[warning: major spoilers ahead. tw // death, depression, anxiety, suicide]
Yesterday I just finished playing a game called OMORI. In case you haven’t heard about it, OMORI is a RPG surreal psychological horror game which was released last December. The gameplay involves having an adventure with your friends by exploring various areas as the story goes, facing and defeating lots of creatures and bosses through the turn-based JRPG mechanics, and eventually revealing and untangling the truth; uncovering what really happened between the characters, making things make more sense. The graphics and artworks are so colorful, making them visually pleasing and adorable… at least before things get much, much darker (literally).
During the few first hours, the game might seem peculiar. You’ll meet Aubrey, Basil, Hero, and Kel, which are your best friends. You’ll meet Mari, who is your sister and often having fun with your friends as well. You’ll play, have picnics, and explore the world with them. You’ll see lots of bizarre things and creatures, go to odd-yet-colorful worlds, even you’ll ride on a Pluto-like creature to teleport between places (what does that even mean?). You might feel that the game is pretty much like Pokemon but on crack; hence surreal is included in the game’s genre.
spoilers start from here
It is later revealed throughout the gameplay that those peculiar, vibrant, colorful places are actually depictions of Omori’s dream world. Omori himself is actually a kind of doppelgänger of someone named Sunny. Omori only exists every time Sunny is sleeping and entering the dream world. Sunny’s friends do exist in the real world, but some of them are actually opposites from what we’ve seen in the dream world. We’ll discover that Sunny is actually shutting himself in his house for approximately 4 years after the death of Mari, which was caused by Sunny pushing her down the stairs after a heated argument. To made the incident seem like a suicide and to ~save~ Sunny, Basil, who was along with Sunny when the incident happens, brought Mari’s body to the tree behind their house and hang her with a rope.
Past the incident, everything are not the same as they were before. The friend group have been parted away for years. Each of them were grieving and dealing with Mari’s death with their own ways, though I’ll talk mainly about Sunny and Basil. Sunny starts to become depressed, isolating himself in his house, creating his own utopia in his previously mentioned dream world. There, he depicts his memories and thoughts mainly about his old self prior to the incident, and tries to repress the guilt and basically everything about Mari’s death, before those repressed thoughts are slowly start to appear. Basil, on the other hand, is becoming much more shy, timid and anxious after Mari’s death, probably resulted by his constant guilt of taking part of and covering the incident.
lesson learned
Throughout playing the game, one of the best insights I had was that we have to forgive and accept yourself in order to overcome and move from the past. It’s indeed much easier said than done. Of course, everyone makes mistakes and has things which they regret doing so. Being unable to overcome our mistakes can result to constantly repressing your thoughts, difficulty to gain self-esteem, or even hating and blaming yourself. Some of those mistakes are inevitable, though. We might develop some sort of unpleasant trauma following those mistakes. Dealing with our previous mistakes and actions is of course not an easy thing to do. We might as well try to find and do unhealthy coping mechanisms. Constantly blaming ourselves, repressing our traumas and do some kind of escapism, turning the wounds to outward manifestations of anger, you name it. I think that’s normal and understandable, but remember that being stuck with your traumas and having an inability to overcome them only worsens your wounds, and won’t do anything to recover from them.
The process of forgiving and eventually becoming to accept ourselves is indeed complicated. I think the first thing we need to do is to acknowledge ourselves to the fullest, which includes facing our own feelings, our previous mistakes, our flaws, and so on. It might be so hard to do, but that’s a part of the process, so take baby steps. By acknowledging ourselves, hopefully we can perceiving ourselves in a much less negative way and stop constantly blaming ourselves. The next thing we can do in the process is to repair our previously done mistakes. In the game, Sunny is slowly trying to overcome his past traumas by reconciling with his friends, thanks to Kel’s help. We can then apologize to the corresponding people for the mistakes we’ve made and acknowledged before. Eventually, in order to forgive and accept ourselves, we have to shift our mind and our focus from the past, thinking about lots of what-ifs and stuff, to the present. We can keep trying to think how to prevent our mistakes from happening again, how to fix the negative effects resulted from our mistakes. We can seek professional help if we feel like we need it, so if the conditions are met, I hope you won’t feel hesitated to go to therapy.
Last of all, the game has taught me many things, particularly about forgiving myself, facing my repressed thoughts, accepting and overcoming my past mistakes and traumas, finding peace within myself, and so on. For me, OMORI is not merely a game, it’s rather a priceless experience to go through. You might try playing it as well. Either way, if anyone ever reads this and is currently having a hard time dealing with past traumas and mistakes, I hope you’re able to overcome them anytime soon!
