Week 4: Meow? (Waiting for Something to Happen?)

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s… OMORI….? …Wait, something’s off.

Progress This Week

This week, I finished my research for OMORI! Yay! I spent so much time this week just scrolling through Steam looking for reviews…

OMORI is an RPG-style psychological horror game created by indie studio Omocat. The story follows Sunny as he explores his town and recalls the events that traumatized him. However, most of the game is set in a dream-like, escapist world known as Headspace, which Sunny’s dream alter Omori explores with his friends. There are several main endings, being a good ending, several neutral endings, and a bad ending, with different choices leading up to each of them. The different endings reflect whether Sunny has overcome his trauma, simply ignored it, or let it consume him entirely. In addition, there is also the presence of two main routes, being the True Route and the Hikikomori Route, which depends entirely on a single choice near the very beginning of the game.

Basically, I have been gathering reviews that mention any sort of opinion on how the presence of multiple endings and/or routes affected their gameplay. So far, I have collect 15 different reviews from different sources across the internet, mainly from Steam. This is because Steam has over 60k different reviews of OMORI, which meant that as long as I kept scrolling, I could at least encounter a few reviews that mentioned what I was looking for.

For reminders, here’s the scoring system I will be using:

1: the presence of different endings / routes detracts from the experience OR the lack of different endings / routes improves the experience

2: the presence of different endings / routes does not affect anything OR the lack of different endings / routes does not affect anything

3: the presence of different endings / routes improves the experience OR the lack of different endings / routes detracts from the experience

Now, here’s some quick fun facts about my results from this week!

– Including my own opinion, I gathered 16 different reviews.

– The ratio of positive to negative reviews used is 15:1, or 93.75% positive. This was in order to attempt to emulate the actual positive review percentage on Steam, which is 97% positive.

– Of all 16 reviews, 10 of them scored a 3 / 3 (meaning that the presence of different endings or routes improved the gameplay experience). Most of the reviews were filled with compliments for how the endings were executed, and how the surprise choices made for rather engaging gameplay.

– Unsurprisingly, the only negative review present scored a 1 / 3. Though, four other reviews that were generally positive scored a 1 / 3 as well.

– The most commonly cited reason for the lowest score was that the game got boring when attempting to clear both of the main routes, as a good portion of content is reused between both paths. In addition, having a choice that affected the game as a surprise is a pain when you pick the wrong option, since you might have to redo a lot of content

– Only one of these reviews scored a 2 / 3. The review specifically mentioned that they were aware of the presence of different endings, however they did not wish to pursue any other ending besides the good ending due to not wanting to see the characters suffer.

– The average score of all reviews is a 2.466667 / 3. This means that on average, people believe that the different endings and routes in OMORI improve their experience with the game.

The attitude that the different options throughout the game improves a person’s game experience seems to align with my initial hypothesis. If research continues to support this opinion, then in the game that Isabelle and I are making, we will be including different interaction options that can affect the ending that the player receives.

Besides the research portion, I also have created a functional load menu popup that can be accessed from the main menu. It features three save slots, and they should be functional, however I have not created a save button yet so that can’t be tested for right now. I also intend to find a way to make the load menu display extra information, such as when the save was made and where the save was located.

Up Next

Next week, I intend to transition to researching a different game, most likely Library of Ruina (I am going to have so much fun rambling about Ruina). Though, finding reviews for Ruina might be tougher than for OMORI, due to the smaller amount of reviews on Steam. I will also continue working on the save and load system, ideally being able to implement a save button for the game, so I can finally test whether or not the game loading works.