you have been here for as long as you remember.
welcome to my omori shrine page! this game kicked my ass. i loved it! so, i made a shrine to celebrate it.

all of that being said, here's a quick warning that this page shares a lot in common with the game, warning and all. you might find some secrets related to pretty unsettling subject matter. it's your choice to proceed. includes a playlist, some recs and some thoughts about life.

PS. THIS IS AN OLD PAGE AND IS KEPT FOR POSTERITY! I MAY EDIT IT IN THE FUTURE TO HAVE A NICER LAYOUT, BUT PROBABLY NOT! BE YE WARNED!
games to play if you liked omori:
indie games to make you think
  • night in the woods
  • the sigcorp / to the moon series
  • yuppie psycho
  • off
  • fran bow
  • sally face
  • classic rpgmaker horror: ib / corpse party / witch's house / mad father / misao / tales of the black forest
  • kentucky route zero
  • earthbound (duh)
  • undertale / deltarune (duh)
  • va-11 hall-a
  • rakuen
  • buddy simulator
  • firewatch
headspace is where omori and all his friends play! there's aubrey, kel and his big brother hero. they like to play cards in neighbor's room, always waiting for the white door to open. there's basil, who tends a garden south of the playground. and of course there's something behind you mari, omori's big sister. she has a bad knee, so she likes to sit and relax with a picnic instead. if you're ever feeling down, sit with mari and she'll make you feel all better. all it costs is your love!
headspace was cute to me at first, but i think that looking back on the game, it's actually a little disturbing. just like how neighbor's bedroom only "needs" to appear to sunny on the hikkikomori route, headspace represents an unsettling kind of self-soothing and self-reassurance. we can try to ignore how this might appear for us, how it transfers over into our own lives, but all people sometimes fall into a place where we want to feel held and protected.

that being said, i think omori was such an impactful game for me because i downloaded it about a week before my grandmother had her stroke, which ended up being the first real brush with grief i've had in my life. playing this game might have made the grief and sudden, painful recognition that i too was aging feel much more visceral, but i also think it helped me cope and understand that the pain i was feeling was something that could be overcome.
...if only that were all true. the real world is waiting outside, sunny!

omori doesn't live in whitespace. omori lives in sunny's head, and sunny lives in faraway town... okay, technically. mostly, sunny lives in his house - and smaller yet, in his room. but when his old friend kel knocks on the door only 3 days before the big move, a stranger a feeling inside him pushes sunny to go outside for the first time in years.
i have a soft spot for the nowhere, usa setting that is faraway town, and so many other towns, both real and entirely fictional.

there's something about small towns that rips the rose colored glasses off your face by the time you're somewhere in your teens. i can't help but put them back on and romanticize it. the crazy play-place at the mall, painted penguin, limited-too and libby lu, claires, hot topic and spencers... the mall was like a playground by itself. today, they're all dying. the storefronts sit empty.

so my friends did what we could in high school and through college. when we were all in town again, we would catch up - how have things changed since the last time i came to this place, since the last time i saw you? we would find abandoned places, antique malls, drive around with nothing to do. and around us, the town as we knew it continued to die. new houses sprung up on what was once farmland. green fields became shopping strips. we weren't growing apart but we were growing, apart. coming back home sometimes felt like being superimposed onto a changing background image.

i can only wonder what it must have been like for sunny to step into the blinding daylight on the first day of the game. it wasn't only his friends who had changed. no, surely his town had changed too. all while he stagnated inside.
because the sheet music is found in deeper well, i chose to list several songs here! includes a lyric from each.
AN OMORI PLAYLIST
(meant to be shuffled!)
the bottomless, ever-growing region to which sunny has supressed the truth.
behind these doors lie rooms of scattered fragments, forever changing.