3.5/5 ★ – Rig2Big's review of OMORI.

I played several hours of this game, and then accidentally hit “don’t continue” after losing a boss battle, and realized my dumb ass hadn’t been fucking saving the entire time. In my defense… why would a game like this not do that automatically? I mean this isn’t 1995 where you have to call your deadbeat dad on the phone to create a save state on your journey. We have this cute nifty little thing called “auto-save” now. Anyway, I ended up spending the rest of my night researching how the game pans out, realized it was 20+ hours, and suddenly felt kinda grateful to have an excuse to drop the thing and just watch some gameplay online. I love Gen 1 Pokémon a lot… and even more than that, I fucking LOVE Earthbound. I’d honestly consider it one of my all-time favorite games, and it released in America nearly 10 years before I was born—making it a product way way out of my demographic range, and still somehow surmounting that. What a perfect game, and fully-fletched expression of artistry. I’m saying this because obviously Omori derives massively from both of these games—hell, it even has a nod to Pokémon Red/Blue with that “four boys are walking on railroad tracks” reference. What’s funny is somehow this modern title has FAR less ingenuity to its combat mechanics than either of these two 30 year old RPGs, which (for whatever reason) Omori stands amongst in the eyes of fans. Even Earthbound didn’t have the best combat, but it was still lightyears better than this. Yeah the art/sound design is really neat, especially for something out of the RPG maker site… but this story has fucking piss-poor pacing, and is loaded with tonal flatlines, which really accentuate how egregiously long the game is. Just makes me wish Omori had been designed as a 5-10 hour experience (with a lot of replay-ability), like Undertale. Also the main twist is cool, and the mini-scares littered throughout the game are easily my favorite parts, but it just doesn’t seem totally worth sifting through 20 hours of unexciting gameplay to see them. If you are into this, good for you, I just am not. For those who’ve been recommended Omori because they were horrified and entranced by the genius of Doki Doki Literature Club, particularly by its meta relationship with psychological horror, you have been properly misled. These two titles are pretty much only similar in the sense that they both skip rope with tonal structure of quirky/scary, and not even really then. Further cementing the fact that there will NEVER be a game quite like DDLC. The fact that this narrative has been often summarized solely by that one singular “event” is not interesting to me. This is a game which should be FULL OF events worth mentioning, and instead, I’m just left me severely underwhelmed compared to my expectations.