OMORI AND THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL Through blinding shame and guilt, OMORI is a beautiful commentary on the human strength to continue and forgive.
I downloaded OMORI in December last year, directly on release day, and I must admit; before playing, I was pretty certain I was going to be disappointed. There’s just this specific genre of games that always draw me in no matter what; this weird subculture of abstract and artistic RPGs (role-playing games), almost always made by small teams, which try their hardest everytime to weave together a tale that is just so emotionally deep and profound and just tells us so much about life and the human psyche… and then, the majority of the time, end up being underwhelming. It’s a rare thing to truly connect with a story on a deeply personal level, and I had been searching for a very long time for some kind of media that would give me that connection. My interests were waning, my passion for my hobbies dying down fast, and all I wanted was something, anything, that would spark that passion again. I kept looking for new movies, books, tv shows, and games that looked interesting to me, each time entering a new story praying that this would be the one that would make me bawl my eyes out for hours; that this would be the one that would
fill my thoughts for months on end, that this story would be the one that would stick with me forever and rekindle my love for storytelling anew. And then, completely out of nowhere, OMORI happened to be just that. This article is about the RPG ‘OMORI’, an ambitious first-time project that took over 6 years to create, a story that has deeply affected me and many others since it’s release, and a lesson about the ‘Downward Spiral’ of guilt many of us find ourselves in once in our lives, allowing us to experience it through new eyes and see the many ways it manifests and grows inside us as time progresses, and most importantly, how
we can learn to forgive ourselves and move towards the future. Through this article, I hope to provide a pinpoint review on why the videogame OMORI is so effective, why it is so important and revolutionary in the realm of videogames, and why you should give it a try! Before I begin, I want to talk briefly about spoilers. First and foremost, this review is meant to help share this game and experience with as many people as possible, so this review will mainly avoid any large spoilers, as I don’t want to ruin it for anyone. However, I will be spoiling a specific reveal that happens around an hour into the game, as without it I feel like I would be overly limited in my analysis and responses
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