‘Omori’ and the Small Traumas of Relationships
The ways Omori has been critically exhausted for its depictions of mental health and trauma make me feel hesitant to weigh in on this game. Since its release, friends have recommended Omori to me in earnest, yet it sat unplayed in my library for about two years, primarily because this recommendation always came with a disclaimer about heavy themes like suicide; I knew that I would need to be in a healthy headspace to work through this game and appreciate it. At long last, I would like to enter the conversation about Omori – namely, what it does well, what surprised me, and how the circumstances of my life while playing directly dictated how I interpreted the parts of the game that are so commonly labeled “trauma.”
As with my experience playing similar games like Undertale, for instance, I think there is some detriment to entering the Omori experience with too much baggage from people who already love it. Things I never heard in reviews or enthusiastic exhortations about Omori include its charming soundtrack, simple but engaging battle system, and the wealth of pure-blooded humor that allows for this game to escape and in some ways overcome the darker themes it explores in more serious moments. I didn’t expect to laugh out loud as much as I did while playing, though I did expect to cry; I didn’t expect to identify with young children protagonists, though I did expect to have my own inner demons engaged; and I didn’t expect to like this game so much that I’d take a completionist route through it, though I did know that I would eventually need two playthroughs if I were to gain some perspective on the “proper” experience.
Playing Omori somewhat felt like being told to play Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, only to find that there’s just as often a stand-up comedian in Senua’s head as there are hateful voices. The gameplay, coming off the back of my recent playthrough of In Stars and Time, felt eerily similar with the rock-paper-scissors evocative mechanics, and yet offered me continual engagement and depth until I had functionally maxed out my characters. Even when I found myself grinding towards Omori’s end, it was a completely voluntary act driven by the fact that I wanted achievements (in this case, to become the “Squizzard Exterminator”) rather than being stuck at a difficulty spike.
The pathway to those achievements involves childish gags like a “Butt Certificate,” certifying that Aubrey has mastered the Headbutt attack, a Download Window boss that echoes Y2K computer nostalgia, and complete wastes of time like orange cone mazes that you have to individually cut down. Collectively, the sense of humor in Omori spans the spectrum, from a personified buff Pluto to a prolonged tofu enthusiasm bit, and somehow all of them work. Whether I was killing 100 bunnies for a bunny-hating leaf or obtaining bread so my party didn’t become toast (literally), I never once felt like my completionist journey lacked purpose or was pointlessly tedious. It’s as if Omori’s developers desperately want you to engage with everything, but for the sake of their Trauma(™) story, the developers didn’t want to hinder the player or jeopardize their likelihood of reaching it.
Obviously, as players advance through the story, they will naturally encounter the ways in which the funny and charming aspects of this game arise through a deep, twisted repression mechanism.The character Omori, or Sunny, depending on at what point you view the protagonist(s), creates a fantasy world where his ethereal sister, Mari, is still alive and well, their sibling and core-friend-group relationships still healthy.
In terms of the aforementioned trauma, Omori’s big, gradual reveal is that he killed his sister – the person he now (and then, too) idolizes and yet cannot escape being haunted by. Players like myself who are used to wacky worlds like Undertale won’t initially question the quirky, upbeat, and sometimes incoherently saccharine world of Omori; at the same time, however, as the story progresses, players start to see more and more evidence within the protagonist that he is not just traumatized, but the very perpetrator behind Mari’s death. He is the wrong factor in this story – the part of the world that metaphysically breaks it apart.
The tragedy of Omori is not just in Mari’s death but in Sunny’s accidental role within it, as reading between the story’s lines reveals that Mari, as pure as she was and beloved by all, pressured Sunny into perfectionism – goading him into a sibling fight that took place atop their family home’s staircase. In a tragic misreading of the situation, Sunny shoved Mari down the stairs, instantly killing her and breaking his violin in the process. This tragic memory reveals not that Sunny is evil or premeditated Mari’s death somehow, but rather, in an act of overwhelm, unleashed his pent up stress in the wrong place and time. In an understandable act of self-protection and buckling denial borne of fear, Sunny and his dear friend Basil take Mari’s body and stage her death to look like an act of suicide, her body swaying from the tree that they hanged her corpse from to hide the truth. This origin story of guilt and shame is one of the key secrets to Omori’s story and the “Omori” identity of your protagonist throughout much of the game.
Omori is haunted by the traumatic ghost of his past, but as aforementioned when discussing the humor of the game, not all of Omori feels dominated by tragedy and loss. The eccentric game world of Omori’s character is obviously born out of psychological repression, fantasizing Sunny’s way out of the reality (and responsibility) of the world his actions have created. Though this reveal about Mari happens quite late in the main story, hints are peppered throughout the entire experience; even though these traumas are large, the ones that meant the most to me were the small traumas true of all relationships, not just between siblings.
The tragedy of all relationships, in my experience, is constituted by the myriad ways in which we accidentally hurt each other – and blame ourselves for it. You don’t have to push your sister down the stairs to know what I mean here. Small traumas, for me, can refer to the blunt comments and sly comments we make when we are feeling hurt but express that hurt through rudeness and malice, wanting to control the other person, with the intention to protect ourselves, through the tool of anger. We see this transpire between Aubrey and Kal, for instance. These small traumas can be the times we said we would be there to support someone and, for whatever reason, failed to live up to that expectation or promise. The entire friend group of Omori is at some level guilty of this. These traumas can also manifest as the chasm between the expectations we project onto partners and the reality of living with them; there’s no hiding and masking on bad days when your social battery is drained or your life takes a punch to the face, so inevitably, we hurt the ones closest to us just because they are there.
I played Omori less than a month before the biggest, most painful breakup in my life – the kind of breakup that was constructed from these small traumas. Prior to this relationship, I had consistently been the one to give up and end relationships that weren’t working, but this time, my partner ended things with me – and I was completely unprepared for it. After a year of long-distance, and several years of intermittent “talking,” I was convinced that this was “it,” romantically speaking. While the context of the breakup was incredibly cordial, her citing that the place we had moved to from Florida was making her deeply miserable, I felt the first real heartbreak of my life in a relationship where I had not just tried, but was “all in.”
Heartbreak is something that media trains us to feel, but having emotionally closed myself off in every relationship prior, leading up to a breakup, I was convinced that I was aromantic – romance wasn’t for me. And before this, I had never felt how viscerally the stories about heartbreak are. It’s as if I viewed heartbreak as a movie trope or cultural cliche rather than an actual, physiological phenomenon.
In the days following the breakup, I couldn’t stop crying. Not just quiet tears rolling down my face, but the sort of rocking-back-and-forth-in-the-shower level of hysterically sobbing, the sort of holding-myself-so-tightly-in-a-hug-that-my-nails-bit-into-my-skin clenched weeping, where I dry heaved, running out of breath between gasps – like I was drowning. I would wake up in the middle of the night, look at my now-ex lying asleep, remember the truth of it all, and quickly escape into the living room where I could bite through tears without waking her up. My literal heart hurt, like I had gone on too strenuous a run or consumed too much caffeine, making me realize that I had never taken writers seriously when they emphasized the “heart” part of “heartache” – until this moment, it had been a metaphor to me.
What I was going through was deep grief, the kind that I had only experienced before when my childhood cat Smokie died and I buried him alone in the rain.
Sure, I had lost people before in deaths and breakups. I have stayed with partners for several years in previous relationships, but I had never opened myself so fully as to this person. Losing this partner was like losing a part of my soul. So as the realizations cascaded, I grieved the relationship with my partner’s family – the feeling of “home” I felt with them during the holidays. I grieved the companionship of living with my partner – the guarantee of having someone to process life, go on adventures, and work through life’s curveballs with. Hell, I grieved her cat, this amazing emotional support animal that would follow me around and cuddle up in my arms while sleeping. But, above all, I grieved the vacuum that had yawned open into my life, shocked and unprepared, so confident that this person would endure anything with me that I had taken advantage of her good will and pushed her away in the process. Hurt, confused, ashamed, regretful – moving on felt incomprehensible.
In a simultaneous flurry, I dragged myself through the Kübler-Ross model: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Weeks later, I finally understood the non-linear nature of grief. More than anything, I didn’t want my partner to leave – not just because I was terrified of being alone again, but that all of my eggs were in this one basket and I didn’t feel prepared to start over. I love(d) this person, to the point where I had planned to propose later this same year, and even the most severe heartbreak couldn’t wipe that feeling away.
While she was out, the evening of the breakup, I restlessly circled the apartment and discarded all direct mementos of “us” – photos of us kissing, tokens of the relationship, the letters she had mailed me over the past eight years. In order to overcome this immense pain, I was, in other words, very close to repressing this trauma just like we see in Omori – by erasing the past, perhaps, I thought, we can influence that grief which holds power over our lives. By taking control of the hurt, I hoped that the actual separation would be less debilitating, for the past always feels threatening when the future is radically reshuffled all at once.
But this breakup, devastating as it has been, wasn’t the first time my relationships have been rended because of small traumas. I think of previous bandmates, who I spent nearly every day with for years making music, touring, recording, promoting – only to lose them as soon as the band split apart. I think of lifelong friends that travelled with me through high school and college, only to lose them when they started partying or hanging with people whose values felt more conservative than my own. I think of people I’ve moved away from, best friends, and the people who have moved away from me – and the inevitable fact that you can, once apart, almost never stay as close as you could when you were practically neighbors. I think of people I withdrew from when I was first coming out as a transgender, people who I knew would not support me – why put myself through that pain, I figured. I even think of my closest friends in Epilogue, people I used to play games with every day, who I barely talk to nowadays – simply because we have drifted apart, and yet I don’t know how to begin to repair the distance between us even though they’re right there. Small traumas like these define me, for better or for worse.
I think a very real response to small traumas is to take the alternative path that Omori presents: the Hikikomori path. For English speakers like myself, this Japanese term refers to people who overly withdraw from society, reclusive people who hide in their homes, anxious or reluctant to engage with the outside social world. In the game Omori, you have the option to simply ignore other people and stay at home. After being hurt so many times, whether as the perpetrator who drove someone dear away or someone who felt the tablecloth suddenly yank from under them one-too-many times, I can deeply understand why someone would choose to pull inward and confine themselves out of, at the very least, self-preservation. People often drink to forget, after all. But, to this end, I think Omori quite clearly relays to the player through gameplay that the way forward is through grief, not by forever avoiding it as the player (and many of us) has the option to. The joy this game offers is to be found only outside, by letting that guard down again.
These small traumas forever draw a barrier between yourself and other people, as illustrated by the frayed relationships the protagonist of Omori has with characters like Basil and Mari – dear as they are to him. The thing that erects between people sharing small traumas isn’t like a bridge so much as a wall, that innate and irremovable fear that people will forever judge you for what you have done instead of offering grace and forgiveness. Out of fear of condemnation, people like Omori form these outer shells, hiding themselves and their feelings and even the truth just to protect the sense of familiarity they find within their communities and immediate relationships. And once a lie is spun, even as a fantasy, it becomes addicting and sometimes impossible to unweave, especially as you grow to believe it yourself.
I’ve included many discussions about this relationship in my articles over the past few years in discussions about Spider-Man 2 and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, but I don’t want every article I write moving forward to be about my breakup. Right now, however, it’s that big of a deal in my life to where I feel like I am ignoring important context for my experience with games I’ve played throughout this experience like Omori, In Stars and Time, and even less obvious titles like Jedi Survivor, without directly addressing it.
Like my transness, like my autism, this deep-seated fracture of heartbreak in me is something that I can’t ignore, I can’t remove; to gloss over it would be to do a disservice to what I find meaningful in writing critically about games – that is, talking about how and why games move us at the particular times we encounter them as art. Moving forward, this topic may resurface, because exploring hurt through metaphor and story has been one of the greater sources of therapy within my life, but I also don’t want people to worry, hence this disclaimer. It’s just, as I have always maintained, games play you – not the other way around – so I want to ensure that what I publish isn’t hiding the truth, or else these articles feel insincere.
The horror of confronting the past hurts that you’ve inflicted on someone is both a hallmark of maturity and one of the scariest, most humbling aspects of being a person. Repression is often not a conscious decision but an automatic process to preserve the narratives we’ve learned that serve ourselves in life. While it’s completely normal to hurt people by accident, whether by disappointing them or doing something genuinely painful that you didn’t foresee, resolving to grow through that experience is what has carried me through so many of these small traumas. I don’t want to lose another bandmate, best friend, or life partner, simply because I am immature enough to drive them away if I’m not being careful.
In these ways and more, Omori is a game about trauma, yes, but it is more importantly a story about grief – the inability to let people go, the inability to confront the selves we brought to broken relationships, the inability to move on and grow through the pain involved. Understanding the antagonism you brought towards someone who just wanted to be loved too, in the case of Mari, and actually feeling the guilt of bearing the responsibility for the hurt caused to others, in the case of Sunny, are necessary steps. If we aren’t careful, as people who love others, we risk resurfacing the neglect and hurt we already feel into these other people’s lives. We, in other words, risk treating people poorly when they have nothing to do with the reasons behind our actions.
Obviously, you can never perfectly act so as to avoid hurting everyone. But it still sucks when it happens. We push away, or in some literal cases like Omori, push down, the people we want to love simply so we can subconsciously reassert a sense of control over that relationship. In reality, we always have the option to be present with them while they express their needs, but so few of us actively decouple from our own needs that it becomes fatuously simple to neglect the other person’s in the name of caring about or protecting our relationship with them. As psychologists so often repeat, hurt people hurt people, so naturally, we behave in the ways that we have been mistreated before and we inflict that on people, to our own disappointment. But as I hope I have taken away from Omori, even though what’s done is done, it’s never too late to recover – we live and learn.
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