Omori (stylized in all caps) is a 2020 role-playing video game developed and published by indie studio Omocat. The player controls a reclusive teenage boy named Sunny and his dream world alter ego Omori. Gameplay is split into two settings: Sunny's activities in Faraway Town and Omori's exploration of a surreal dream world. How Sunny and Omori interact depends on choices made by the player, resulting in one of several endings, in which Sunny either overcomes or suppresses his fears and repressed memories. The game's turn-based battle system includes unconventional status effects based on characters' emotions. Prominently portraying concepts such as anxiety, depression, psychological trauma, self-harm, and suicide, the game features strong psychological horror elements.
Omori is based on the director's webcomic series Omoriboy. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, the game was delayed numerous times and experienced several development difficulties. It was released as a demo on April 9, 2018, on the platform itch.io exclusively for Kickstarter backers, before being officially released for macOS and Windows in December 2020, six years after its initial funding. It saw a release on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 4 with added content in June 2022. Critics praised the game's art direction, soundtrack, narrative elements, and depiction of anxiety and depression, being favorably compared to games like EarthBound (1994) and Yume Nikki (2004). Omori was nominated for several awards, winning DreamHack's "Daringly Dramatic" category in 2021. The game has sold over 1 million copies as of December 2022. A manga adaptation was released in June 2024.
Gameplay
Omoris gameplay is inspired by traditional Japanese role-playing games. Gameplay is split between two settings: the surreal dream world of Headspace and the real world, set in Faraway Town. In Headspace, the player controls a party of four characters: Omori, Aubrey, Kel, and Hero. In the real world, the player begins with only Sunny. Each party member possesses their own unique skills for use both in battle and in overworld traversal.
The overworld portion is played from a top-down perspective. The game features side quests and puzzles for the player to solve, bestowing them with various rewards and skills upon completion. In Headspace, many beneficial weapons and items can be obtained, with some being purchasable using the currency Clams. In the real world, the effects of items are more limited, and the player uses dollars.
Battles are played out in a turn-based format in which each party member performs a move. After attacking, party members can work together to perform "follow up" attacks, which come from a shared pool of energy that accumulates upon taking damage. Characters and enemies have Heart, which functions as health points; if damage is taken, it decreases, and if it reaches zero, the character is defeated and turns into toast. The Juice meter is used to perform skills, special abilities which aid in battle. Outside of battle, the party can save and heal by interacting with a picnic blanket, accompanied by Omori's older sister Mari.
Unlike most role-playing games, status effects are based on a three-pointed emotion system. A party member or opponent's emotion can change throughout the course of a battle, usually due to moves by another party member or enemy. Neutral is the baseline and has no effects; Angry increases attack but lowers defense; Sad increases defense but lowers speed, as well as converting a portion of damage to Heart into damage to Juice; and Happy increases luck and speed but lowers accuracy. Emotions are either strong or weak against each other – Happy beats Angry, Angry beats Sad, and Sad beats Happy. Additionally, higher-intensity variants of each emotion also exist.
Plot
Omori awakens in "White Space", a barren void he has lived in "for as long as [he] can remember". He enters a door to the vibrant world of "Headspace", where he meets his friends, Aubrey, brothers Kel and Hero, Basil, and Omori's older sister Mari. They peruse Basil's photo album, containing pictures of their shared memories, and decide to visit his house. Once there, Kel and Aubrey scuffle, damaging the album. Upon seeing a disturbing photo fall from it, Basil panics, and Omori is abruptly teleported back to White Space. He stabs himself with a knife, revealing Headspace to be the dream world of a teenage boy, Sunny, as he wakes up in the middle of the night.
It is revealed that Sunny and his mother are moving. He goes downstairs for a midnight snack but is confronted by a nightmarish hallucination. He dispels the illusion by taking deep breaths and returns to bed. Awakening in White Space, Omori reunites with Aubrey, Kel, and Hero. They discover that Basil has gone missing and set out to rescue him. The four explore the various regions of Headspace in search of Basil, with Mari assisting along the way. The group is continuously diverted from their search by various situations, leading their memory of Basil to fade away.
Later, in the real world, it is revealed that Mari killed herself four years ago, leading to the friend group diverging. Though Kel and Hero recovered to varying degrees, Sunny became an estranged shut-in, Aubrey a delinquent, and Basil an anxious recluse. Three days before Sunny moves away, Kel knocks on his door in an attempt to reconnect one last time. The player can either ignore Kel or answer the door: by choosing the former, Sunny stays inside for the remaining three days, immersing himself in housework and his dreams.
By choosing the latter, Sunny and Kel venture to find Aubrey and her new friends bullying Basil. They discover that she has stolen Basil's photo album, ostensibly to stop him from vandalizing it. After confronting Aubrey, they return the album to Basil, though some photos are missing. Basil lends the album to Sunny, believing he needs it more. While eating dinner together, Basil becomes visibly distressed as he learns of Sunny's impending departure and runs to the bathroom. Sunny finds him in a hallucinatory panic attack, but leaves him alone out of fear. The next day, Kel and Sunny encounter Aubrey and her gang surrounding Basil at their old hangout spot. After they confront her, Aubrey angrily pushes Basil into a lake. Sunny dives in to rescue him, but both boys are saved from drowning by the arrival of Hero, and they carry Basil back to his home.
Kel and Hero offer to have a sleepover in Sunny's house. In his sleep, they return to Basil's now-dilapidated house, where Omori is transported to the more disturbing "Black Space". Basil appears in different areas, repeatedly attempting to talk to him about something before dying gruesomely each time. In the final room, Omori kills Basil and places himself atop a throne of massive, red hands. On the last day before Sunny's departure, the others reconcile with Aubrey, discovering she had kept the photos containing Mari from the album. Coming to terms with Mari's death, the reunited friend group decide to spend their final night together at Basil's house, despite him refusing to leave his room.
Eventually, in his dreams, Sunny finally confronts the truth about Mari's death: Sunny was frustrated that he couldn't perform as well as anticipated on the violin (which was a gift from his friends), and threw the violin down the stairs on the day of an upcoming recital, shattering it. This infuriated Mari, and as Sunny tried to walk away from her, she blocked his path and he accidentally pushed her down their staircase, killing her. Basil arrived at that moment and witnessed the incident; devastated over Mari's death and in denial that Sunny did it, he helped frame her death as suicide by hanging her corpse. As the boys finished, they glanced at Mari's hanging body, its immediate appearance shaping their subsequent hallucinations. While Basil was consumed by guilt and self-loathing, Sunny's depression led him to create Headspace and his alter ego, Omori, to repress his trauma. After facing the reality, Sunny wakes up in the middle of the night, leaving the player with the choice of either confronting Basil or falling back asleep.
Endings If the player confronts Basil, Sunny enters his room and is cordially greeted. However, Basil loses his temper over Sunny's absence in the aftermath of Mari's death, and it is revealed that Sunny is the one who vandalized the photo album, causing both to enter a delusional state and fight. When Basil stabs Sunny in the right eye with garden shears, both pass out. While unconscious, Sunny reminisces about his childhood spent with his friends and Mari, giving him the strength to face Omori. Refusing to die, Omori lambasts Sunny for keeping the truth of Mari's death from his friends and eventually defeats him, causing the player to receive a game over screen.
If the player opts to continue, Sunny gets up and performs the recital with Mari. Omori disappears and a hospitalized Sunny awakes in the real world. He encounters his friends inside Basil's room, and confesses the truth about Mari's death. If the player watered Basil's garden repeatedly in Headspace, an after-credits scene will depict Basil waking up to the sight of Sunny in the hospital. The two smile and their hallucinations disappear. Should the player choose not to continue, Sunny disappears rather than Omori. After Omori awakes in White Space and enters Headspace, the scene cuts to Sunny jumping off the hospital's balcony.
If the player ignores Basil on the final day, Sunny and his friends will wake up to discover that he has killed himself. Sunny returns home and, depending on the player's choice, can either kill himself with his knife or move away with his guilt still unabated. This ending also occurs if the player has chosen to remain inside and avoid Kel.
Development and release Omori was developed over the course of six-and-a-half years, directed by pseudonymous artist Omocat. It is based on , a webcomic Tumblr blog Omocat created to "help [them] cope with [their] problems during a confusing part of [their] life." Initially planned as a graphic novel, they switched its medium to a video game since they felt it fit the story better, and to enable the audience to make choices during it. For the game engine, they chose RPG Maker, as they deemed it important to support an accessible platform and community.
A Kickstarter campaign was launched in 2014, and was successfully funded within one day, with an initial projected release date of May 2015. A Nintendo 3DS port was promised as a stretch goal, but ultimately never came to fruition due to the discontinuation of the console. Backers were instead offered a Nintendo Switch port. To aid the game's creation, Omocat hired several additional team members, including an RPG Maker expert, but still had a goal of keeping the team size small. Initially, they enlisted their musician friends Space Boyfriend and Slime Girls (Jami Lynne and Pedro Silva, respectively) to help with the soundtrack; after being inspired by Calum Bowen's "My Time" and coming up with the idea of hidden music tracks, they contacted him as well.
Many of Omoris environments were inspired by dreams that Omocat had when they were younger. The imaginary world of Headspace was based on lucid dreaming, and to instill a dreamlike tone, concepts for it were spontaneously devised as it was created. Initially, Headspace was envisioned as a crayon-like world with more experimental gameplay, but this was scrapped due to difficulty designing, testing and programming such a setting. Eventually, Omocat utilized a more unconventional design along these lines for "Black Space".