[untitled dump post]

In the interest of (hopefully) not having to do more sledgehammer edits, I’m gonna try something less liveblog-y with this post: skim over the whole scene, jot things down, and then come back and flesh things out proper. This makes no difference to you, dear reader, but I am nothing if not obsessed with “this was how the thing done”-type notes, and thus litter my own writings with them gratuitously.

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[img: “You see a boy sleeping in his room.”] < Sunny sleeping in the void only ever reappears in the Omori fight, iirc

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“Sunny has become bioluminescent???”
[img: screenshot of Sunny in his room, night]
^I really dig the night palette, can we just take a moment to appreciate how damn clever the “bioluminescence” is here? From a pure utility standpoint, it lets the characters stand out in the darkness without significant palette-clashing. Storytelling-wise, it foreshadows the actual deep sea motifs from later in Headspace (literal depths of the subconsciousness, my beloved), and probably has a thematic relation to Basil’s glowy-eye thing.

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“He has color :o” oh yeah, I didn’t have any frame of reference for literally anything, did I? It’s funny going back and seeing the little “:o” of surprise at perfectly mundane things like Sunny having an actual skintone.

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[img: “Cardboard boxes are littered across the house.”]
Hmm, recently moved in? “Littered” is certainly a word choice

…Son of a bitch, I just realized this is probably related to the ongoing trash/recycling motif. There’s some good meta on tumblr about Sunny’s recycling “obsession,” although the trash half of that is worth closer inspection; we do have a whole-ass Junkyard map, and then the flavor text above is a thing long before any of that. No conclusions, only observations.

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This game legitimately had me afraid to check the voicemail, have I mentioned that?

One more thing before I unleash a fresh round of hell: this is… approximately where the light bulb is in the white room, I think? And instead of investigating the fan (a light) you’re looking at Mom’s sticky note, huh
[img: Mom’s sticky note: “I left some food in the fridge for you downstairs. It’s steak… your favorite!”]
laptop is roughly where the voicemail is, plant is the tissues, cat is chores
[Weeb,] I’m not ready

^Fear aside, parallel room setups are something I stopped paying close attention to somewhere along the line (the Faraway houses are pretty cookie-cutter), but it’ll be worth another look in -checks smudged writing on mental calendar- five-thousand years when I finally play the true route again. I totally forgot about this note.

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connects this dot to the lightbulb turning black
[img: Mom’s voicemail: “I forgot to tell the electric company that we need a few extra days before we’re ready to move, so the lights might cut out sometime tonight.”]

Ahh, more early-game stuff I forgot about. Goes without saying that dark/light motifs are a huge recurring symbol in this game, time of day very much considered. I’m not sure what to make of this particular detail, though; something something even if you’re not prepared to face The Dark, external circumstances can and eventually will force the issue?

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save point in Mom’s room, Mari = “Mommy” theory deepens
[img: save file, total playtime of a little over 2 hours, location Mom’s Room)]

Lmao @the timestamp. Have I mentioned I logged like, 70+ hours on the game overall? I think that’s counting time I was effectively not playing, chatting away on Discord with the game open on the side, but still. Point is, I’ve seen people say it took them… what, ~12 hours to beat the whole thing? What the fuck, honestly.

Anyway, though, I’m still holding onto Mother Mary Mommy Mari as a sort of ~thematic connection, much like the Sunny-Hero thing. As for the in-universe implications of the picnic basket in Mom’s room, I do have to wonder if Sunny’s legitimately never gone downstairs in months. Like, why else would going down scare him this bad on this night in paricular? Is it because his mom’s not home, stress of the impending move? There’s no strong evidence for or against Sunny having been a literal shut-in, just that he sure as hell hasn’t been out and about Faraway.

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Between this and the earlier height bit I am getting the sense this is like, I don’t know, looking over the edge of a really tall building 😄

might introduce the vertical hierarchy thesis now, might save it, hmm. we’ll see how pacing works out
[6/8: I don’t remember what I was getting at in the quote out of context tbh. the line above is/was a note to self…]

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sure feels Notable that the mom’s room and Sunny’s are at like, opposite ends of the house

Sunny’s relationship to his parents is pretty undefined, but this left a pretty strong impression early on. It’s clear that his mom cares, what with all the sticky notes & because it’s implied she (and the dad) knew the truth about Mari’s death but covered it up, but like, she very much did leave her very mentally ill son alone for three days. Like, she very much did do that.

That the other Faraway houses have a similar if not identical layout (kids’ rooms far from the parents’) isn’t actually a point against this, imo. They could’ve been designed differently. But I think this ties into a larger theme Omori fits into, with regards to RPGs in general: kids having adventures, encountering some pretty “adult” fears and circumstances (think more “mature, serious” than “69 jokes”) but without actual adult guidance. You can thank this Yume Nikki review for formulating the thought; Nitro Rad also goes into the ur-inspiration, the classic American comic strip Peanuts. Crazy how far back these things go.

TL;DR no one here has a close relationship with their parents, and it’s reflected right in the environmental design. We love to see it!!

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sweet fucking jesus
[img: screenshot of Sunny in the upstairs hall, night]

red = suicidal ideation??
[img: “An eerie red glow radiates from outside. You feel strangely drawn to it.”]
…wow shit red is everywhere in this game, including the arrows and those fork-things that try to force you back into the white room. I MEAN IT COULD BE OFF because red also = anger, but, still. filing that away

^There’s a post I scrounged up, before finishing the game (yes, I took a few peeks into fan content despite wanting to stay unspoiled, sue me), about color symbolism in Omori. I had the tab open for weeks, eagerly awaiting the hue-by-hue deconstruction, because boy did the game’s handling of color become more and more conspicuous.

When I finally did go back, I decided to read some older meta by the poster first, and disagreed so vehemently with some of their takes that I just scrapped the color theory tab without reading it.

I don’t like the whale, okay?? We’ll get there when we get there. Here’s the post anyway, since I did eventually read it and will admit it makes some decent points, grumblegrumble it’s gotta be more complicated than X Equals Y End Analysis but it’s not bad. I just had a knee-jerk reaction to an entirely unrelated set of thoughts.

Anyway.

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the way you’re forced to walk down the stairs very slowly, I love video game storytelling

I don’t remember if there are a lot of forced-movement scenes in Omori. Omori and Sunny take position in various cutscenes without player input, which is mostly expected (sans [Faraway] group hug, notably); more dramatically, when Omori approaches Basil to stab him the player can do fuckall but sit back and watch. It’s moments like these that make me insist Omori is a game best experienced via actual play, not even video; you can’t replicate that “oh, shit, that’s not me” without, y’know, actually having control 90% of the time otherwise.

That, and if you actually get to play, you can bury yourself in the mountains of flavor text that other players might (reasonably, if disappointingly) skip for time! You, too, can also spend hours at Dino’s Dig just trying to get the damn spoon, and fuck with the Headspace crew’s emotions for fun and profit, and—

anyway yeah vibeo gaem storytelling Good

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i too love the sticky hands stuck to the top of every dentist’s office ceiling
[img: Sunny descending the stairs, hands closing in from the surrounding darkness]

Weeb then informed me that My Experience Is Not Universal. Horror and shock and dread! (It was also an A+ excuse to step away from the game for a bit; I am not a horror afficianado, no.) Thus it is my civic duty to inform the world at large that these bad boys exist:

[fuck it. doodle] [6/8: ok seeing as I Did Not Doodle, I mean these lads.]

Concocted of some unholy mixture of plastic and sparkly gelatin, these floppy motherfuckers love to slap themselves into walls and, uh, Stay There. That’s it, that’s what they do. You could probably amuse yourself for a few minutes slapping a friend with one; it’d hurt less than snapping a rubber band, at least.

They were apparently a hit at my childhood dentist’s office (which offered them among other cheap plasticy handouts, the truest delights of youth), and seemed to boast long and healthy lifespans of approximately five minutes from exit:

[doodle 2: office door. hands all over the ceiling]

Modern constellations.

Anwyay, hands that are squiggly are probably a Yume Nikki reference, but for lack of familiarity with that game I don’t know what it traces back to from there. I will say, though, that after being scared shitless from the whole buildup of this sequence, actually seeing the Something was mildly anticlimactic. Ha, look at that toothy lad! I’ve drawn creepier 😄

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It shoves Sunny–more violence, just like Aubrey and Kel (in the dreamworld, anyway).

Disgustingly good foreshadowing. I can’t believe Aubrey shoves Kel down the stairs oh who am I kidding there’s probably an AU for that. This has fuckall to do with the playthrough commentary but, in my fandom-trawling, I have discovered that an apparently popular form of Omori fanwork is “AUs” that essentially swap the cast’s personalities, including the part where a child dies*. Funniest fucking thing (affectionate, with great reverence for creativity even when wildly OOC), begging some of y’all to make them OCs and go even more wild from there.
*[6/8: this is referencing a tweet but hell if I remember what the source was, RIP. went something like (paraphrasing, not at all exact) “Omori AUs are so funny because in other fandoms you get “what if [nice thing happened]” and Omori gets “what if a different child died”]

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LOVE the effect of the screen getting gradually darker, now the Something is taunting, and THIS DIALOGUE. HMMM
[img: “???: Take a deep breath… Don’t be afraid. It’s not as scary as you think.”]
Something as embodiment of fear of… death? abuse??

Stick a mental pin in “Something👁️‍🗨️ represents abuse.” Leave it there. Bright red and grabbing and horrifying.

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There’s not much left for this segment, but that felt like as ominous a note as any to cut the post on. Less dramatic from this point on, too; I stopped playing shortly after returning to Headspace, so maaaaybe I’ll be able to cover the rest of the dang irl-day this round?

did someone get hit by a car
[img: Mom’s sticky note: “If you leave the house, remember to look both ways before crossing the street!”]

Probably another Yume Nikki homage. I saw at least one person say they (or their friend?) thought Kel ran Mari over with a car, and I am devastated to report I didn’t save the link and can’t find it again >:(

More seriously, Mewo sure is schrodinger’s cat, but I think “got run over by a car” is plausible (as anything else, really). It sure could’ve, erm, bisected her—which ties into the larger duality motif regardless, but that’s getting way ahead of myself here.

Anyway, more jumpscares happen, not much analysis, and then I finish up or the night shortly into Headspace. Have some note-observations:

• I have NEVER been so relieved to get yeeted back into a white void and I think that’s exactly the feeling this part is going for
• I still don’t know what to make of the scrambled eggs in the Neighbor’s Room. They make the same squishy sound effect as the mini-Somethings (Basils? fact-check this), so maaaaaybe there’s some kind of parallel here running by watermelon-Basil?
• “Four boys walking on railroad tracks” is a Pokemon reference, which itself references [a movie, need to dig up that post again]
• …Huh, not even allowed to go near the fear of heights anymore. And stopped by Hero the Supporter™️. Interesting. [img: Hero: “We should go see Mari… She’s been so worried about you.”]
• …man, is Mari’s thing like, a world where Sunny imagines his mom really cares about him and is always there. What the fuck, man 8( [img: Mari: “Don’t worry me like that.”]
  “As always, I’ll be there if you need me!” See what I meaannnnn
  I am eyeing everything she says with a thousand times more suspicion now (and kicking myself for not checking her stats more thoroughly at the very start). Conditional love???” [img: Mari: “So… do you need me to help you with anything? All it costs is your love!”]

Thus ends my first session of Omori! Man, holy shit, what a night. and yeah incidentally I’m not gonna clean all this up tonight-March-5th, preeetty hefty chunk of material here… two posts should be good I think, especially if the vertical thing gets expanded. for now, send tweet save draft \o/