Partway through Chapter 1, Omori had already disappointed me in the way it refused to balance, in any way whatsoever, its diegetic and thematic narrative. The prologue hit very strongly by luring the player into a sense of security and cuteness with all the sugary vibes, readying the stage for the rug-pull that would snap the story back to reality and kickstart the “hero’s” journey. All the pieces showed thus far, metaphorical in their nature, would soon be paralleled by their counterpart in the true world of Faraway City, highlighting the complex coping mechanism that Sunny built for himself to escape a reality that had all the elements he once cherished and loved, but wrong, broken, different, and for the most part due to his own faults. While not groundbreaking, this is a very solid foundation for the fiction and meta-fiction alike, again a very intriguing and well built prologue.
But then the game stumbles, misses almost all the subsequent steps by acknowledging that the plot is happening during the countdown to Sunny’s departure from the city, his crime never to be discovered in the ultimate avoidance of responsibility, but at the same time the actual game still takes place in the dream world that Sunny built as Omori. This is a tonally deaf and utterly baffling narrative choice, especially because it rarely even matters by that point what goes on in the inner mind of the murderer. The pieces are already in motion, the dream world had already achieved its goal by stalling the player, as it stalled Sunny, in the incipit of the game and yet, long after opening the door to accept the real world again, we are still asked to travel inside a whale’s belly and fight magical slime girls. Lightening the mood to unwind after a big revelation is one way to show restrain for the emotional highs that Omori is capable of, but following an hour of strong bonding between the main characters, catching up after four years of separation, with a three hour castle dungeon to solve Sweetheart’s pointless marriage struggles is effectively blue-balling, none of this ever matters. The dream contents not strictly tying to any meaningful allegory wouldn’t even be an issue, if they gave insight to the characters, were engaging, fun or quirky in some way, but none of this is true; what actually happens is that the game, for ¾ of its duration, chooses to ignore what it’s actually trying to tell to become a distractingly standard RPG.
The last stretch of the game, as well as its most impactful scenes, are top class for the genre, with their stellar production values and emotionally charged writing, but anything in between is just fluff, cute fluff but nonetheless unnecessary padded fluff. The one great thing about even the worst of 16bit indie RPGs made in the last two decade is that they are straight to the point to a fault, Omori on the other hand feels like it needs to be 20 hours long because then it would be a real video game like the big boys on the Steam front-page, I cannot find any other reasonable explanation for all its disjointedness.