OMORI took six years to make and arrived as one of the most affecting games of its generation. It presents itself as a cute RPG Maker adventure with a pastel dream world, a party of childhood friends and a battle system built around emotions. That's not a lie, exactly. It's just not the whole thing.
The structure is the mechanism. You spend hours in Headspace, a world so warm and safe that leaving it feels wrong, and then the game pulls you back to a bedroom in the real world where a boy hasn't gone outside in four years. The contrast is doing all the work, and it is devastatingly effective.
The emotion system - happy, sad, angry, each countering the next - turns feelings into stats without trivialising them, which sets up a lot of what the story is about.
The friend group is what makes it hurt. Aubrey's anger, Kel's forced brightness, Hero's guilt and Basil's fragility are all recognisable responses to the same event, and the game refuses to let anyone off easily.
This collection covers the party and their symbols. Play it if you haven't, but be somewhere comfortable when you do.
