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# OMORI is equal parts Final Fantasy and Eraserhead
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/omori-cuts-final-fantasy-eraserhead/
- Published: 2014-04-23T19:47:57.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T16:34:33.000Z
- Description: You’d be forgiven for thinking horror games have lost their edge lately. The current torchbearer is Amnesia: start with a weird fiction pedigree, keep the player on her toes with careful formal elements, and pop in a horrific slavering hellspawn when all else fails. Games like Slender and its YouTub
- Author: Astrid Budgor
- Tags: News, Horror, Kickstarter, omori, RPG, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

You’d be forgiven for thinking horror games have lost their edge lately. The current torchbearer is *Amnesia*: start with a weird fiction pedigree, keep the player on her toes with careful formal elements, and pop in a horrific slavering hellspawn when all else fails.

Games like *Slender* and its YouTube-ready ilk have nixed the first two, leaving a spare, often-generic level design that disperses jump scares with unflinching repetition. Lord knows how many *Slender*\-likes populate Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter, but it’s a formula that sells.

One thing you cannot accuse the freshly Kickstarted *[OMORI](http://kck.st/1i3AiVA?ref=killscreen.com)* of is exploiting a formula—unless you somehow count “lysergic surrealist RPG” as a formula, in which case *let’s make more of those*.

The game comes out of a [blog](http://www.omoriboy.com/?ref=killscreen.com) run by artist OMOCAT; a blog which follows bona-fide [*hikikomori*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori?ref=killscreen.com) Omori (wait a minute…) as he talks to himself and his cat, listens to The Smiths, and occasionally points a knife at the bridge of his nose.

Not your typical protagonist, even for a self-released *RPG Maker* game, but OMOCAT says she’s “always envisioned *OMORI* as a game,” and it seems to have blossomed into something quite interesting.

The point of reference seems to be *Yume Nikki*, both for the phantasmagoric day-glo aesthetic and for the willfully obscure narrative, which traps Omori in “white space” like an abstract take on *Silent Hill 4*. But between the warped battle system – like your usual Active Time Battle, except instead of casting Fira or Dispel, you tell your character to “Calm Down” in the face of what appears to be a hybrid shark-plane – and the promised loads of NPCs, dungeons, and quests, plus the eerily sweet soundtrack, the game has earned enough goodwill to muscle past its $22,000 goal in less than two days.

With 43 left to go, we’ll see just what OMOCAT has planned for Omori– hopefully he’s not too shy to attend his coming-out party.