Welcome in Omikron.
A bit less than a year ago, I took an innocuous trip to a retro game store. I didn’t have any special pickups planned or anything, it was just something for me and my friends to do to burn time and maybe find something cool. However, we didn’t find something cool, we found Beyond Two Souls. My friends pushed me to join them and offer up my PS3 to play the game and it truly made for a memorable experience to say the least. Of course we then followed that up with David Cage’s other three story games as our little group expanded. While I think those four games definitely aren’t great, and that they definitely vary in quality, I can at least say they brought me a little bit of joy with their goofy moments. However, as our grand finale, we had to get together one last time and play his first game: Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
There was nothing goofy about Omikron.
Let’s start with the graphics, because jesus christ this game is ugly. Despite promising a big cyberpunk adventure, the world of Omikron is less Blade Runner and more Black Mesa, “Mesapunk” as my friends and I referred to it as. The color palette is incredibly drab and lifeless, covered in grim grays. Despite the game intending to show a big, bustling lived-in world, it feels so empty, which I’m sure was not intentional. The whole world feels artificial which is unfortunate when that’s a big marketing point for it. Admittedly there are a few inspired settings, I quite enjoyed the second zone, but for the most part the world is entirely soulless. The character design is pretty dreadful too, with bland humans or demons that aren’t disgusting enough to look cool but aren’t appealing enough to… Be appealing. That’s not even to mention the unnatural, lazy character animations and the poor shot composition of cutscenes. Even for the time these are lackluster, especially for a PC and Dreamcast game. By far the worst aspect of this game’s visuals is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen fail before, at least like this. The font. Legitimately, a huge chunk of this game’s writing, including required reading for puzzles, is in a borderline illegible font. Seriously, look up “omikron the nomad soul font” on Google Images, it’ll blow you away. There’s multiple points where you can buy books on the game’s lore, which is a really cool concept, but I legitimately didn’t want to just because so many were a headache to try to decipher. How do you even mess that up?
On the other end of aesthetics, the soundtrack for Omikron has received nearly universal praise… I don’t get it. The background tracks are horribly repetitive and dull. The music mainly fits into a bland ambiance that bores me to tears, only further creating the negative emotional aura this game gives off with the world design. When it is not that you, get tracks like the fight themes which are just grating. The worst it gets is with the theme of the Awakened Base in Jaunpur, which is a 90 second loop that plays EVERY MINUTE you’re in the area. The song is already a little annoying and repetitive, but when it’s in an area you visit CONSTANTLY it just gets infuriating!
The music isn’t just where the auditory issues end, because the sound design in this game is horrid. So many things in this game are just… Silent. I swear with how empty this game is you would think it’s a horror game. My favorite part is the sliders, vehicles which you can call upon for fast travel and even drive. These cars make no noise at all. None when they drive to you, none when you get in, and none when you get off. Great work everyone. The voice acting isn’t great, it could be worse, but it’s not good enough to invest someone playing. It’s also held back by your player character never being voiced! You just get this crappy wind sound whenever they talk as the dialog shows up in a tiiiiny spot in the bottom left corner. Because why should the most important character in the game talk, right?
But let’s be real, the acclaim for Omikron’s audio comes from David Bowie’s work. And it’s… Alright. I’m not deep into Bowie’s work but the stuff in this game feels more like B-sides than top tier compositions of his. All very okay and forgettable. You’re also only going to be hearing a few of his songs in the game, I think there are more but they’re stuck in optional concerts. It’s more than likely you won’t be going to them because that requires navigating in this game.
The bulk of The Nomad Soul is spent navigating the open world of Omikron. We’ve already gone over how it isn’t a very interesting world, but is going around it fun at least? No. First, let’s talk controls. They’re bad. The Nomad Soul is controlled entirely with tank controls. Tank controls may have been a pretty common standard at the time, however I still question their implementation here. I haven’t played a ton of late 90s adventure games, but I fail to see how this improves the game at all. Maybe due to the fact many PC players would be stuck on a keyboard? I have no clue, but it took quite a while to get used to how stiff the movement is. It’s workable but trying to turn around with your player character’s stupid slow half-steps is never not irritating. Sprinting makes it a little better, allowing you to cruise your character around, but it’s still not really ideal movement, especially in smaller rooms. Sure these aren’t the worst controls ever, but when the vast majority of the game is wandering around aimlessly it can only make things worse. Speaking of worse, that’s what this game continues to get when it starts expecting you to platform! It’s few and far between, but the slow, janky jump in this game is expected to be used to get you across platforms. It’s not fun. It has no momentum either so it just feels entirely dissatisfying, but you better not fail due to expecting that since this game has fall damage! Great! There’s also a handful of times you’ll have to swim, but they control sort of alright and never get you into situations where it’s likely you’ll drown. Not great, but I appreciate one of the few times this game doesn’t screw something up.
You may be thinking that I’ve forgotten to add any details on substance, and that’s because there is not any. The majority of this game is spent walking from Point A to Point B. And I’m not exaggerating. Sometimes maybe you’ll solve an annoying puzzle, usually one of the numerous ones involving translating symbols, but that’s it. There’s nothing exciting to the adventure gameplay, nothing that mixes it up and makes it engaging aside from the previously mentioned rare platforming and rosetta stone puzzle segments where you have to read off that awful font. This game’s main gameplay loop can basically just be summed up as following orders on where to walk and who to talk to, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. There is some other traditional gameplay here, so let’s talk about it.
Okay, so Omikron actually is split into three gameplay styles. There’s the third person adventure game segments, the fighting game segments, and the first person shooting segments. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “those sound like completely different concepts that don’t mix together.” Well thankfully, you’re right. It’s completely jarring, it’s not like Zelda where you pull out your sword and fight on the same overworld, the game will just pause and go “hey it’s time for a fight.” Not to mention that you basically have to familiarize yourself with two different genres on top of this game’s horrible excuse for main gameplay.
The worst of this is the hand-to-hand fighting game segments. Thankfully there is a free training room you can interact with at the beginning of the game, but unfortunately there isn’t really anything to learn. I think you can block, dodge, and you have four combat buttons you can mix up for moves I’m pretty sure? You may be wondering why I’m talking in such uncertainty and that’s because there’s no proper tutorial or training for how it works. I know that that could be seen as intrusive, but having something like that could possibly give us the chance for interesting gameplay. Plain and simply, you mash to win. There are, I think, a few combo moves you can use, but you’ll never actually have the chance to learn them unless you waste your time labbing in the training room. There’s no command list, it’s just “here’s the four attack buttons good luck.” Absolutely no motivation to get better is given, there’s probably less than twenty of these in the entire game and they last no more than two minutes. I would just throw myself at these and sometimes I would win getting hit twice at worst without even dodging or blocking, and sometimes I would be decimated without even getting the chance to respond. It’s an unintuitive crapshoot that feels like it was made by someone who’s fighting game experience was watching their friend play Mortal Kombat at an arcade ten years ago. It’s terrible and the only "compliment" I can give it is that there’s no actual difficulty scaling or anything, because being expected to learn this with absolutely zero information would be a nightmare.
A nightmare is a title more deserved for the shooting segments, because dear GOD who the HELL thought these were okay? First, you aren’t even given a chance to learn how to play these despite it being a completely different gameplay style. You’re thrown into the first two segments with enemies in your face, and you can die extremely quickly, but thankfully there aren’t really many consequences. We died pretty much instantly due to the controls. I played this game on Steam, and I just wanna say this port is a piece of crap. At one point our saved controls undid themselves, and playing these segments on controller is legitimately unplayable. Dual analog was never added, you’re stuck aiming with buttons, but that’s not the issue. The left stick is SO SENSITIVE that, no joke, even moving it as slow as possible and barely exiting the dead zone would cause my character to make a full rotation in only about a second’s time. So optimally playing this game is switching from controller to a mouse and keyboard whenever these segments pop up. Maybe it’s a good thing the change in gameplay is so jarring. However, the control issues do not end there. I had multiple times where going forward would just. Break. I would move for half a step and then just. Stop. For one section I had to have my friend help me dual hand the keyboard and mouse + the controller since we were far away from our last save point and couldn’t restart the game, which trust me WE’LL GET TO. Even when that wasn’t happening, the use button would just legitimately never work for us during shooting segments on keyboard. We would have to leave pressing A on the controller to someone else a lot of the time, and when you’re constantly being shot at that’s not a very good thing to rely on, especially if I were to be playing this game alone.
But whatever, when the controls actually worked, these sections were barely better than playable. First off, the working controls still aren’t great. You move like a car, with super fast top speed and incredibly slow acceleration, which makes strafing away from enemy attacks near impossible. Kidding of course, because often it just IS impossible. I had. COUNTLESS. Times where enemies would shoot from behind the crappy draw distance that wasn’t upped in the PC port either, enemies shooting me at first sight before it was even possible to dodge, and times where I’m running at max speed, going backwards, AND jumping and I get hit anyway. Getting through these shooting segments is often more of a test of endurance than anything. There’s no actual skill in gunplay, especially considering you’re limited to using one weapon for all of a segment and ammo management is stuck to “you have the good ammo you got elsewhere and then you run out and use the less good ammo.” There IS technically a second weapon, you get it early on even, but you either use one or the other in a section with the other basically being useless, and they behave basically identical. Why even have a weapon switch function if it’s useless? Oh wait, because it isn’t useless. There’s other weapons. Allegedly. You have to find them in the dumb as hell overworld optionally, but that requires actually being able to find things there, but, again, I’ll save that for later. Either way, the horrible enemy placement and dodging is not fun. This is only made worse by the actual level design in these segments too.
To be fair, not all of these segments are horrible. I’m sure one or two can be maybe mediocre if you love first person shooters even in their most poorly designed forms. However, when Omikron brings out complicated objectives, I start to get pissed. Here’s a list of some of my least favorites. Searching around a maze of rooftops for the rare few things you can actually interact with, where you’re constantly taking pot shots from offscreen enemies, especially if you aren’t just using someone else’s gameplay to tell you where to go. Going through a sewer WITH A TIME LIMIT to lay bombs on certain spots, where I’m pretty sure if you miss one you’re screwed (and also has a glitch where you'll just randomly die far into it that happened about five or six times for us). And the GOD AWFUL final boss where you’re expected to utilize the unusable strafing to circle around after stunning him and hit his back. I’m pretty sure those alleged other weapons don’t even work on him by the way so no hope in sweetening that deal. As far as I’m aware, because all footage I’ve seen of him does this and I had to do it as well to beat him in the second half of the fight, the only way to realistically beat this fight is to get him stuck on level geometry and abuse his AI to get behind him. What great game design where BREAKING THE GAME is the most well known method for fighting a boss. A lot of these segments, including ones I didn’t mention, feel as if they’re unplayable without having stocked multiple medkits before. I wonder if that’s why this game makes you have multiple saves, because this seems like a game where it would be VERY easy to hardlock yourself otherwise.
Anyway, now let’s head back to the main gameplay. A bit abrupt to go from completely different concepts and then back to wandering aimlessly right? Yeah, I know right, who would ever think of that. Now imagine this except without the first sentence, because there sure aren’t any transition cutscenes. Whatever, nitpicking. There’s another reason it takes up a majority of the game, in fact there’s a good chance this gameplay style could take up over 99% of your playthrough. Why? Omikron is, without any exaggeration, the most cryptic game I’ve played in my life. Now, I don’t instantly hate a game for being cryptic. A few of my favorite games of all time even have a moment or two where I feel it’s best to just look something up. However, let’s talk about why it bothers me less there. Mother I think has dungeon design that’s way too maze-like, so I feel it’s best played with a map on the side. Super Mario Sunshine has a handful of overtly obtuse blue coins for 100%, and I think it’s healthier to just look up the last few you’re missing at the end of the game. These games also make up for this by having actual gameplay. There’s no fighting enemies and for the most part no platforming in the adventure segments of Omikron, just walking.
Keep in mind Omikron is an open world game. The best way to describe the situations it puts you into to progress is a needle in a haystack. Here’s some specific examples I remember. Finding buttons that are almost identical in color to the wall they’re on. Having to use a random part an NPC that you may or may not talk to gives you on a random elevator despite them having no mentioned relation. Being expected to jump UP to a ledge to grab an item for the ONLY TIME you’re ever able to do that in the game. Using candles you got multiple hours earlier in the game to lay out in a summoning circle. And the most common, getting a random item and being expected to show it to someone on the other side of the map. Imagine a point and click game where you have triple the items, there’s fifty filler screens between each area, and what you can interact with isn't even emphasized objects or NPCs.
That’s not even to mention that this game has LIMITED INVENTORY, despite the fact that every single item that could ever possibly benefit you in combat being able to realistically fit in your inventory at the same time. So in reality this system only exists to give you that moment where you realize you can’t pick up an item and you have to go find a stupid PC to put your items up in. Ignoring that, the game’s gameplay loop just becomes following orders from a walkthrough due to how cryptic it is. “Go here and do this. Go here and get this item. Give this item to this person.” There goes your chance of getting lost in the world! Sometimes even a written guide isn’t enough, at one point the game deleted one of our addresses the sliders could take us to so we were forced to wander around for twenty minutes until we found out where to go! There is NO REASON it disappeared by the way, it just… Did. Why? What does that add? Was this an oversight? Did anyone even get this far in playtesting? That would certainly explain the final boss. There is no way in hell that anyone beat this game naturally, without a guide, and enjoyed it. How did anyone on the team think this was okay?
Thankfully, there is one saving grace Omikron has for navigation: the magic rings. Magic rings are a currency you can find throughout the world, and using them will give you advice. Is the advice good? I wouldn’t know, never used it. And it’s not because I didn’t want to, it’s because advice costs FIVE magic rings to use. Five FINE-ITE magic rings. I wanted to have as many as I could because they’re used to restart shooting segments… And to save. Yes. SAVING. THE GAME. IS A FINE-ITE RESOURCE. I repeat. SAVING THE GAME IS A LUXURY. Who the HELL thought this was good? What does it add to the experience? What does making it harder to progress and harder to SAVE THE GAME add to Omikron? Does it make it more fun? More challenging? Hell no! All it does is make it more tedious and frustrating to play. Not like that’s the only questionable rollout of items in the game either. Health packs are limited too unless you buy them, and there’s no way to do something like sleep to restore HP, but money is limited from finding it on the ground unless you do dumb minigames that thankfully I never had to do due to save scumming. Why was I save scumming? A lot of the time dying doesn’t result in loading a save or a game over but having your soul transferred. This makes you lose money, which can softlock you by the way! Again, what does this add? Why? At worst it softlocks you just like that, and at best it just lowers the stakes of fighting or shooting segments. There is just… No value here. The only, ONLY credit I can give to any of these three gameplay styles, is that occasionally you use the game’s nomad soul body changing gimmick to do something clever like possess a guard to escape a prison. That’s neat, but of course it’s both underutilized and limited by mana that you only need to stock up for by managing money for potions. Great!
So if the gameplay, music, and visuals suck, what is there to keep you playing? Well, there’s the story. I’ve actually seen some people online claim that the story is pretty interesting. Do I agree?
What the hell do you think?
Omikron starts in an admittedly intriguing way. With a man named Kale coming to you, the player, asking you to inhabit his soul and access the world of Omikron for some unknown reason. One of my main issues comes right here. This game’s soul hopping gimmick doesn’t give you a character to get attached to, it’s just you. If this game had a silent protagonist or something I could maybe roll with that, and while there are dialog options that would fit that, there’s snarky dialog describing characters and it just confuses me. Are they me or are they a character? The story revolves around them being me, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The characters in general are just so lacking. There’s so few recurring characters, and most of them just get dropped really quickly. First you’re working with the police, then you leave to be with the awakened, which is a cool concept I guess, but there goes your entire first cast of characters. Then most of the awakened get sidelined after you leave their original base, so who am I supposed to get attached to? It’s not like anyone is remotely charming or interesting anyway, the only one I even remember the name of is Soks and that’s because he’s a goofy robot, and as I mentioned earlier, Omikron always chooses not to be goofy!
One of my least favorite things about David Cage games is that they almost always choose to follow this dystopian, doomer atmosphere, which just makes the games come off like they really do think they’re high art despite there being nothing to analyze. There’s no humor or anything to ground you in the characters, because this game is so focused on showing you its epic and deep plot, which just makes it come off even more pretentious. And speaking of pretentious, Omikron is pretentious! I hear that word thrown around a lot with David Cage games, and while I do get that I can’t help but feel it’s a little exaggerated. Except with this game. Omikron has such poignant commentary like “the computer and the government is controlling us all and we need to become awakened.” Wow, so deep. That’s totally not saying the most surface level, unnuanced crap imaginable!
Where this game gets the most pretentious however is the meta elements. A major element of the plot is that Omikron is a game made by the villain to suck in the souls of gamers and use them. So, let’s talk about meta elements in fiction. I’d say there’s two types, one is where the game is built around “meta” ideas, let’s say saving loading, and resetting, but the story can function without you, the player, being an imagined concept in the game. On the other hand is a much more complex idea, one where you as the player existing and playing the game is a necessary aspect for the story, like if a character had an obsession with the person playing. The second is a lot harder to pull off, and ignorantly, Omikron chose that method. So this very world-shattering decision was made and… Nothing is done with it. They mention how no one else has gotten this far and has been destroyed or whatever, which instantly breaks any immersion with the fact you need a guide from another player to get through this game. There’s this horribly cringe-worthy dialog you can get where you mention how Omikron is just a game and an NPC goes “erm, actually, Omikron isn’t just a game it’s a real world you’re interacting with.” Come on, Even for ‘99 this was corny. Worst of all though, nothing is done with this. No interesting ideas are raised, it just pays lipservice to being a commentary on video games or general media and does nothing with it. It’s just. Meta to be meta. Subversive to be subversive. So epic...
Not like the actual story is anything to ride home about anyway. The first part is a mystery about what’s really going on, but after you hear Big Bad's name and join The Awakened you do crap like spread radio waves about le truth and blow up a random bridge like that’s gonna do anything. It really just feels like filler, doing random missions that mean nothing over and over again between the constant handing off of random items to random NPCs in random places. The plot meanders until eventually you get a few back-to-back epic Omikron lore drops and are allowed to fight the final boss. An underwhelming story full of missions would maybe be fine if there were interesting characters, fun scenarios, or, you know, GOOD GAMEPLAY, but Omikron has none of that. Nothing at all. This lore does nothing to pull me in either. As I mentioned reading about it is painful to your eyes and brain to process, but both the lore books and what lore they dump on you with exposition in the horribly stilted cutscenes is a bore. It’s all so generic “ooo shedemerv dropped onto ooladan and used the granjardee to activate the porgorcan” and it’s just obnoxious to sit through. It mixes so horribly too, the game’s supposed to have this epic sci-fi world but in typical David Cage fashion he has to add everything he thinks is cool, so it has demons you need to fight and ancient powers stored in fantastical people because why not? I’m not against sci-fi and fantasy mixing, but jesus all this crap just feels like it was made up as it went on. It all leads to a boring climax that sneaks up on you and an unsatisfying ending, to the surprise of no one.
If it wasn’t obvious enough, I despised pretty much every single thing about this excuse of an interactive experience. The graphics are ugly as sin, the sound design is simultaneously obnoxious and dull, the story is pretentious and poorly-written, and the gameplay is some of the most cryptic, boring, frustrating, stressful crap I’ve ever put myself through. Everything I said was a major complaint too, I could go on even longer if I wanted to nitpick into further detail. Anything positive I said about this game was less than a minute of “oh that’s kind of cool” compared to the hours of excruciating, torturous gameplay and cutscenes my friends and I had to go through. Nothing went right here. I can say without a doubt that Omikron: The Nomad Soul is the worst game I have played in my entire life, and I think the developers should be embarrassed to have had worked on this. I would give a 0 if I could.
A bit less than a year ago, I took an innocuous trip to a retro game store. I didn’t have any special pickups planned or anything, it was just something for me and my friends to do to burn time and maybe find something cool. However, we didn’t find something cool, we found Beyond Two Souls. My friends pushed me to join them and offer up my PS3 to play the game and it truly made for a memorable experience to say the least. Of course we then followed that up with David Cage’s other three story games as our little group expanded. While I think those four games definitely aren’t great, and that they definitely vary in quality, I can at least say they brought me a little bit of joy with their goofy moments. However, as our grand finale, we had to get together one last time and play his first game: Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
There was nothing goofy about Omikron.
Let’s start with the graphics, because jesus christ this game is ugly. Despite promising a big cyberpunk adventure, the world of Omikron is less Blade Runner and more Black Mesa, “Mesapunk” as my friends and I referred to it as. The color palette is incredibly drab and lifeless, covered in grim grays. Despite the game intending to show a big, bustling lived-in world, it feels so empty, which I’m sure was not intentional. The whole world feels artificial which is unfortunate when that’s a big marketing point for it. Admittedly there are a few inspired settings, I quite enjoyed the second zone, but for the most part the world is entirely soulless. The character design is pretty dreadful too, with bland humans or demons that aren’t disgusting enough to look cool but aren’t appealing enough to… Be appealing. That’s not even to mention the unnatural, lazy character animations and the poor shot composition of cutscenes. Even for the time these are lackluster, especially for a PC and Dreamcast game. By far the worst aspect of this game’s visuals is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen fail before, at least like this. The font. Legitimately, a huge chunk of this game’s writing, including required reading for puzzles, is in a borderline illegible font. Seriously, look up “omikron the nomad soul font” on Google Images, it’ll blow you away. There’s multiple points where you can buy books on the game’s lore, which is a really cool concept, but I legitimately didn’t want to just because so many were a headache to try to decipher. How do you even mess that up?
On the other end of aesthetics, the soundtrack for Omikron has received nearly universal praise… I don’t get it. The background tracks are horribly repetitive and dull. The music mainly fits into a bland ambiance that bores me to tears, only further creating the negative emotional aura this game gives off with the world design. When it is not that you, get tracks like the fight themes which are just grating. The worst it gets is with the theme of the Awakened Base in Jaunpur, which is a 90 second loop that plays EVERY MINUTE you’re in the area. The song is already a little annoying and repetitive, but when it’s in an area you visit CONSTANTLY it just gets infuriating!
The music isn’t just where the auditory issues end, because the sound design in this game is horrid. So many things in this game are just… Silent. I swear with how empty this game is you would think it’s a horror game. My favorite part is the sliders, vehicles which you can call upon for fast travel and even drive. These cars make no noise at all. None when they drive to you, none when you get in, and none when you get off. Great work everyone. The voice acting isn’t great, it could be worse, but it’s not good enough to invest someone playing. It’s also held back by your player character never being voiced! You just get this crappy wind sound whenever they talk as the dialog shows up in a tiiiiny spot in the bottom left corner. Because why should the most important character in the game talk, right?
But let’s be real, the acclaim for Omikron’s audio comes from David Bowie’s work. And it’s… Alright. I’m not deep into Bowie’s work but the stuff in this game feels more like B-sides than top tier compositions of his. All very okay and forgettable. You’re also only going to be hearing a few of his songs in the game, I think there are more but they’re stuck in optional concerts. It’s more than likely you won’t be going to them because that requires navigating in this game.
The bulk of The Nomad Soul is spent navigating the open world of Omikron. We’ve already gone over how it isn’t a very interesting world, but is going around it fun at least? No. First, let’s talk controls. They’re bad. The Nomad Soul is controlled entirely with tank controls. Tank controls may have been a pretty common standard at the time, however I still question their implementation here. I haven’t played a ton of late 90s adventure games, but I fail to see how this improves the game at all. Maybe due to the fact many PC players would be stuck on a keyboard? I have no clue, but it took quite a while to get used to how stiff the movement is. It’s workable but trying to turn around with your player character’s stupid slow half-steps is never not irritating. Sprinting makes it a little better, allowing you to cruise your character around, but it’s still not really ideal movement, especially in smaller rooms. Sure these aren’t the worst controls ever, but when the vast majority of the game is wandering around aimlessly it can only make things worse. Speaking of worse, that’s what this game continues to get when it starts expecting you to platform! It’s few and far between, but the slow, janky jump in this game is expected to be used to get you across platforms. It’s not fun. It has no momentum either so it just feels entirely dissatisfying, but you better not fail due to expecting that since this game has fall damage! Great! There’s also a handful of times you’ll have to swim, but they control sort of alright and never get you into situations where it’s likely you’ll drown. Not great, but I appreciate one of the few times this game doesn’t screw something up.
You may be thinking that I’ve forgotten to add any details on substance, and that’s because there is not any. The majority of this game is spent walking from Point A to Point B. And I’m not exaggerating. Sometimes maybe you’ll solve an annoying puzzle, usually one of the numerous ones involving translating symbols, but that’s it. There’s nothing exciting to the adventure gameplay, nothing that mixes it up and makes it engaging aside from the previously mentioned rare platforming and rosetta stone puzzle segments where you have to read off that awful font. This game’s main gameplay loop can basically just be summed up as following orders on where to walk and who to talk to, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. There is some other traditional gameplay here, so let’s talk about it.
Okay, so Omikron actually is split into three gameplay styles. There’s the third person adventure game segments, the fighting game segments, and the first person shooting segments. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “those sound like completely different concepts that don’t mix together.” Well thankfully, you’re right. It’s completely jarring, it’s not like Zelda where you pull out your sword and fight on the same overworld, the game will just pause and go “hey it’s time for a fight.” Not to mention that you basically have to familiarize yourself with two different genres on top of this game’s horrible excuse for main gameplay.
The worst of this is the hand-to-hand fighting game segments. Thankfully there is a free training room you can interact with at the beginning of the game, but unfortunately there isn’t really anything to learn. I think you can block, dodge, and you have four combat buttons you can mix up for moves I’m pretty sure? You may be wondering why I’m talking in such uncertainty and that’s because there’s no proper tutorial or training for how it works. I know that that could be seen as intrusive, but having something like that could possibly give us the chance for interesting gameplay. Plain and simply, you mash to win. There are, I think, a few combo moves you can use, but you’ll never actually have the chance to learn them unless you waste your time labbing in the training room. There’s no command list, it’s just “here’s the four attack buttons good luck.” Absolutely no motivation to get better is given, there’s probably less than twenty of these in the entire game and they last no more than two minutes. I would just throw myself at these and sometimes I would win getting hit twice at worst without even dodging or blocking, and sometimes I would be decimated without even getting the chance to respond. It’s an unintuitive crapshoot that feels like it was made by someone who’s fighting game experience was watching their friend play Mortal Kombat at an arcade ten years ago. It’s terrible and the only "compliment" I can give it is that there’s no actual difficulty scaling or anything, because being expected to learn this with absolutely zero information would be a nightmare.
A nightmare is a title more deserved for the shooting segments, because dear GOD who the HELL thought these were okay? First, you aren’t even given a chance to learn how to play these despite it being a completely different gameplay style. You’re thrown into the first two segments with enemies in your face, and you can die extremely quickly, but thankfully there aren’t really many consequences. We died pretty much instantly due to the controls. I played this game on Steam, and I just wanna say this port is a piece of crap. At one point our saved controls undid themselves, and playing these segments on controller is legitimately unplayable. Dual analog was never added, you’re stuck aiming with buttons, but that’s not the issue. The left stick is SO SENSITIVE that, no joke, even moving it as slow as possible and barely exiting the dead zone would cause my character to make a full rotation in only about a second’s time. So optimally playing this game is switching from controller to a mouse and keyboard whenever these segments pop up. Maybe it’s a good thing the change in gameplay is so jarring. However, the control issues do not end there. I had multiple times where going forward would just. Break. I would move for half a step and then just. Stop. For one section I had to have my friend help me dual hand the keyboard and mouse + the controller since we were far away from our last save point and couldn’t restart the game, which trust me WE’LL GET TO. Even when that wasn’t happening, the use button would just legitimately never work for us during shooting segments on keyboard. We would have to leave pressing A on the controller to someone else a lot of the time, and when you’re constantly being shot at that’s not a very good thing to rely on, especially if I were to be playing this game alone.
But whatever, when the controls actually worked, these sections were barely better than playable. First off, the working controls still aren’t great. You move like a car, with super fast top speed and incredibly slow acceleration, which makes strafing away from enemy attacks near impossible. Kidding of course, because often it just IS impossible. I had. COUNTLESS. Times where enemies would shoot from behind the crappy draw distance that wasn’t upped in the PC port either, enemies shooting me at first sight before it was even possible to dodge, and times where I’m running at max speed, going backwards, AND jumping and I get hit anyway. Getting through these shooting segments is often more of a test of endurance than anything. There’s no actual skill in gunplay, especially considering you’re limited to using one weapon for all of a segment and ammo management is stuck to “you have the good ammo you got elsewhere and then you run out and use the less good ammo.” There IS technically a second weapon, you get it early on even, but you either use one or the other in a section with the other basically being useless, and they behave basically identical. Why even have a weapon switch function if it’s useless? Oh wait, because it isn’t useless. There’s other weapons. Allegedly. You have to find them in the dumb as hell overworld optionally, but that requires actually being able to find things there, but, again, I’ll save that for later. Either way, the horrible enemy placement and dodging is not fun. This is only made worse by the actual level design in these segments too.
To be fair, not all of these segments are horrible. I’m sure one or two can be maybe mediocre if you love first person shooters even in their most poorly designed forms. However, when Omikron brings out complicated objectives, I start to get pissed. Here’s a list of some of my least favorites. Searching around a maze of rooftops for the rare few things you can actually interact with, where you’re constantly taking pot shots from offscreen enemies, especially if you aren’t just using someone else’s gameplay to tell you where to go. Going through a sewer WITH A TIME LIMIT to lay bombs on certain spots, where I’m pretty sure if you miss one you’re screwed (and also has a glitch where you'll just randomly die far into it that happened about five or six times for us). And the GOD AWFUL final boss where you’re expected to utilize the unusable strafing to circle around after stunning him and hit his back. I’m pretty sure those alleged other weapons don’t even work on him by the way so no hope in sweetening that deal. As far as I’m aware, because all footage I’ve seen of him does this and I had to do it as well to beat him in the second half of the fight, the only way to realistically beat this fight is to get him stuck on level geometry and abuse his AI to get behind him. What great game design where BREAKING THE GAME is the most well known method for fighting a boss. A lot of these segments, including ones I didn’t mention, feel as if they’re unplayable without having stocked multiple medkits before. I wonder if that’s why this game makes you have multiple saves, because this seems like a game where it would be VERY easy to hardlock yourself otherwise.
Anyway, now let’s head back to the main gameplay. A bit abrupt to go from completely different concepts and then back to wandering aimlessly right? Yeah, I know right, who would ever think of that. Now imagine this except without the first sentence, because there sure aren’t any transition cutscenes. Whatever, nitpicking. There’s another reason it takes up a majority of the game, in fact there’s a good chance this gameplay style could take up over 99% of your playthrough. Why? Omikron is, without any exaggeration, the most cryptic game I’ve played in my life. Now, I don’t instantly hate a game for being cryptic. A few of my favorite games of all time even have a moment or two where I feel it’s best to just look something up. However, let’s talk about why it bothers me less there. Mother I think has dungeon design that’s way too maze-like, so I feel it’s best played with a map on the side. Super Mario Sunshine has a handful of overtly obtuse blue coins for 100%, and I think it’s healthier to just look up the last few you’re missing at the end of the game. These games also make up for this by having actual gameplay. There’s no fighting enemies and for the most part no platforming in the adventure segments of Omikron, just walking.
Keep in mind Omikron is an open world game. The best way to describe the situations it puts you into to progress is a needle in a haystack. Here’s some specific examples I remember. Finding buttons that are almost identical in color to the wall they’re on. Having to use a random part an NPC that you may or may not talk to gives you on a random elevator despite them having no mentioned relation. Being expected to jump UP to a ledge to grab an item for the ONLY TIME you’re ever able to do that in the game. Using candles you got multiple hours earlier in the game to lay out in a summoning circle. And the most common, getting a random item and being expected to show it to someone on the other side of the map. Imagine a point and click game where you have triple the items, there’s fifty filler screens between each area, and what you can interact with isn't even emphasized objects or NPCs.
That’s not even to mention that this game has LIMITED INVENTORY, despite the fact that every single item that could ever possibly benefit you in combat being able to realistically fit in your inventory at the same time. So in reality this system only exists to give you that moment where you realize you can’t pick up an item and you have to go find a stupid PC to put your items up in. Ignoring that, the game’s gameplay loop just becomes following orders from a walkthrough due to how cryptic it is. “Go here and do this. Go here and get this item. Give this item to this person.” There goes your chance of getting lost in the world! Sometimes even a written guide isn’t enough, at one point the game deleted one of our addresses the sliders could take us to so we were forced to wander around for twenty minutes until we found out where to go! There is NO REASON it disappeared by the way, it just… Did. Why? What does that add? Was this an oversight? Did anyone even get this far in playtesting? That would certainly explain the final boss. There is no way in hell that anyone beat this game naturally, without a guide, and enjoyed it. How did anyone on the team think this was okay?
Thankfully, there is one saving grace Omikron has for navigation: the magic rings. Magic rings are a currency you can find throughout the world, and using them will give you advice. Is the advice good? I wouldn’t know, never used it. And it’s not because I didn’t want to, it’s because advice costs FIVE magic rings to use. Five FINE-ITE magic rings. I wanted to have as many as I could because they’re used to restart shooting segments… And to save. Yes. SAVING. THE GAME. IS A FINE-ITE RESOURCE. I repeat. SAVING THE GAME IS A LUXURY. Who the HELL thought this was good? What does it add to the experience? What does making it harder to progress and harder to SAVE THE GAME add to Omikron? Does it make it more fun? More challenging? Hell no! All it does is make it more tedious and frustrating to play. Not like that’s the only questionable rollout of items in the game either. Health packs are limited too unless you buy them, and there’s no way to do something like sleep to restore HP, but money is limited from finding it on the ground unless you do dumb minigames that thankfully I never had to do due to save scumming. Why was I save scumming? A lot of the time dying doesn’t result in loading a save or a game over but having your soul transferred. This makes you lose money, which can softlock you by the way! Again, what does this add? Why? At worst it softlocks you just like that, and at best it just lowers the stakes of fighting or shooting segments. There is just… No value here. The only, ONLY credit I can give to any of these three gameplay styles, is that occasionally you use the game’s nomad soul body changing gimmick to do something clever like possess a guard to escape a prison. That’s neat, but of course it’s both underutilized and limited by mana that you only need to stock up for by managing money for potions. Great!
So if the gameplay, music, and visuals suck, what is there to keep you playing? Well, there’s the story. I’ve actually seen some people online claim that the story is pretty interesting. Do I agree?
What the hell do you think?
Omikron starts in an admittedly intriguing way. With a man named Kale coming to you, the player, asking you to inhabit his soul and access the world of Omikron for some unknown reason. One of my main issues comes right here. This game’s soul hopping gimmick doesn’t give you a character to get attached to, it’s just you. If this game had a silent protagonist or something I could maybe roll with that, and while there are dialog options that would fit that, there’s snarky dialog describing characters and it just confuses me. Are they me or are they a character? The story revolves around them being me, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The characters in general are just so lacking. There’s so few recurring characters, and most of them just get dropped really quickly. First you’re working with the police, then you leave to be with the awakened, which is a cool concept I guess, but there goes your entire first cast of characters. Then most of the awakened get sidelined after you leave their original base, so who am I supposed to get attached to? It’s not like anyone is remotely charming or interesting anyway, the only one I even remember the name of is Soks and that’s because he’s a goofy robot, and as I mentioned earlier, Omikron always chooses not to be goofy!
One of my least favorite things about David Cage games is that they almost always choose to follow this dystopian, doomer atmosphere, which just makes the games come off like they really do think they’re high art despite there being nothing to analyze. There’s no humor or anything to ground you in the characters, because this game is so focused on showing you its epic and deep plot, which just makes it come off even more pretentious. And speaking of pretentious, Omikron is pretentious! I hear that word thrown around a lot with David Cage games, and while I do get that I can’t help but feel it’s a little exaggerated. Except with this game. Omikron has such poignant commentary like “the computer and the government is controlling us all and we need to become awakened.” Wow, so deep. That’s totally not saying the most surface level, unnuanced crap imaginable!
Where this game gets the most pretentious however is the meta elements. A major element of the plot is that Omikron is a game made by the villain to suck in the souls of gamers and use them. So, let’s talk about meta elements in fiction. I’d say there’s two types, one is where the game is built around “meta” ideas, let’s say saving loading, and resetting, but the story can function without you, the player, being an imagined concept in the game. On the other hand is a much more complex idea, one where you as the player existing and playing the game is a necessary aspect for the story, like if a character had an obsession with the person playing. The second is a lot harder to pull off, and ignorantly, Omikron chose that method. So this very world-shattering decision was made and… Nothing is done with it. They mention how no one else has gotten this far and has been destroyed or whatever, which instantly breaks any immersion with the fact you need a guide from another player to get through this game. There’s this horribly cringe-worthy dialog you can get where you mention how Omikron is just a game and an NPC goes “erm, actually, Omikron isn’t just a game it’s a real world you’re interacting with.” Come on, Even for ‘99 this was corny. Worst of all though, nothing is done with this. No interesting ideas are raised, it just pays lipservice to being a commentary on video games or general media and does nothing with it. It’s just. Meta to be meta. Subversive to be subversive. So epic...
Not like the actual story is anything to ride home about anyway. The first part is a mystery about what’s really going on, but after you hear Big Bad's name and join The Awakened you do crap like spread radio waves about le truth and blow up a random bridge like that’s gonna do anything. It really just feels like filler, doing random missions that mean nothing over and over again between the constant handing off of random items to random NPCs in random places. The plot meanders until eventually you get a few back-to-back epic Omikron lore drops and are allowed to fight the final boss. An underwhelming story full of missions would maybe be fine if there were interesting characters, fun scenarios, or, you know, GOOD GAMEPLAY, but Omikron has none of that. Nothing at all. This lore does nothing to pull me in either. As I mentioned reading about it is painful to your eyes and brain to process, but both the lore books and what lore they dump on you with exposition in the horribly stilted cutscenes is a bore. It’s all so generic “ooo shedemerv dropped onto ooladan and used the granjardee to activate the porgorcan” and it’s just obnoxious to sit through. It mixes so horribly too, the game’s supposed to have this epic sci-fi world but in typical David Cage fashion he has to add everything he thinks is cool, so it has demons you need to fight and ancient powers stored in fantastical people because why not? I’m not against sci-fi and fantasy mixing, but jesus all this crap just feels like it was made up as it went on. It all leads to a boring climax that sneaks up on you and an unsatisfying ending, to the surprise of no one.
If it wasn’t obvious enough, I despised pretty much every single thing about this excuse of an interactive experience. The graphics are ugly as sin, the sound design is simultaneously obnoxious and dull, the story is pretentious and poorly-written, and the gameplay is some of the most cryptic, boring, frustrating, stressful crap I’ve ever put myself through. Everything I said was a major complaint too, I could go on even longer if I wanted to nitpick into further detail. Anything positive I said about this game was less than a minute of “oh that’s kind of cool” compared to the hours of excruciating, torturous gameplay and cutscenes my friends and I had to go through. Nothing went right here. I can say without a doubt that Omikron: The Nomad Soul is the worst game I have played in my entire life, and I think the developers should be embarrassed to have had worked on this. I would give a 0 if I could.