, though, the important thing is that the change from “typical RPG” to “exploratory character study” has irreversibly gone into full effect. Completing Black Space means no turning back, in more ways than one.
Right now, the character we're studying is Aubrey. After a tip from Kim, the boys head on over to her residence: a sad, neglected, trash-filled house with a drunk mother who seemingly completely ignores whatever Aubrey is doing.
We’ve talked about the level of detail in the Faraway Town houses and how they tell us so much about its residents. Just looking around then, without needing Aubrey to say that much when the boys find her, we learn so much about why she turned out the way she did, especially if this was the way she lived even as a small child four years ago.
Kel, Hero, and Aubrey have a heart-to-heart as Sunny watches, and they all put the rest of the photos into the album, save for one. The photos missing from the album before all pictured Mari, and now we have the biggest picture of how Sunny’s life was like back then. It’s far more honest than the Headspace photo album we saw, featuring tons of extra detail that show all the kids as fully three-dimensional people, getting along with each other in a realistic and down-to-earth way.
Aubrey apologizes, but Hero reminds her that it's Basil who needs to hear it, so she resolves to do so next chance she gets. After letting her gang know she’s okay, we can visit Mari’s grave now that all four of the dream world counterparts are all together. Though nothing major is revealed here, it’s still moving to see Hero finally visit Mari and for us to have our first real world picnic. Dream world picnics aren’t a thing anymore, so we’ll need all the strength we can get for whatever’s about to happen next.
Basil isn’t home, he’s visiting his grandmother who’s in intensive care, so while we wait we resolve to check out Sunny’s treehouse. As sad as the emptiness of the real world counterpart to the Neighbor’s Room is, and as ominous as Sunny finding the toy box key is (not that he doesn’t tell anyone that he found it), the important thing to take away is that Aubrey sincerely feels bad for what she did, even if she had her reasons. Of note is that while she pours her heart out and collapses to the ground in remorse, Kel and Hero rush to her while Sunny backs away. The meaning behind this doesn’t become clear until hours later, but for now it foreshadows that Sunny is at least partially conscious of something that not even the journey to Black Space made clear to him. When the big group hug happens, Hero has to literally push Sunny to join in, and the pic makes it clear it was pretty sudden for him, like he didn’t expect to join in despite everything.
Now that time has passed, Aubrey reiterates that they need to be there for Basil, because she's grown enough over the past few days to realize her sense of morality had blind spots. Aubrey is great because despite her actions we understand exactly where she's coming from, and she comes to understand with the help of her former friends that she needs to look at things from a more compassionate angle. And so after the group hug she reiterates that we need to see Basil both so she can apologize and for everyone to be there for him.
We enter his house now that he’s finally home. He’s locked the door to his room and won’t come out, and as worried as everyone is, they decide to wait for him until he’s finally ready to leave his room, so they sleep over. This means… it’s time to enter Sunny’s dreams again.
This time, Sunny is himself. Not Omori. He even enters White Space and walks right past him, and shatters the dark light bulb, making a decision to face what’s contained within, whether he’s ready to or not. Something awaits. Unlike past encounters, Sunny doesn’t start off in Fear. He's going to face this with as much resolve as he can.
The boss fight against Something, cycling through it's normal form and its Dark, Walls, and Water forms, perfectly captures the sense of unearthing a long and deeply held trauma. Even after we remember how to respond to every form in order, the fight eventually progresses past the Water form. We know Something is related to Mari, but now we finally see that it is Mari… her hung corpse.
Seeing Mari’s corpse like this is upsetting to the point that Sunny feels like his life is in danger upon focusing on the image for the first time. After getting Sunny to calm down enough to finally gather the courage to overcome, we get past the fight... but at this point we know this isn’t all there is to it. Basil in Sunny’s dreams keeps asking him if he’ll forgive him, and Sunny switches between being comforted by Mari’s presence to being terrified of Something’s presence. This wouldn’t really be happening if the sole source of Sunny’s trauma was simply witnessing Mari’s dead body. And that’s what Sunny ventures into his mind to find out and remember, once and for all.
The Truth
If the Black Space rooms were great at telling us how Sunny feels about himself while Omori did what he could to prevent some unseen truth from truly surfacing, then with Omori out of the picture we can truly see how he feels about it. The rooms here are utterly uncompromising as they make you gather photos for a brand new photo album… one detailing Sunny’s memories of what happened the day Mari died. Every single time you pick up a photo, you’re prompted to put it in the right place, as the horror gradually sets in. It’s more terrifying than all the grisly mutilation Sunny goes through as he feels each photo literally destroying him, eventually causing him to leave bloody footprints wherever he walks.
It's hurting Sunny so much because, while the photos are gotten out of order, that doesn't mean the order we do find them in isn't deliberate. It's done to give the feeling of dancing around a realization as it creeps up on us.
This first major photo we find gets us to start suspecting that it wasn't a suicide because we know Mari was found outside hanging herself in her backyard… so why would she ever be laid at the bottom of some stairs…?
The next group of photos. We put them in the right place. They relate to whatever took place after Mari laid at the bottom. She was seemingly carried upstairs, then downstairs… but we can also see through the empty spots that something happened before Mari laid at the bottom...
This broken violin is also at the bottom of the stairs, but its place is quite a bit before Mari laid at the bottom...
This photo may seem a little relieving at first, like she got up, but no. Its place is before she laid down… but it’s after the violin photo.
...We can figure it out. We don’t want it to be true.
This photo is gotten immediately after, the game unconcerned about our mounting fear.
Finally, we find the photo confirming our fears. It’s the photo so suppressed that we need to screw in a light bulb we got earlier upon getting past Something to finally see it, and the only photo that prompts us with the question of picking it up:
It wasn't suicide.
Sunny… was only twelve years old.
We started this segment thinking it was going to just be a vivid memory of Sunny and Basil discovering Mari's suicide. Instead… we learn of their role in staging Mari's suicide.
The remaining photos are gotten in chronological order. The photos are taken from Basil’s perspective, and in the 15th photo (the first one listed above, the others are the 20th, 21st, and 22nd respectively) you see his arms grabbing Sunny, who looks completely out of it. Judging by how all photos from then on involve him and Sunny going outside...
Basil came up with the idea to frame the events as a suicide. He helped Sunny cover up his accidental murder of the most important person in the entire world to him and his friends.
They were twelve.
They were only twelve.
Sunny wakes up. It’s still nighttime… but now we know. We know what Sunny has to say to Basil, now that we know exactly what he and Sunny have been haunted by for four long years.
The game has a few alternate endings depending on what we do here. You can go back to sleep and forget about what Sunny remembered, or you can straight up run all the way back home. None of these options are good. They're seemingly only here because the game wants to pay respect to Sunny's desire to run away after remembering clearly for the first time in four years what he did.
Who wouldn't want to run away? How could anyone be strong enough to own up to doing something like that? To have killed someone who meant so much to you, who meant so much to your closest friends?
But the thing is, Sunny also clearly remembers that this isn't solely his cross to bear. Basil was involved… and Basil needs help. Helping him is the last available choice, and the only correct one.
Pain, and relief from pain, is a big theme in Omori. What happened four years ago caused everyone deep, deep pain, and what made it hurt all the more was that everyone in Sunny's group decided to separate and deal with it in their own way, in private. This didn't work, to put it lightly. Healing and moving on from the incident requires everyone coming back together, but the biggest obstacle to that is that one of the people hurting the most is also unambiguously the most culpable for it. Yet coming forward would, and will, cause it to hurt much more and on such an intense level as to scare them into inaction.
What Sunny woke up from explains the cycle. Sunny is in pain, and seeks relief. Yet, the relief is only temporary. To completely address it, however, would potentially cause much more pain than Sunny can handle. It can even kill him.
Sunny can't do this by himself. But, either by luck or by providence, he doesn't have to. He has us. If we guide him to Basil’s door, then he really can rely on us.
I haven't talked too much about Basil until now, so I'll mention that he's an excellent example of a damsel-in-distress character. Basil can't seek therapy because he's protecting someone else, and confessing what he and Sunny did would jeopardize Sunny, cause him and Basil's arrest, or both. Basil might not even care about getting arrested, but he clearly doesn't want anything bad to happen to Sunny, so he shoulders their shared pain. He has to because, from his perspective, Sunny has not done anything about this for the longest time. This has thoroughly broken him after so many years of bottling everything up, with no realistic way of any sort of release, since the one person he can talk about this with has avoided him for as long as possible until the past few days. In other words, Basil truly, genuinely can't be saved by anyone other than Sunny.
Saving Basil
The prompt mocks us. We know what happened the last time we said yes. But we were Omori back then. We're Sunny now. Given the gravity of the situation, the answer is still clear.
Basil’s not well. His grandmother passed away, she didn’t make it. We now see all too plainly why he can’t tell Polly how he truly feels, so she can’t help him. The only person in the whole world who can help him is Sunny… and he’s about to move away forever.
We learn why Basil helped Sunny with what he did: Basil literally can’t comprehend that Sunny would ever do such a thing. Even now, he claims Something stood behind Sunny and made him do it. Sunny’s a good person, he says, so this can be the only explanation for why it happened.
Basil yells that it’s not fair for Sunny to leave tomorrow. Despite Sunny's decision to visit him, now that his door is unlocked, his feelings of betrayal are too strong. Basil's Something emerges, and Sunny's Something returns to prevent us from leaving--which he will try to do regardless of our input on him.
Sunny met with Basil to help him, but the ugliness of the truth that created their Somethings is too overpowering, and all of Basil's pent up feelings of being trapped by covering for his best friend are spiraling out of control, consuming him.
Basil's Something is as symbolic to him as Sunny's Something. Basil's Something covers the area all around him, preventing him from taking a step forward no matter which direction he goes in. One of Basil’s most common sayings is “There’s no way out of this, is there?” Basil, for the last four years, has been completely trapped in this situation. And it attracts itself to him, rather than haunting him from a distance, because this situation was itself born from his own decision. Sunny made a horrible accident, but Basil made the active decision to help Sunny cover it up. All those mouths in Basil's Something show how this decision constantly threatens to completely consume him.
But as trapped as Basil feels, he deludes himself into thinking he can make the next step. Basil declares that he won't let Something hurt Sunny, that he will get rid of Sunny’s Something once and for all.
Violently.
The Sunny and Basil fight is difficult to watch. For the first time in the whole game, Sunny’s calm down, focus, persist, etc. skills don’t work at all. Even compared to finally remembering what Something’s shape was supposed to be, this is on a whole other level of stressful. Sunny's usual tactics for dealing with his own Something can't adequately address the situation Basil put himself in to create his Something.
The entire time, the energy meter from Headspace makes a dark return as a heartbeat monitor. As the fight progresses, and Sunny earns 10 energy, the lines spell out “Everything is going to be okay.”
Sunny’s fear magnifies into being Stressed Out. The literal only option left is to lash out because he and Basil don’t know what else to do with the latter not in their right mind.
The situation looks absolutely helpless and everything is utterly panic-inducing. Under the delusion of trying to fight each other’s Somethings, they only give each other the beating of a lifetime.
They pass out, and we hear an ambulance.
ENDING MOMENTS
One final dream.
After Sunny buckled under the unfathomable pressure of the Basil confrontation, he imagines himself finding his way home. We finally get to see what it was like before everything was packed away, which is a huge treat, but more importantly all the flavor text is now in first-person, not second-person. Sunny is talking and thinking to himself what everything was, as honestly as he can with himself.
Considering what Sunny finally remembered, after locking it away within his mind for so long, this honesty will be very important when Sunny decides what to do next. The ambulance we heard means that Sunny and Basil will both likely come out of their fight alive, so the inevitable consequence to face when Sunny wakes up will be explaining why the fight happened in the first place to the people he cares about. This is why Mari is found inside--she acknowledges the past few days have been hard for him, but she reassures him that he’s worked hard to get to this point. Owning up to what he did will be tough, and Sunny knows it, but he can do it, she believes in him.
While Omori is a game that neither confirms nor denies that anything supernatural is going on with Something, it heavily implies that the meetings with Mari in Headspace before the Deep Well arc, after Black Space at night, and this part right now are Mari’s spirit communicating with Sunny directly. If this is the case, then the sum of what Mari has been trying to tell Sunny is that… she’s sorry. From her perspective, her death was a combination of her perfectionism getting the best of her and Sunny making a fatal mistake in the heat of the moment. On her end, she believes that Sunny resented the times when she locked herself away as she tried to perfect her music, because Sunny loved spending time with her. And the thing is… you don’t love spending time with someone you would get so angry with that you would kill them in the heat of the moment. It’s quite the opposite--Sunny took up an instrument so that he could spend time with Mari even as she practiced. It’s clear that Mari, despite losing her life, doesn’t hold it against Sunny, and just wants him to own up to what he did before it consumes him forever.
Speaking with Mari is what allows Sunny to finally see the closet door we’d been hearing so much about. We’ve remembered, it’s in the toy box.
His violin. His instrument of spending more time with his sister, broken into pieces marking the day his mistake took her away. The day the pressure of playing well to keep up with her, for her, finally became too much, and he lost himself and his sister in his frustration.
The violin was locked up because Sunny would have rather run from his mistake than to make it better. But now, he picks it up and ventures out onto Memory Lane to heal.
Before the Basil fight, Omori hit us with the worst memory Sunny could ever remember to show him that he needs to do something about it. Deciding to meet Basil, even though it went badly, means Sunny did want to make a step in that direction. These happy memories, so much more fully realized than anything the photo album showed us in Headspace when Sunny was still running from what he did--they give him the strength to keep moving forward. Because he really did feel this good, and his friends really did mean the entire world to him.
It’s true that he will always treasure his time with his friends, and it’s true that, more than anything, Sunny wants this back. So he has to try to get that back.
The game text informs us that reliving each memory mends the violin, up until it’s finally completely repaired. But obviously it’s Sunny himself who’s healing, after going four years of feeling either nothing or feeling fear, because feeling anything wholesome after so much time closed off is what he needs. The game lets us bask in each of these memories for as long as we want to, even providing save points within a few of them if we really do need that much of a breather. Sunny can use all the positivity he can get, so there’s no rush on our part.
On the day of Mari’s death, the two of them were going to attend a recital. So to give himself closure on the memory of his sister, Sunny imagines himself playing the song they used to play together all the time. He is supported by the memory of his friends from four years ago--not the shallow versions of them we saw in Headspace, but who they really were. Sunny is honest enough about his friends that they then become their present-day selves, and they’re who see Sunny off as he leaves backstage to meet the crowd.
Despite all of Sunny’s efforts to strengthen himself, his efforts to be honest with himself… he can’t do it. Not by himself. As strong as his memories were, they also reminded us that Sunny hated being alone, and he’s performing a song that’s meant to be a duet. With the other person absent, Sunny falls to the ground after a lonely performance and, as if by habit, retreats into White Space.
The Final Showdown
It used to be his sanctuary away from Headspace. When the dream worlds he created for years didn’t suit his need for escapism anymore, when they needed to be discarded, White Space was always there for him to feel comfortably numb. Unfortunately, this desire to never face the truth has lasted so long that it now threatens to take control of Sunny forever. So he does the only thing that can be done: confront the new king of White Space, Omori.
I waited until now to talk about Omori in-depth because Sunny's recent realization puts his time as Omori in his dreams in a depressing light. If Omori is who Sunny thinks himself as, then he's felt like a murderer who wields the emotions of people around him like tools to get what he wants. He's felt like someone who, whenever he lets himself feel anything, it's just to get the upper hand on someone. But we know this isn't true, so our last mission as the player is to get Sunny to overcome this image of himself, this version of himself that isn't really himself.
Omori is host to fights that test your emotional resolve on a literal level. We’ve already discussed the emotion system and the unique take on rock-paper-scissors it has. It was most likely how Sunny viewed his own emotions: weaknesses in himself and in others that he would inevitably, purposefully or not exploit to his gain. Sunny has grown enough to see that this isn't true, so the final showdown of the game doesn’t revolve around changing Omori’s emotions, or to make ourselves feel anger or happiness or sadness, or anything like that. It revolves around the temptation to feel nothing, to feel we deserve nothing, and to embrace the ultimate nothing. Sunny has brand new violin attacks to manage just for this fight because it represents his newfound resolve to face the truth, and his resolve is all Sunny has to face the epitome of his guilt for what he’s done.
Omori is finally talking and everything he says is an attack right in Sunny’s heart. Not in the mechanical way, though critical attacks will happen sometimes--they’re the most cutting and brutal things Sunny feels about himself because of what he did.
Even now, the game recognizes that all the strength Sunny managed to gather on his own, the strength he worked so hard for… it still isn’t enough. No matter how many times Omori is knocked down, he’ll never succumb.
Omori is uncompromising about how honest fighting your own trauma is. These thoughts will never go away. These thoughts will always be a part of you.
...but there’s strength, real strength, in the decision to keep going despite it all. All those happy memories, Sunny’s newfound resolve… the Game Over screen is where the real test lies.
Because Omori will not succumb… but that doesn’t mean Sunny has to, either. It’s his decision to make.
Whatever choice is clear--to continue or to end--will differ from player to player, depending on their mindset. The game makes its sole judgement of the player if they choose to end, leaving Omori to take over Sunny and commit suicide--it gets the Bad Ending label. Because while the game can be a tragedy, it’s only by our decision.
And so...
Trying to describe the beauty of what heppens next is… beyond me. It needs to be witnessed.
[Edit 6/21/22: I figured out how to describe it a few months later, after I originally finished this write-up, in case you have a moment to spare. I dunno why I took so long to link it, oh well.]
All we need to know is that Sunny’s memory of his sister will never fail to give him the strength he needs. He killed her, and we know he never meant to, because we know he truly loves her. This final certainty is what allows Sunny to finally forgive himself enough to embrace Omori, the part of himself that will always remind him of what he did, what he never ever meant to do, and wake up.
CONCLUSION
It is difficult to talk about Omori without trying to relate yourself to it in some way, due to the game's introspective nature. Right now, I count at least three video essays on YouTube detailing the uploader's own personal journeys with the game and how it resonated with them on a deep and personal level, and I could probably find more if I deliberately sought them out.
Omori is a game that tackles heavy themes like trauma, depression, and suicidal ideation through the lens of its protagonist and his dreams, his subconscious, and his guilt. It feels invasive on my part, like I'm intruding on other, more vulnerable people's space, when I feel a point of relation. But I'll let myself detail it:
Even before the incident, Sunny was very reserved. He usually hung around with the rest of the group because he did like their company, but would generally need a little push to do things with them. There's nothing wrong with that, especially when you have people who understand and try to involve you because they like your company regardless of any hesitance.
In other words, Sunny's friends go to him, they interact with him. But he doesn't do much back, and there's a sense of guilt about that that can eat you up inside if you let yourself feel bad about it. Omori used it against Sunny in his fight because it's natural fuel for how terrible of a person you can see yourself as if you let it get to you.
When Sunny finds himself in a situation after the incident where he is all alone, he doesn't let himself feel anything. Not that he can't, of course, the boss fights against the forms of Something prove he still feels fear. He does what he can to feel as little as possible, all to cope with what happened a long time ago.
When I was in middle school, I lost the close friendships I had in elementary school. As someone who has always had trouble making friends, I decided to feel as little as possible to cope with the loneliness. I made it through middle school with very few friends, and the ones I did make, I was not very close to. I didn't have any sort of smartphone to occupy myself with the way I do now, nor did I have constant uninterrupted access to the internet. I read books, I played games, I did everything to forget how lonely I felt.
After middle school, though, I did eventually learn to make friends again. When I did, though, I was still pretty aloof and hesitant to show any emotion. It wasn't until much later, after I made baby steps like initiating conversation about stuff I liked or responding to texts rather than pretending that I didn't see them, that I allowed myself to become honest on an emotional level again. I became openly enthusiastic about what I loved and more secure in sharing any personal troubles I was having trouble keeping to myself before.
When Sunny awakes from his dream fight with Omori, he opens his one working eye and, for the first time in years, he lets all his feelings pour out.
For me, this was the most emotional I felt playing the game. Here, we feel for Sunny because we learn about what he did only after we see the effects his actions had on him. We've seen how Mari's death affected his friends, but the effects on Sunny are utterly sobering. He decided to stop feeling for as long as possible. He felt that he didn't deserve to live. He stopped having real interactions in favor of imaginary ones. He felt guilt so palpable it took the form of a monster that haunted him even in the safety of his dreams for four long years. Sunny went through all this because he felt like the absolute scum of the earth for unintentionally snuffing out the most important person in his life.
But over the course of this entire game, we help him make good decision after good decision. We were with him as he chose to finally answer Kel's requests to meet us, as he made honest if imperfect efforts to leave his intoxicatingly comfy dream world behind, and as he visited Basil in the dead of night. We are nothing but proud of him.
It's not on anywhere near the same magnitude, but I relate to Sunny because I know how relieving it is to finally let yourself feel again after putting forth so much effort to do so. So that's my piece.
Sunny has grown so much the past few days that he ignores the hallucinations of the Headspace versions of his friends to follow The Stranger into Basil’s room. Trying to follow the friends prompts Sunny to do his Madotsuki-style head shake--they’re not who he needs to see.
Aubrey, Kel, and Hero huddle around Basil’s bed. They turn around to see Sunny enter, having actively sought them out, instead of them coming to him.
Sunny does the bravest thing he’s done in the entire game, and he does it unprompted without our help: he speaks, because he has something important to say:
...and the game rolls to credits, as a beautiful singalong song plays to show Sunny’s resolve to keep living no matter how hard it gets.
Omori knows how dishonest it would be to tell us that Sunny’s friends will absolutely, certainly, 100% forgive him. That’s not the point. All Sunny can do is forgive himself for what he did, because otherwise the guilt will eat at him for the rest of his life no matter where he lives, and we know how much of a toll it's had on Sunny already.
Maybe they will hate him, and the game does not do anything to say they won’t. Sunny's actions took away someone who Aubrey loved Mari like a big sister, and who Hero straight up loved. Because of Sunny closing himself off for years, Aubrey bullied the person she was friends with before she met him for years, and Hero mistakenly thought he was the single biggest reason for his loved one's death which couldn't be farther from the truth. And as understanding as Kel can be, there's no guarantee that he'll be as forgiving now. All three of them carried immense pain in their hearts, so who's to say that they'll forgive Sunny no matter how bad he felt about it?
But there’s hope. At the very beginning of the game, in Headspace, Omori is informed that he can keep watering Basil’s plants while he’s missing. He and his party members can gain extra max Heart for doing so, but the amount is so little that it’s easy to forget and ignore.
If we never forget about Basil, even as Omori and his friends do, by tending to his flowers the whole game, then we gain an additional scene after the credits.
Sunny and Basil look at each other, with their Somethings around them. Only, Sunny’s Something disappears behind him as he smiles, a very nice and genuine smile, for the first time in the whole game. Basil’s Something recedes into him, and he smiles back.
I got this scene when I first played the game, and considering just how much implied resentment Sunny held toward Basil, it speaks to the genuine possibility that, if Sunny was able to put it aside for Basil, then the others can come around too. It will take time, possibly even years. But in my heart, it will eventually happen.
Even as it cuts to credits before we know for sure, that there is the honest hope the game allows us to feel.
---
Omori has a second route to explore. I haven’t done so yet, but all you and I need to know about it is how you activate it: by ignoring Kel and going back to sleep when Sunny wakes up during the first daylight section. It focuses on the RPG part of Omori much more, including an unlockable boss rush and several unique boss fights, including this game’s superboss, Perfectheart. I know her boss fight includes managing the constant barrage of emotions inflicted on your party, so by defeating her, I suppose Omori can pretend he’s conquered these pesky emotions once and for all. There are also new areas to explore, including an even more intense version of Black Space where we can see Sunny’s rawest and darkest brain matter on display, and the scariest parts of the entire game are here.
At this point, we know for absolute sure that this isn’t best for Sunny. Even if he’s a fictional character, he’s real to me, and I don’t want to put him through that right now. Maybe later I’ll write about this route when I play for it myself. I won’t say it doesn’t sound interesting, at least.
I’ve seen people knock the game for this route, but again, it just makes sense why it wouldn’t be as satisfying as the main route. Without even going down the alternate route, I know it’s not supposed to be--you’re depriving Sunny of the help he needs by not answering Kel at the door.
---
This game took me on a journey I’ll never forget, and I can only hope that by going on and on about it at length, that you were able to see why I think so highly of it. At the end of the day, the game’s biggest strength isn't its wonderful visuals, excellent music, or fun gameplay--it's the wholehearted compassion and humanity it shows toward its characters and toward us.
Omori is my new favorite game. I hope you have a great day.
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