Transcript for:
Exploring Omori: A Deep Game Analysis

omori one of the most impactful and memorable game experiences i've had since playing the surreal and bizarre cruelty squad i only recently discovered the existence of this game weirdly due to youtube recommending me a trailer which was released way back in 2014 the trailer intrigued me from the get-go not only from the undertale-esque appearance of the game also being created in rpg maker but also two other things one being the art style and claimed that this was some kind of psychological horror game but also the fact that upon searching the game i discovered it only came out in 2020 long after this trailer was released it should be said that the music in the trailer was also top notch however from that point forward i knew i would have to play this game heading over to steam seeing the overwhelmingly positive reviews only reinforced the idea that this game was something that i needed to experience leading to me buying the game right there and then and installing it as soon as i could my internet is very shitty however so whilst it was downloading i thought i'd check out who was behind this game and why there was such a long gap between the trailer and the release of the game turns out the game was created primarily by an artist called omocat who runs a website sharing the same name and sells original clothing pretty much all of the designs looked very high quality with the art style fitting in line with the game which excited me because there's nothing i like more than someone who expresses their creative and unique voice but that still left me asking what was with the long wait for this game a question that would lead me down a rabbit hole of kickstarter troubles and development hell i'm not gonna go over a lot of it because it's already pretty well documented and in my opinion pretty boring considering the game's out now and we're looking at it from a retrospective point of view essentially the project was introduced on kickstarter on april 21st 2014 reaching half of their target goal within a day and shooting past their goal and sub goals in the following weeks people obviously had a lot of faith in omocat to deliver something great which does make sense considering the final product we got however what people didn't realize was how much longer they were gonna have to wait to even experience it the original estimated release day was may 2015 however it's clear that omocat had been deeply unaware of all the facets that go into making a game let alone creating a genuinely good one the project ended up garnering over two hundred thousand dollars in order to help with the development but even with that money it didn't mean things were gonna go smoothly over the next five years the project seemed almost stagnant with delay after delay and next to no clear communication with the backers anymore some felt they'd been scammed and turned against the project and omocat entirely while others held faith and showed as much support as they could whilst also hoping that the game would be released soon no matter what side you were on it was undeniable that the magnitude of the project was clearly too much for omokat and their game development team to deliver in a reasonable time frame essentially getting to the point where they stayed silent barely responding to anyone and just worked as hard as they could on getting the game to a level of quality they were happy with and releasing it when they felt was necessary fast forward through all the development troubles to the 25th of december 2020 and the game was finally released despite how long people had to wait it was undeniable the level of quality that this game had being comparable to other games like undertale and lisa with earthbound arguably being the clearest and most prominent influence on the game and in this video we're going to be diving into every aspect of this game and breaking down what's so great and unique about it when opening the game initially we only hear silence with the omo cat logo being flashed on the screen followed by a warning that some of the topics being featured in this game may be too disturbing for certain people to handle i guess this would be a good time to say that omori can get very dark at points touching on very deep personal and real subjects it tackles them all in a fantastic and sensitive way which we'll get into later just a heads up in case you think that ideas like suicide and depression are too much for you to handle we then get brought to the title screen with the titular character staring blankly at us with a light above his head from the second i saw this i almost knew that i was gonna like this game the hand-drawn art style of this game is something that i think sets it apart from a lot of its other contemporaries making it a lot more unique and oftentimes beautiful starting the game we immediately hear some kind of film tape running as the phrase don't worry slowly appears on the screen there are several cutscenes like this throughout the game which all have this film tape sound underneath and are delivered in a stuttery almost stop-motion type of way we see who we can assume to be omori covering his eyes and crying before we're told no matter what promise me that we'll always be there for each other this takes us to another image showing both omori and another unknown character in front of a big dark door once again we can assume this new character who's been introduced is the person who's been saying all the phrases which have been popping up on the screen making us think that this may be another pivotal character towards the story we're then brought away from that scenario to a place called the white space omori has apparently been here for as long as he can remember bringing us into the actual game surrounding us are a sketchbook a cat a laptop and a box of tissues i really hope those tissues are just used for mucus the music sounds rather upbeat and happy which is quite a juxtaposition considering how barren and strange the environment is immediately giving me a sense of unease even when literally nothing's happened yet looking inside the sketchbook we can see these bizarre and twisted drawings presumably done by omori this is our first little insight into omori's mind with the themes of depression and anxiety already being presented under the surface looking on our laptop gives us the chance to check out our journal which shows rows and rows of the same two actions being repeated those being spending time in the white space and visiting friends something to know is that if we assume they've been listed in a vertical fashion omori's focus on his friends has only been a recent development with most of his time previously being spent in the white space this already starts making us think that perhaps the white space is some sort of metaphor an internal metaphysical place that omori comes to when repressing his emotions after inspecting all of these objects something falls nearby which turns out to be a shiny knife quite a violent object to appear in this relatively tame and calm environment and with that we looked at the lone white door not even being attached to any wall or floor and step through this takes us to a completely new environment one which is bright colorful and almost childlike in every way even down to the music here we're introduced to our three friends aubrey kell and hiro who seem to be playing a game of cards this initial meeting with these three do a very good job at setting up these characters as well as the location making it clear the dreamlike environment that we'll be exploring aubry is the most outspoken of the group and clearly is a very emotional person not only in how she treats you and your friends but also how she reacts to her stuffed toy being hidden kel appears to be a bit of a loose cannon being the most childlike and ignorant of the group getting angry at little grievances like not being able to win at cards and finally hiro seems to be the most level headed calming kell down and rationalizing the situation which would make sense considering hiro is actually the oldest of the group details like the colors of the environment and characters are perfectly implemented giving us this immediate contrast of omori stark black and white appearance in comparison to the other characters bright and colorful ones anyways we find the stuffed toy that kell hid and give it back to aubry before going up the stairs and leaving before leaving we're given an allowance of clams a term which is used to signify a single dollar bill however in this dream world they're literal clams we emerge from the stump of a large tree being surrounded by a forest the music in this section i noted as being especially excellent which is the case for a lot of the music in this game [Music] we'll touch on it more later but the sound design in general is an element that i think enhances the game so much even to the point where i think certain scenes would lose all of their impact without this incredibly solid soundtrack heading south we end up in a playground where we immediately notice our two other best friends mari and basil mari serves as almost the peacekeeper of the group always being able to help out everyone with their problems she serves as our save point allowing you to save with her picnic basket and here with whatever food she has in front of her basil on the other hand is a shy peaceful flower boy who always tries to look on the bright side of every situation it's revealed in their discussion that basil has a particular interest in photography and capturing his friends in a more naturalistic way as opposed to having everyone pose for a photo basil then pulls out his photo album which includes a number of photos showing all of the friends messing around and having fun if you hadn't picked up already the idea of feeling like the odd one out is especially reinforced here with omori always appearing to be especially shy and quiet in all of these photos there's also a photo showing everyone's feet with the description all of our feet in a circle can you guess whose feet are whose of course everyone's feet look exactly the same apart from omori's which are jet black this already alludes to the ideas and that warning from the start of the game with me immediately realizing that omori clearly suffers from either depression or anxiety or both and has a false impression of his surroundings and how people perceive him no matter how much love and acceptance is thrown his way from his friends his problems clearly go much deeper not just being a sad and introverted person but instead someone with a genuine chemical imbalance that needs serious help it's clear that his friends don't seem to notice and if they do they accept him anyway perhaps showing that his black and white color is only being shown from omori's perspective appearing different to those around him after they're done looking at the photos basil suggests coming back to his house avid to show his friends his new sprout moles which he's apparently growing the gang agrees however before setting off decide to play a game of hide and seek with the other people in the playground this entire segment serves as a way to not only flesh out these characters in the playground which plays a bigger role later in a different context but also to show our main characters dynamic with each other and how they treat each other and those around them omori is chosen to be the seeker which leads to aubrey saying quite a key but sneaky piece of dialogue that you wouldn't initially notice on your first playthrough omori is it but omori doesn't like to be alone these subtle foreshadowings are utterly brilliant not sticking out like a sore thumb but simply presenting certain ideas and leaving them there only to re-emerge later on and create a bigger impact on the player you end up finding everyone except basil who seems to have disappeared a rustling in the bushes reveals that basil is being held by somebody called boss which leads us into our first fight this serves as a way of slowly introducing us to the game's combat mechanics an aspect of the game that i think was superbly done the battles are always engaging due to the style in which they're presented choosing to go the route of having these nice drawings of the characters instead of just copying and pasting their sprites you can mess around with several mechanics in this initial fight however we'll be touching on those in a second you have four main things that you can do during a fight attack which simply serves as your standard one-hit damage dealer skill which lets you do a number of things depending on which character you're using such as a special attack or healing there's snacks which feature all of the consumable healing items that you have in your inventory and finally toys which are also consumables but instead feature ones that can either damage or put effects on the enemy you may have also noticed that there's another blue bar under our health this is the bar which signifies how much juice we have which is what's required to use our skill moves this means that you not only have to manage your health if you end up getting damaged but also your juice too in order to give the enemy an appropriate amount of damage back it's quite run-of-the-mill stuff in an rpg i suppose clearly once again taking a large inspiration from earthbound specifically but i think it's mainly the style of these fights that always kept me engaged i think the drawings in this game are just so unique and excellent and really liven up what could initially appear as your standard rpg game after defeating boss he lets basil go and we set off to his house before we leave we can also notice a man inside a mailbox this guy serves as the primary shop offering you consumables in exchange for your clams the shop looks fairly barren right now however as the game progresses it'll get stocked up with even more items that you'll definitely want to be buying as you get to some of the harder fights in the game heading down to battle's house he gives us a rundown of all of his flowers that he takes care of he compares sunflowers to himself arrogant lily of the valleys to mari roses to hero gladial glady gladioluses to aubrey cacti to kell and white tulips to omori this will have more significance later but once again fleshes our characters out a bit more despite being slightly on the nose in between this flower tour we have three other battles with these sentient sprout moles all of them have three different emotions the first being anger second being happiness and third being sadness this emotions mechanic is one that's integral to the combat's design and ultimately resulted in one of my favorite gameplay experiences in a while with my previous favorites either being lisa or undertale once again i like how unique the gameplay is here working on its own by keeping the combat constantly engaging but also working in terms of the game's story and themes after the second fight hiro hands you an emotion chart showing us very clearly how the system works happiness beats anger anger beats sadness and sadness beats happiness with neutral being an all-rounder that doesn't do much good with anything either with skills or consumables you can inflict these emotions both on your foe and teammates in order to maximize the amount of damage you're giving out as well as minimizing the attacks thrown onto you by the enemies on top of this these certain emotions come with their ups and downs when you're angry your attack will be raised however your defense will be lowered when you're happy you have a higher chance of getting critical hits however also have a higher chance of missing your attack entirely and finally when you're sad your defense increases however your attack decreases with the trade-off of higher defense being that instead of losing solely health you also lose some of your juice despite all these positives and negatives you primarily want to be focusing on that emotion triangle and using the stronger emotion to one up your enemy it's a very interesting design choice and never particularly became intrusive or annoying throughout the entire game it's debatable whether anything else or any other emotions could have been added later in the game however i think it's pretty perfect as it is upon reaching basil's house we come up against ye old sprout which introduces the last key gameplay mechanic that being the follow-ups as hero explains an energy bar is now present at the bottom of the screen which allows every character to do a special follow-up move they're all unique to each character and will either work more or less effectively depending on which direction you pick for example in these early stages of the game if you choose to pass to omori while keller's attacking omori will often not see it coming and take a small amount of damage himself another example would be all of heroes follow-ups which heals a small amount of the selected characters health as well as giving them another chance to attack it's a very fleshed out mechanic that you'll see me frequently use throughout the entire playthrough of the game the energy bar fills up whenever a character takes damage and once it reaches 10 you're able to use the release energy option which uses up all your energy in exchange for one extremely powerful attack in standard battles you'll rarely get the chance to use this option however it becomes somewhat integral in certain boss fights down the road after defeating this old fella you make your way inside basil's house aubry and kell get into a petty argument causing basil to fall over and drop some of his photos on the floor which upon entering the house we put back into place what seems like a nice moment swiftly takes a darker tone basil picks up his photo album and prepares to show us his little sprout moles he's been growing however upon doing this a single photo falls out of the album looking at the photo basil immediately becomes panicked which is shown perfectly in his facial expressions above the text box something that is done very well for most characters who are expressing certain emotions as basil turns around black strands begin to grow around him and a high-pitched screech can be heard basil's eyes turn crimson red as he mentions mari however before we can figure out what's happening the game distorts pretty much serving as a jump scare it's clear that something flashed on the screen however it's nearly impossible to make out when first playing going back and looking at it from my footage it's clear to see that the picture is of a broken violin at the bottom of a set of stairs it's unclear at this point what this means and why it has anything to do with anything however this is essentially dropping clues and leaving questions inside our minds which will be elaborated on later in the game this takes us back to the white space in which our only option is to stab ourselves in the chest taking us back to black this leads into another cut scene showing what we can assume to be omori and basil sitting in front of a collection of photos we get a close-up of the photos and it's unclear whether these photos have intentionally been scribbled out or if it's just the art style of the specific segment we can assume basil is speaking to us saying that the photos may be a bit sad now but we should be glad that we experienced any of these things in the first place basil and omori stand up and hold hands as they get engulfed by this dark scribbled mess perhaps alluding to the idea that both of the boys did in fact draw over all of these old photos we don't know why they would do this or why basil says that just him and omori are gonna make new memories without the group however it's once again leaving this breadcrumb trail that's leading us through these strange and bizarre events hoping that all these puzzle pieces will eventually fit into place if there's something that i think this game does better than anything else it's the amount of restraint it has the ideas are all there it's interesting from the second you hit new game but i think it would have been so easy to [ __ ] all of these things up with the wrong execution like going too far in one certain direction and removing any of the mystery i am glad to say though that omori sets his story up perfectly and keeps your interest throughout this entire opening through the darkness a figure of a boy sleeping in his bed fades in as we get asked what his name is the canon name of the boy is sunny however i wanted to do my own thing they didn't let me put munt for some reason so i just put my own name this section is very dark and i mean literally the brightness and i don't know if it's just how i've got my monitor set up but i mean so dark to the point where i can barely see anything we can see our phone flashing waking up and getting out of our bed without any dialogue or explanation we can clearly piece together that all of the things we just experienced were birthed out of our dreams this is another element of the game that i think was done very well as we start to notice several elements from the real world seep into our dream world this once again is handled with incredible restraint simply inserting things into our dream world and not saying anything about it letting players notice and discover things themselves as opposed to having everything spelled out for them looking at our voicemails we have a single one from our mum referring to us by our real world name and making us aware that we're preparing to move house despite her seemingly caring demeanor which we can hear over the message it's clear to see that our mother has her priorities fairly mixed up we don't know exactly where she is but the fact is she's left her young son in their house by himself she even mentions how she forgot to let the electric company know when they're leaving which means there will be no electricity for the last few days we'll be spending here before she finishes her call she encourages us to go outside the house as we've apparently spent a lot of our time isolating ourselves she says that our friend kell has been trying to meet up with us and says that we should meet with him before hanging up heading out of our room we attempt to go downstairs where our character literally refuses to go making it so the only option is to go back to our room and go back to sleep upon trying to do so we're woken up by our intense hunger perhaps making us think that with all these troublesome thoughts going on inside our mind we might have lost our appetite and maybe started starving ourselves going back out of our room the scene is a lot more visible being illuminated by an eerie red light coming from the outside this time we almost force ourselves to go downstairs with the journey down getting increasingly scary with the scene getting darker and long dark hands creeping up beside us the way the game portrays this anxiety is not only excellent but accurate with one of the key symptoms of an anxiety attack not only being fear and confusion but also that everything feels very slow like time itself has slowed down which is represented by the elongation of this stairway we eventually stumble across a knife picking it up and continuing down the stairs until a huge realistic hand emerges from behind us eventually grabbing us and bringing us into a fight the enemy is simply described as something with the design being extremely unsettling contrasting heavily to the bright and colourful creatures that we were fighting only 10 minutes ago the music also sets in this point of an impending sense of doom [Music] with it constantly decreasing in pitch as well as being shrouded in distortion and ambience if we in fact speed up the track we can hear that it does in fact play out incredibly differently [Music] sounding more intense and like we have an actual chance at defeating this thing something about slowing it down makes everything incredibly more haunting we have no other choice but to attack with every attack doing no damage trying to run doesn't work either so we just have to keep attacking until a dialogue box pops up calling out to us it tells us not to be afraid and to steady our breathing leading to us remembering how to calm down ending the battle we make our way to the bottom of the stairs and make ourselves some steak however upon eating air we immediately feel nauseous leading to us going to the bathroom and throwing up before going back to bed we hear a loud banging at the front door and upon checking it's revealed to be mari we can tell straight away that we're hallucinating with the appearance of the character being ripped straight from our dream world with the heavier emphasis on the blue tones around the character if you decide to open the door to maori it leads to this once again we have no idea what that was or what it means but it's really [ __ ] freaky to say the least with that we head back to bed re-emerging in the white space it's here where some of the pieces start to come together creating a clearer image of this dream world which is known as headspace upon going to sleep we'll always start in the white space as this is basically the place we go before we actually start dreaming i personally take it as those nights where you go to sleep and just wake up and it's morning does that make sense i don't know if that makes sense or not nothing happens in this white space you're not gonna learn anything about yourself or anyone else it's just nothing in the middle of nowhere however when you enter headspace that's where the real dreams start and where elements from the real world start blending together with this imaginary dream one after that freaky encounter was something in the real world there's some new cryptic things which are presented in the white space booting up the laptop it cuts to black bringing us to a new screen showing a game of hangman with a list of letters and vague descriptions of where they're located it's unclear right now what these do or what they'll lead to upon collecting the right ones coming out the laptop we hear something full nearby stumbling across a map of headspace we can see there'll be several different areas we'll be venturing to with a couple of these once again being completely optional and highly miscible if you aren't paying close attention and remembering certain things that are mentioned passingly in conversations jumping back into headspace your friends actively acknowledge your absence and ask if you've seen basil anywhere it seems basil has gone missing so with no leads to go on it's decided that discussing something with mari would be the best option on the way there we find the first letter that being an a upon picking it up it tells us we have 11 more mandatory keys to collect however still don't have a clue what these are actually for despite all the freakiness that's been happening around us heading back to the playground ultimately puts all those things to the back of our mind for a while and just lets us take in this nice and bright environment again it has to be said though that now we know for sure that none of this is real as well as the creepy stuff that's happened both in and out of headspace there's a sense of disingenuousness that will inevitably linger throughout the rest of our time here not only do we now know that we're repressing our true feelings and hiding from our fears by going into this dream world it's also not working that well as these fears aren't completely barren from this idealistic place the gang come up with a plan of action first deciding to head back to basil's house to see if he's there kind of a stupid idea considering well he's lost so what these guys are just saying he's disappeared without even checking his house on the way back down we can see one of the sunflowers has started to wither which we can then water to fix what seems like an insignificant thing actually unlocks another secret ending to the game essentially if you keep an eye on these plants throughout the game you'll notice they'll start withering the further you progress keeping all the plants alive will result in a secret ending cutscene which we'll talk about later anyways heading to basil's he's not there obviously but what is there seems to be some kind of otherworldly dark beam of energy it reminds us of the something boss that we just thought in the real world not only telling us that things are getting harder to ignore in headspace but also that whatever underlying problems there are may be somewhat connected to basil after drawing a blank the gang decide to search through the vast forest which is where you'll most likely be fighting your first real enemy encounters and leveling up your characters these fights of course aren't too difficult but can take out your teammates if you decide to just brute force every single fight the designs of pretty much every enemy in the game are very creative and perfectly show the dreamlike nature of this world and its inhabitants ultimately this search through the forest is also unsuccessful heading across a foggy bridge and collecting another letter before we head back to mari though we bear witness to a strange entity in this bridge section it turns around and stares at us with its beaming white eyes as we can immediately identify that the figure is very reminiscent of basil's appearance no one seems to comment on it perhaps signifying that this vision is solely exclusive to omori making the cutscenes from earlier with basil and omori feel more important and makes us aware that perhaps basil and omori have more of a connection than we'd initially think heading back to mari we have one final bit of forest to travel through where we can find watermelons with items in these watermelons are primarily where you'll be finding your gear and items with them not only containing simple healing items but also new weapons and equipment that can help you out in battle typically the normal coloured watermelons have consumables whereas the ones with a bluish tint to them will contain equipment we return to the playground and find what appears to be a trail of bloody footprints leading upwards which once again nobody seems to notice everybody discusses what to do next with hiro saying that they should start looking outside the forest leading to kell mentioning a really tall ladder that they could climb it's revealed that omori is afraid of heights linking back to the real world where our character was terrified of the height of the stairs despite this we head to the ladder where amore's friends encourage him that everything will be okay leading to him finally conquering his fear of heights despite her only appearing on the screen now it's clear that fight in the real world was the true conquering of our fears learning to not fight it or run from it but simply try be at peace with the things that scare us and try rationalize the situation upon starting this climb however i do understand why you'd be scared it's [ __ ] huge remember that map we got from earlier well we can see this ladder takes us to a different world entirely one detached from the vast forest we've been exploring so far the ladder serves more as a transitionary point like mgs3 although kell ends up losing his pet rock hector on the climb up something that will actually end up being resolved much later in the game and for me an entirely different playthrough the place we end up in is called otherworld and true to its name features otherworldly creatures that we haven't seen yet whereas before we were fighting rabbits and vegetables now we fight things like an actual wormhole an unidentified flying orange and more rabbits i get why the [ __ ] are we killing rabbits what you may have already noticed is that there are some characters within the game which have black light bulbs above their head this signifies that they have a side quest for us which can be completed usually to gain extra things to help you on your journey they're wholly unnecessary with me only completing a couple on my playthrough but i do appreciate games that do the whole bang for your buck thing if you wanted more content they've basically got you covered i genuinely say this is one of the most content-rich games i've played in a long time there's just so much to do and see that you'll most likely end up missing a lot of it on your first playthrough depending on the way you play you might also just be locked out of certain missions bosses and even entire areas of the game so make sure you don't just stop on your first playthrough it's almost necessary to play a different route to get the entire experience there's characters which made me genuinely laugh in this section pretty much because of how stupid they are you have snaily who apologizes for being in your way before stepping in your way every [ __ ] time you have small the world's smallest centaur who flexes all of his awards on you and more importantly a guy known as space boyfriend who is the emphasis of our journey through otherworld we rock up to his place and are told that he's recently broken up with his girlfriend sweetheart and has been acting strangely ever since we can see him curled up in his bed and try to convince him everything will be alright but one of his crew enters and explains we'll need to find his special mixtape in order for him to feel better we agree to help and are told the tape should be located somewhere in the junkyard the pirate guy opens up a portal leading to a bridge through space don't forget to fight the earth on your way through here it's a pretty easy fight and gives you quite a bit of xp we see two people at the end of the bridge discussing how to explain to space boyfriend that pluto's gone missing if you were observant enough on your journey up here you would have actually been able to get into a fight with pluto who we can find hiding behind a tree it's really stupid but i can't lie i did find it actually funny anyways heading into this junkyard we stumble across new enemies like mixtapes and dial-ups which you don't have to fight but go a long way in helping you level up your characters that's another aspect of this game i really appreciate the fact that you don't really have to grind at all there's nothing more that i hate in an rpg than grinding to me it just feels so tedious and repetitive especially the ones where you just attack win and then move on to the next one i do have to say though i think purely because of this and how much i enjoy the combat in this game almost every enemy i came up against for the first time i always battled and i think that's saying a lot because i really do not like wasting any time fighting things i don't have to this is also where a new game mechanic is introduced where you can tag between your three other friends to use their specific abilities omori is used to cut things aubrey smashes stuff hiro uses his natural charm and kel throws things for some reason i thought the game was gonna start getting convoluted here but it's actually a very simple mechanic and has no other effects on gameplay other than activating these very specific moments which is perfectly fine by me making our way through the junkyard you can stumble across the lifejam guy and no matter if this kool-aid guy reference was ironic or played for genuine laughs i still [ __ ] hated it there's also this couch you can find on top of this stack of containers where you can just chill with your friends for a while there's quite a few of these scattered throughout the game just little activities where you can sit back and watch the characters interacting with each other pulling you closer into the game and making you more attached to these characters and their connection with each other it's nice and i did find myself just watching blankly for a while because everything from the music to the visuals just encouraged me to take this all in we eventually stumble across a character called rosa she ends up finding the special mixtape just before us and when we demand she give it to us she jets off with us pursuing quickly behind something that i found consistently funny throughout this game and i don't really know why is that every toilet you come across always has ramen in we eventually catch up to rosa and find her surrounded by what appears to be tv screens or maybe some kind of generators no matter what they are there's a long warning line in the phrase do not cross written above crossing the line our game seemingly crashes as we're taken to a boss fight against a literal error screen i love the creativity of this boss with details like the windows xp background something else i should mention which is very prominent in this fight is how when you change anyone's emotions it not only changes their mechanics but also their physical appearance i just think it's such excellent attention to detail with how all the characters have their own specialized drawings depending on how they're feeling it would impress me if it was just our four characters but having that translate to every enemy in the game is something that i think needs to be applauded it didn't have to be there but the sheer fact that it is i think shows real dedication like the five to six year delay was actually put to good use defeating the boss leads to a snatching back the mixtape from rosa and as we make our way back to space boyfriend the music kicks up as pluto storms from behind us knocking that annoying but admittedly very polite prick snaily out of existence the gang helped pluto hide and after telling us a story that brings everyone to tears he teleports us back to the entrance of otherworld this unlocks the fast travel in the game which can be found at these pluto's space travel stops the game then managed to get a genuine laugh from me when pluto teaches kell to flex [Music] it's really [ __ ] stupid but i think it just caught me off guard replenishing our health and snacks we head back up to space boyfriend who upon hearing the special mixtape launches into a fit of rage taking us into another boss battle i wouldn't say this boss is very difficult hell i wouldn't say any of the fights in this game are particularly difficult but i wouldn't blame you if you ended up dying a couple times to these bosses much like i did with the emotions mechanic in place the game takes the approach of having an optimal way of tackling things which i personally enjoyed for example in the space boyfriend fight he'll get angrier as the fight progresses meaning that you'll be wanting to make your whole team as happy as possible to counteract his effects it's rather simplistic when you break it down but i much prefer it this way if there were a bunch of specifics you had to focus on and having to be an appropriate level to battle these bosses it would have most likely just ended up in me getting bored i have to say as well the music for this fight is [ __ ] unbelievable i can't go into the music too much because i'll just end up ranting about it for ages but the soundtrack to this game is so good i'll make sure to mention it whenever i think the music is particularly incredible but pretty much every track in the game is excellent using items such as the sparkler confetti and aubry's pep talk ability will get everyone feeling happy in no time and sets you up for the rest of the fight all you have to do from that point is try get off as much damage as you can and manage everybody's health that's another part which i usually have a problem with in games like this but here i found it worked perfectly what i'm referring to is the idea of consumables i hate them i always find in games they give you these attack and defense boosters which only last for a certain amount of turns and then disappear i never end up using these things and just find them more of a nuisance clogging up my inventory omori avoids all this nonsense and once again goes the simpler route simply having health and juice regenerative items as well as some extra things under the toy section it's as i mentioned before the restraint of these developers that impresses me more than anything the fact that they've been put under immense pressure due to their several delays over five to six years but still ended up going for a more streamlined approach to the gameplay as opposed to needlessly complex and complicated they knew that despite the gameplay being a big part the story is really the key to everything once you defeat space boyfriend he comes back to his senses and apologizes for how he's been acting going back to his former title with captain space boy aubry starts crying as despite us helping captain space boy we still have no idea where basil is space boy ends up giving us a train pass which can be used in the train station located in the vast forest this takes us to a completely optional area which i'll talk about much later on however during your first playthrough i don't doubt that you completely forgot about this spaceboy eventually leaves as a letter e appears under one of his cushions the same bloody footprints we saw from the playground also reemerge perhaps the real world is starting to worm its way back into our minds picking up the key this time reveals a hole underneath reaching in we get one piece of text describing a cold breeze well that was underwhelming make sure to keep checking these holes after picking up keys though because they do end up getting a lot more elaborate and crazy as the game progresses following the footprints leads us back to mari in another moment that actually made me laugh out loud [Music] the flexing is just so [ __ ] pathetic i love it so much we end up heading back to the long ladder where we can see the dark basil figure waiting for us following him the scene gets a lot darker and the music gets pitched down omori is now by himself showing us that this is clearly some kind of hallucination checking these different routes leads us to areas of interest every single one accompanied by a piece of dialogue significant to the items the first area includes a watermelon a beach ball and some blow up boys this is in reference to the picture we were shown earlier in the photo album of the friend's day at the beach it seems like memories are starting to collide and we're starting to flesh them out more there's several others which can also be stumbled upon some we're familiar with and some that will make more sense later however following basil we eventually come across a barn with a red light beaming from the inside upon entering basil stares right back at us before entering this huge picture frame we follow him in and are transported to a dark set of stairs climbing up we eventually reach another key as well as a family portrait it's not made aware whose family this is but we can assume at this point they would either be ours or basils and upon interacting with it we can see all of the faces on the portrait be scribbled out attempting to leave causes something to spawn behind you and no matter how much you try to get away it eventually catches you we then get another flash of images before cutting to black the first shows basil with his back to the camera followed by what we can assume was him looking at the picture at the start of the game which was the first sign of something strange going on we're immediately transported back to the white space with our only option being to stab ourselves in order to wake up this takes us to a cut scene showing another interaction between omori and basil where basil asks when you stood here before did you see it too before showing us an image of basil with black strands almost grabbing at him from behind upon first playing this imagery alone made me understand what was going on which i found very impressive without any dialogue this soul image tells us that whatever it is that's going on basil and omori are at the core of it and on top of that whatever it is that's happened it's clear that basil was being consumed by his inner demons with it in turn destroying him it ends off with the phrase something behind you before showing us that we have three days left we're brought back to the real world with it now being daytime our mum has left another message for us reminding us that the three-day countdown is in reference to when we're moving away leaving our bedroom we hear knocking at the door and upon checking who it is it's revealed that it's our old friend cal what the game does here is excellent in retrospect we see kell illuminated much like mari was last time we were in the real world of course when we answered the door that time we saw some scary ass [ __ ] so i wouldn't put it past people to just decide to not open the door kell explains that he saw we were moving away soon so i wanted to spend some time with us in these last few days that we're here the thing is you have two genuine options here either open the door or don't this is where the game breaks off into two separate routes one being known as the sunny route and the other being known as the hikikomori route most people will be answering the door to kel so i'll be touching on the sunny route first however this is why i mentioned having to play this game two times to get the full experience despite a lot of the events playing out the same the hikikomoriru i personally think hold some of the greatest darkest and most interesting things i've ever played in a game we'll be touching on that later in the video but for now let's stay on with the sunny route opening the door shows kellen completely different clothing than his sprite confirming to us that he's not a hallucination but an actual person who we've been imagining and integrating inside our dreams this reveals another layer that we wouldn't have initially noticed because kell is real this shows us that other characters like aubry hero and basil could potentially be real too despite knocking kel didn't actually expect us to answer the door immediately letting us know that our character is more of a recluse which would make sense considering the white space is essentially filled with items that would be in our bedroom kel comes up with the idea to go to a shop called hobbies at faraway plaza with that last section being a literal horror show it's not only a welcome change of pace from the freakiness but also headspace in general certain things like the ways colors are used especially within the faces of our characters let us know that we're truly in reality despite our bleak mindset it's undeniable that our surroundings are as bright as our dreams heading into hobbies we can immediately notice the cardboard cut out of captain spaceboy with there even being a spaceboy arcade game which you can play kell tells us that we're here to get a present for his brother hiro who's coming back from college an element of their relationship which hasn't been touched on at all in headspace this was the first time i discovered that not only were kellen hero brothers but also that hero was significantly older than us after we're done with that kell once again doesn't really know what to do for the day so simply lets us explore our own volition heading back the way we came we can stumble across faraway park which is instantly reminiscent of the playground and headspace right away we can see basil talking to another kid he's asking for something back and as kell starts to intervene a group of kids roll up on their bikes one of these kids is aubry looking completely different from her headspace version with bright pink hair and a more punk aesthetic it's clear to see that whatever memories we've had of her are simply just memories aubry is now running with a bad crowd and appears to be a completely different person than the one we thought we knew of course looking at every individual kid in the group we can also see their headspace counterparts but i'm not gonna go over every single one here because it's largely insignificant unlike cal who was friendly to you off the bat despite not seeing you for supposed years now aubry makes it aware from the get-go that she has an active distaste for both of you basil tries to deflate the situation but gets pushed over by kim leading to you and kell stepping up and fighting aubry this real world combat is very underwhelming which i think is the entire point whereas in headspace you have all these cool skills and huge damage dealers in the real world you deal barely any damage in this first fight we forget that we've still got a steak knife equipped so end up slashing aubry unlike in headspace slashing someone with a knife is usually seen as [ __ ] insane with orb reacting like anyone would if someone slashed them only thing that doesn't make sense here is how a character is drawn with a baseball bat with nails in it i mean if anything the knife just makes it fair game the battle ends as soon as you use the knife resulting in everyone leaving and you having your knife taken away by kel basil is still on the ground and upon speaking to him he sounds fairly normal if a bit shy kell asks if he wants to hang out with us but basil decides it would be best if he just went straight home saying that his grandma hasn't been feeling very well lately we drop basil back off at his house but as we're about to leave basil erupts and begs us not to leave he then explains that his photo album was stolen from him by aubry obviously mirroring the photo album we saw in headspace you and kell decide to help bazel out and set off on a mission to get back the photo album this is where you can freely explore the real world and i do genuinely recommend searching every nook and cranny because there's a lot of stuff to see here and a lot of interesting parallels you can draw between headspace and the real world you eventually come across two of aubry's friends angel and charlie who you then need to fight in order to find out where aubry is it ultimately ends up being pointless as they don't know where she is either however they point you in the direction of someone called mikhail or rather the maverick we find him by the fountain at faraway plaza putting up the act of being a cool kid with two girls beside him which he paid and a false blonde wig we also have to fight him which was the moment where i became a bit confused about the combat in the real world while he's alive the enemies will only attack kell and if you don't have healing kel will eventually be taken out leaving you to fend for yourself with your calm down skill you basically will never run out of health leading to some of these fights just feeling really drawn out and weird anyways we end up beating him leading to his girls walking away from embarrassment before he can do any more of his maverick [ __ ] kel just says that we should try find kim who is the most likely person to know where aubry actually is and also is most likely somewhere near candy heading into the supermarket we stumble across the candy section and like clockwork kim and her friend vance are filling their pockets with sweets they end up getting caught by the store owner miss candice and just decide to leave following them outside we get into another battle which i felt was just tiresome at this point i suppose you can make the argument that you're supposed to be sick of the fighting much like kelly's but i never think an element of a game should be purposely bad or boring just for the sake of proving a point or making a gag we end up beating these guys as well and finally get told that aubry is most likely at the church kell remarks in disbelief how he thinks a church would be the last place aubry would be in however upon reaching it and going inside we managed to find her making our way quietly behind her we start arguing whilst presumably a preacher is giving a sermon key details are dropped in this confrontation like how it's true that all of these characters used to be best friends but ended up falling out due to the character mari's death this makes that jump scare from the previous night even more haunting as well as her presence in headspace even more impactful this must be part of the reason that mari doesn't join you on your quest through headspace and serves more as a helpful guide and caregiver despite aubrey's pain being understandable which is conveyed by her insensitive and repressive approach to the subject kell ends up talking the most sense telling her that he's sorry he wasn't there for her while they were all grieving but everyone had their own ways of coping with the loss kell finally brings up what we were initially here for basil's photo album however when brought up aubry insists that she stole it because she wanted to keep it safe alluding to the idea that basil was mistreating or destroying the photos inside flashback to that cut scene of you and basil in front of the photos from earlier and it starts to become clearer that the blacked-out pictures weren't just an artistic decision but maybe quite literally what you and basil did to the photos add murray's death into the mix and it starts to become slightly understandable why these confused and heartbroken kids would be doing these strange things aubry then tells us how it's been four years since any of you have interacted getting angry that we think we can just barge back into her life she then tries to leave but is stopped by you and cal causing a scene in the church with everybody turning their heads to look at you quietly whispering amongst each other you end up getting into a fight with aubry which i'm pretty sure you're supposed to lose i suppose it could be possible to beat her but the game keeps going anyway when you both get knocked out aubry then storms out however if we decide to not follow her and actually head forward and outside we come to the graveyard here we can find mari's grave where kell gives a heartfelt and completely missable speech about the fallout after her death he mostly recounts how hiro dealt with it who fell into a deep depression with no real care for anything it lasted for almost a year until one day kell tried to give him a pep talk with heroes snapping as a result leading to him screaming in his little brother's face his parents rushed into the room and immediately went to hero hugging him and calming him down completely ignoring kell this single moment seemingly brought hero back to his senses rushing over to kel and saying that he's sorry the dialogue is absolutely excellent not too bulky not insignificant but completely missable fleshing out these real world characters and contrasting the gang's dynamic between reality and our idealistic headspace heading out of the church we can see the days coming to a close and as we head back the way we came we see aubry come out of what we can assume to be her house and dump something into the trash firstly looking at her house we can perhaps piece together her rough exterior to being an adaptation to her surroundings living in a fairly worn down and broken house especially compared to the other posher looking houses surrounding it and secondly upon investigating the trash we see that aubry in fact threw away the photo album quite a convenient plot point considering well one she just talked about how much he cared about it and two we're standing right [ __ ] in front of her after giving kel a solid high five we take the photo album back to basil who pokes his head out of the door after his caretaker answers it's this kind of imagery that i find very powerful and tells a story without having to say anything from the sheer fact he has a caretaker we know that for whatever reason basil's parents aren't around anymore something that would clearly impact him and the way he peeks around the corner almost in a manner like he's terrified of the outside shows us that much like us basil may also be fairly reclusive and scared of human interaction we end up getting invited in for dinner however before we eat we pull out the photo album and look at some of the photos inside there's quite a few photos missing however the ones that still remain show clear parallels once again to headspace with certain pictures like the flower crowns your day at the beach and of course everyone enjoying watermelons all being represented in our dream world there's a lot of photos that weren't even referenced in our dreams though such as our birthday and christmas there's a photo with us playing the violin immediately making us think back to the start of the game where what we can assume to be this same violin was seen destroyed at the bottom of some stairs perhaps the reason some of these didn't appear in our dreams leads back to our tendency to repress uncomfortable emotions and memories after looking at all the photos it becomes clear that something's missing with that being the complete absence of maori this makes us think that perhaps the missing photos haven't just been lost but maybe have been removed by aubry someone who clearly is also repressing her emotions and acting out in anger and rebellion to try to disguise her true feelings after the three boys reminisce dinner's ready unlike everyone else who interacts with you if you try talking to basil he'll get actively uncomfortable at the fact that you're really just staring at him to be honest i think basil has the most rational response could you imagine if someone walked right in front of you and expected you to do all the talking ultimately waiting around does nothing so we start exploring the house by ourselves eventually discovering basil's sick grandma god our character is [ __ ] weird just staring at people and then wandering around beside her is a white egret orchid which we also saw next to mari's grave perhaps being a sign of death or at least someone who's very close to death this is backed up by how it apparently symbolizes the phrase my thoughts will follow you into your dreams implying some kind of ethereal spiritual energy basil walks in behind you and begins this fairly uncomfortable conversation with you at least that's how i think you're supposed to feel with the scene being completely silent and basil's stuttery and strange delivery he ends up giving you the photo album and tells us that he believes he was taking pictures of things he was most scared to lose never being able to forget the good times because they were captured in a photo before the talk gets any deeper basil's caretaker yells for us to come eat as we all have a very quiet meal together everything seems fairly calm until kel announces off the cuff that we're moving away clearly shocking basil leading to him asking to be excused perhaps due to ignorance or lack of perception it's only us that notices basil's clear change of attitude with kell even saying that when you gotta go you gotta go we also get up and follow basil into the bathroom where an eerie track immediately begins to play despite how intense and complex some of the tracks in this game are it's usually these extremely freaky and simplistic ones which i end up liking the most it represents the feelings of distress and panic perfectly capturing the idea of feeling stuck in a loop of torment black strands once again surround basil as he repeats the phrase everything is going to be okay basil turns round and notices us realizing that we can see these black strands too describing them as something behind you this idea of something is now clearly established being representative of our character's deepest thoughts and fears we're still fairly unsure of what these are and have only seen one so far that being our fear of heights which we ended up conquering but the one that we really want to discover is the fear which connects you and basil together looking into the mirror behind basil shows something standing behind you with black strands approaching from the left hand side of the mirror basil stares at us with his beaming blue eyes asking why we look so scared i'm pretty sure you know why man as we try to leave basil begs us not to go adding not again on the end perhaps alluding to the fact that the gang's disbandment that aubry mentioned happened over four years ago affected basil a lot you and kell end up leaving shortly after as we can see it's now night time heading back to our house kel thanks us for coming out with him and says that hiro's coming back from college tomorrow so he'll be knocking on us again what seems like a nice end to the day is quickly brought to a grinding hole as soon as we enter our house hearing scuttling and whispers as well as another droning track our house seems to be infested with spiders which we can now assume to not be real but instead a manifestation of another one of our fears we pick up a knife from the kitchen to cut the webs to our stairway and upon entering can see a black and white door to the left of us as well as a blockade in front of the stairs the imagery once again reminds us of that broken violin picture with lots of strands being splayed out all over the place the journey upstairs is once again long constantly getting stopped by huge spider legs jabbing at us inside the walls once we reach the top we once again see something looking right back at us who eventually disappears leaving what appears to be a black and white version of mari in its place this eventually leads into a second boss fight against something this time taking the form of a hyper-realistic spider it's exactly the same process as last time hanging on and calming ourselves down until we're given another way of coping that being the skill focus once we learn to focus the fight's over conquering another one of our fears it's still unclear why maori keeps appearing in our minds we still don't know what the actual cause was but clearly the fallout affected everyone deeply for us though it seems we're not just grieving but are almost being haunted and tormented by mari and something we're not seeing mari painted in the light as someone who we loved and appreciated but someone who we fear after that ordeal we get into our bed and go to sleep starting up a cutscene that we saw earlier with us and basil but instead this time basil in the door disappears leaving us by ourselves if you pay close attention you'll realize that this is an omori but instead our real world counterpart transitioning to headspace all of the things which scare us fade into the background as elements of white space begin to fade in it's our clothing in particular which is the key giveaway with omori always sporting a tank top and us in the real world always wearing things like t-shirts polos and vests the visuals here imply that we're now diving into headspace with us not being in control anymore but instead omori the music in white space has changed originally being an 8-bit sounding upbeat tune now being turned into a somber haunting piano still playing the same tune it becomes clear when entering headspace for a second time that this tune is also repeated in a different fashion in this initial area things play out much like the last time you came back to headspace with everyone acknowledging your disappearance and setting up to go search for basil i like the detail of how aubrey starts to flirt with you saying that you and her could go search for basil by yourselves obviously with us in the real world perhaps liking aubrey's new look a bit more than we'd like to admit things run like clockwork for a while checking back on mari who gives us a hug discussing a plan and then deciding we're gonna go left of the stump on the way there we beat the [ __ ] out of a family of sprout moles who have front row tickets to a show put on by sweetheart i can't be the only one that thinks this was just really mean on our way there it's revealed that we'll have to journey through an area infested with spiders conquering our fear of spiders once and for all strangely though it's shown that hero is in fact also afraid of spiders being represented by his afraid emotion against enemies in this area i thought this was an interesting gameplay mechanic as whilst your teammates are afraid they can't use any of their skills meaning that the only way to get them back is to switch their emotion to something else it only really happens this single time though which i thought was weird the afraid effect does also crop up in the hikikomori route especially towards the end of the game but even then it's not used much we then get another section that's mainly focused on gameplay giving you a chance to level up your characters in advance of the next section essentially what you have to do here is collect three railroad tracks from three different areas and place them down on the broken places of the track repairing it and busting into a new area however if we search this final area a bit more thoroughly we'll discover a path to a secret area called the lost forest in this area is a character called daddy longlegs who introduces us to the lost forest and describes it as a place where you find things you never knew were lost in the first place perhaps they were forgotten for a reason despite this area being optional and in most cases completely missable it does include some vital clues to events which will be revealed much later in the game as well as fleshing out headspace even further there's multiple paths in each area however following the paths guarded by a ghost bunny will eventually lead you to your goal talking to daddy longlegs in each different area basically starts slowly revealing what headspace is entirely about i suppose we all hold secrets no matter how lost or how deep we bury them they find their way back to the other side trying to lose yourself or have you accomplished that already either way this is the right place for you perhaps that's why you've come here to finish the job usually we tend to do things we want as opposed to the things we say we do i've never been one for once i'm more of a need kind of person i suggest you look for the exit before your needs become apparent you're still here you must have either given up or you have fully embraced your fate a confession perhaps but i'm not the one to tell there was a boy wandering around here before very similar to you he went into the darkness and never came out how regretful it must have been to never find what he was looking for be it regret defeat or confusion no one will know i've seen lost and i've seen blind but the combination is unsettling perhaps you are hiding away from the right way upon entering the final section we can see daddy longlegs standing in front of a campfire he says we finally reached the end of the lost forest but the beginning of the truth he then tells us a story focused around this character called the dreamer quite clearly being a reference to either omori or us in the real world certain details are mentioned like his quiet nature but tormented mindset he then talks about the creation of headspace being a place manifested by the dreamer to hide these intruding thoughts despite this the darkness still continued to scrape at the back of the dreamer's mind and although the dreamer had created this perfect dreamt up world he could never be a part of it always observing but never actively partaking in it the dreamer took on another name trying his best to forget himself quite clearly referencing omori's identical appearance to us despite being known as someone else in headspace omori does not yet know the truth and isn't aware that this reality is false so has been traveling around ignorant of the fact that he's simply been manifested in the mind of a suffering kid daddy longlegs closes by saying that the end of this world is inevitable with the dreamer being the only one who can truly set this world free before setting the campfire a light and burning himself alive until he fades away i especially appreciated in this segment that nobody else talked at all throughout the lost forest it gets you engaged and builds up suspense as you journey through being hyper-focused with no unnecessary interruptions in between and with the lost forest dealt with we head forward to sweetheart's castle before we get there we need to take on a boss called the king crawler it's a fairly easy and forgettable boss but has a small healing mechanic attached to it where he spawns in sprout moles and consumes them to regen his health you can take these out before he gets a chance to heal but it doesn't really matter as long as you've figured out the basics of how the combat works this shouldn't give you much trouble we end up in sprout mole village whose theme is another one of my favorite tracks in the entire game i just love how chilled out and spacious it sounds heading left brings us to the entrance of sweetheart's show trading our tickets for front row seats there's a lot of dialogue in this section and did end up being a bit long on repeat playthroughs but ultimately it's all right this show that we've gone to was basically a glorified dating show with three contestants attempting to be sweetheart's husband before the show starts though a power outage occurs turning snaily to dust [ __ ] me this guy doesn't catch a break we decide to go fix the power basically serving as a way to show off sproutmold village and the numerous interactions you can have within it there's some interesting things like the four seasonal sprout moles who will give you a separate item and achievement depending on which one you choose talking to these guys you also end up being aware of their tofu addiction i literally have no idea what any of this means or if it's like referencing something but i thought it was funny nonetheless reaching the bottom we find that the plug powering the entire place had been pulled out of its socket putting it back in and restoring the power there's another nice interactable here where everyone hops on the treadmills and starts exercising along with the sprout moles i'm quite a heartless prick when it comes to games so i usually just skip over stuff like this but there's something undeniably nice about this for me these simple things made me attach to these characters closer than most games ever have and despite decisions like this seeming very simple on the surface i personally believe were thought about heavily during the production we head back to the show and get talked to by a mustache mole who's clearly that character rosa from earlier in disguise they asked if one of us could be a replacement for snaily who don't forget literally [ __ ] died with hiro eventually being taken away we see all of this play out in front of us once again feeling a bit longer than i thought was necessary but it's not really a big deal here we get properly introduced to the character sweetheart the ex-girlfriend of captain space boy and the character that will crop up the most throughout the rest of our adventure she's spoiled annoying and has the worst laugh i've ever heard so basically she's perfect in how she's trying to be presented this section feels quite drawn out and ultimately just needed to work as a way to get the gang sent to the dungeon of the castle which happens when hiro rejects sweetheart's advances leading to everyone being taken to the dungeon this leads to the main gameplay section taking place in sweetheart's castle which could arguably be my least favorite section in the entire game there's nothing in particular that's bad i think it's just how long it goes on for with some unnecessary pit stops in between essentially in this part you have to go to at least three different parts of the castle and do side quests helping out the sprout moles in preparation for sweethearts final show all of these are relatively harmless but ultimately aren't very interesting and as i keep mentioning in repeat play throughs it becomes more of a hindrance than anything everything's well written and charming just perhaps too bulky you ended up getting sprout mole masks from that king crawler fight from earlier so you put them on to blend in meaning that none of the guards will immediately try and attack you i would recommend having at least a few fights though as there'll be a boss fight coming up which could potentially destroy you if you aren't leveled up properly you don't have to level up as i mentioned earlier it just makes everything a lot easier there's also three mandatory fights against sir maximus the first second and third which all occur after you complete a side quest make sure to check out some of the areas thoroughly though because you may just stumble across some strange secrets that flesh out characters like sweetheart so once you help out some chefs arrange a choir and kick out people who aren't adhering to the dress code the front of the castle is finally unblocked previously being crowded with numerous sprout moles heading outside we once again get what feels like padding having to go to four areas of this garden to acquire a password for this statue in the middle worst part is if you've already played the game you're most likely already gonna know what the password is however it doesn't even give the option to input any words related to it this is why i think this section is my least favorite just way too much padding especially when we've already been shown how interesting this game can get there's a small secret out here which is highly missable so make sure to check behind these vines at the bottom you'll eventually see something glaring back at you in the distance eventually you get the password which is sweet jelly filled donut and traveling through a short underground passage you emerge back in the theater another sequence plays out where sweetheart reveals that for the final episode she'll in fact be marrying herself as she believes no one else is good enough for her kel makes fun of her but aubry feels sorry for sweetheart eventually making a scene leading into a boss fight i'd argue that this is the best boss fight in the game it not only has one of the best boss tracks in the game but it seems that the mechanics are used to their maximum potential in this sole fight and then never again it skirts a line between way too hard and way too easy finding a perfect balance in between whereas before you could rely on switching both yours and the enemy's emotions this time round things get a little more complicated due to sweetheart's laugh attack when she uses this no matter what emotions your characters are on they'll immediately be switched to angry much like space boyfriend did sweetheart gradually gets happier and happier with angry being more vulnerable to happy there's a number of ways you can choose to tackle the fight but the approach i took was to primarily focus on omori hiro should always serve as the healer of the group i found myself using kell mainly for his emotion skills and the same goes for aubry which leaves omori as the main damage dealer the first time i battled sweetheart i brute forced it by making everyone guard and have omori use his knife attack this worked but was very slow sweetheart's attacks deal a lot of damage so much so that if you're very unlucky one hit from her swinging mace attack could wipe out your entire team ideally you'd want to use items like the rain cloud and poetry book to make your entire team sad faster although i ended up just trying to make omori sad as it's almost inevitable that sweetheart will end up using her laughing attack after an intense battle you managed to beat sweetheart with all of her guards backing away due to fear all of a sudden captain spaceboy busts through the ceiling and romantically proposes to sweetheart in which he accepts as they both make their way to spaceboy's ship sweetheart blows up the stage leaving a massive hole our characters realize that they've basically just wasted a huge amount of time with them not coming any closer to finding basil as it's also shown that our bond has increased this means that our follow-up moves will be more effective and give off more damage as we try to leave the screen becomes dark as we're showing the ghostly figure of basil entering the hull with this premonition we walk back to the hull when are given the option to jump in it's a long way down but we eventually reach the bottom and are once again alone this is a place known as the lost library and includes several books which you can read which are simply recounts of your memories with all of the names removed the area isn't particularly large or important for that matter well at least not in the sunny route however just gives more context to how close you and your friends used to be reaching the bottom we find the letter l revealing a passage upon picking it up we then get brought to a cut scene showing basil with his back turned to us but as he turns around we get a brief look at his face looking panicked and worried we then get closer to his eyes and see something lingering within them cutting to black and flashing a taped key on the screen the writing around it says don't forget it's in the toy box at this point we have literally no idea what this means with no mention of any key or toy box but before we can think any further we're brought to white space where we once again have to stab ourselves to wake up this takes us to day two of the real world where we get woken up by who we can assume to be kell knocking on our door our mums left us another message talking about chores and interestingly tells us to check the closet downstairs to see if we wanted to keep anything checking around the house there seems to be no sign of a closet anywhere with the only thing that could perhaps be happening once again being a repression of feelings remember that black and white door from last night interacting with the place it was located brings up the message there is nothing here which isn't just a piece of text that comes up when interacting with anything but it's been specifically placed to let you know that something really is there it's just that you don't want to see it heading outside we talk to kel tappan for someone who seems to be into activities like sport kell really doesn't seem to know what fun is dragging us out to go help him at the shop of course this doesn't really matter i just thought it was funny how both times you hang out with him it seems that you're doing the most standard [ __ ] you pick up an order at the bakery and collect a hero sandwich from gino's pizza kell tells us that's where hiro got his nickname revealing that's not his real name it's never mentioned within the game but some people have discovered hiro was sometimes labeled as henry in the game files so that could possibly be his actual name in this second day make sure to keep a keen eye on your surroundings as you might just stumble across some people that aren't really there distant memories re-emerging creating hallucinations of days gone by or some [ __ ] like that after we've collected everything we go back to kel's house and hang around for a bit discovering that kell and hiro are now big brothers with him mentioning how he can't play his music too loud or it'll wake his sister sally as we check out his room kel's mum calls down to us about a woman at the door who turns out to be basil's caretaker she doesn't know where basil is and is worried about him so asks if we can go find him with that we set off heading back to the last place we saw him faraway park basil appears to be nowhere until we all of a sudden hear cries from the forest we follow them eventually discovering basil once again being bullied by aubry and her gang you and kell step up and have to fight the gang but since this is the real world you get beaten up pretty quickly and lose the battle we get into another argument with aubry where kell starts exposing her for putting up a front claiming that she doesn't care about her old friends but still brings her new ones to the old place that they used to hang out everything gets a bit too deep for aubry's friends to handle leading to everyone taking off aubry ends up breaking down in a fit of rage getting particularly angry at basil and pushing him into the lake kel says he's got orb recovered sending you to go help basil out of the lake revealing another one of our fears that being a fear of drowning despite this we dive right in after him taking us to a hallucination we can see the ghostly figure of mari once again as we follow her down our stairway at home the way they bring back mari's theme in headspace but present it in a haunted and hollow fashion is pure genius to me [Music] we reach the bottom of the stairs and collect a knife which in turn makes mari disappear something fades in behind us taking us to our third battle against our fears this time learning how to persist using the skill three times ends the battle and despite not saving basil we've seemingly conquered another one of our core fears before we get back into the game a short cut scene of mari pulling us out of the water is played with us being unsure whether this is simply another hallucination or perhaps a distant memory that has been brought back to the forefront of our minds as our eyes begin to slowly open we figure out that hiro actually came to rescue us immediately taking control of the situation and saying that they need to get basil somewhere warm aubry tries to get into another argument which is quickly shut down by kell leaving her by herself we rush back to basils and explain what happened to the caretaker eventually taking time to talk between the three friends hiro apparently didn't even recognize aubry and starts feeling regretful for leaving because of how bad things have initially appeared to him you give cal another solid high five and head back to their house for dinner whilst eating you get another chance to look through the photo album although of course no new photos are here hiro ends up asking if they can spend the night round your house considering you're moving away and how long it's been since you've interacted with them they feel it's appropriate that they get a final look around the house they spent most time having fun in feeling guilty for abandoning his mum hiro suggests that before they go they should get her some flowers for leaving making a little detour before arriving at your house it's already night time when we get there so it seems you'll be giving a home tour with no electricity as the three of you start reminiscing kel comes up with the idea to stay round for the night which you all eventually agree on as you begin to head upstairs hiro mentions the two rooms to the right and left the closet being on the left and the piano room being on the right this confirms there's definitely a room on the left hand side of the stairs but even after he says this is still nowhere to be seen up until this point whenever you tried to enter the piano room you'd simply refuse to enter however as hero enters the room you're able to follow him in he shows off his piano skills a bit before bed going up to your room kellen hiro decided to make a bed for with the conversation that ensues dropping little nuggets of information which makes certain things in headspace make more sense it becomes clear at this very moment how every single one of your friends are perceived inside your mind and how their specific traits and characteristics are elevated in headspace aubry is aggressive and emotional just like in headspace kell is fairly ignorant but kind and has a heavy focus on sports which is why his attacks are always with a ball and finally hiro always had the aspiration of being a cook however ended up pursuing a career in being a doctor combining his cooking and healing skills kel falls asleep in an instant and with that it's time for you to go to sleep as well we then get a cut scene more blatantly showing what i mentioned before about the transition from you to omori you lie flat on the ground as omori appears behind you the clothing being the most prominent difference between the both of you he stares at you until you fade away this time entering the white door from the get-go we see all of our friends waiting for us but upon getting into the game no one's to be seen this juxtaposition is immediately unsettling as not only are your friends gone but so is everyone in the playground the environment that you thought was safe and had gotten used to is now starting to change against your will heading upwards we managed to find mari who acts very oft from the get-go she acknowledges the disappearance of our friends but acts very nonchalant about it saying they could potentially be across the water once again we definitively overcome our fear of drowning with mari giving some encouraging words beside us i found this detail to be particularly great as in the real world when you're battling something the thing that pushes you to learn the skills like calm down focus and persist is a mysterious voice instructing you on what to do it just so happens that the wording in those parts are identical to how mari tells us here to steady our heartbeat and not be afraid you and mari swim straight up encountering a few dark spirits which take the form of characters like mari but also some others we haven't seen yet we then reach some kind of docks and continue traveling upwards stumbling across several different memories of our friends it's becoming clearer that all of this may just be one big hallucination with even the path we're walking on seeming ethereal in its appearance one of these memories shows basil standing on a stump which if you hadn't noticed has cropped up fairly frequently both in headspace and the real world the stump is of course where we initially emerge from when entering however looking to the real world we can see that there's also one behind mari's grave that being the only cut down tree in the entire graveyard we eventually reach a pale curtain as mari tells us that it's clear we've forgotten something important and questions if we're okay with that she steps out into the water and says we've seen this curtain before the last time we went to the lake perhaps referencing that cut scene from earlier when mari saved us from drowning with the curtain possibly representing the idea of heaven or the afterlife she finally says that she shouldn't have come here meaning headspace and says that she really misses us referring to our character in the real world instead of omori the curtains open and the scene is bathed in a white aura revealing that mari has now transformed into her ghostly appearance which we've seen a few times earlier this imagery doesn't have to say anything to make you understand what's going on here our character clearly thinks mari is the most important one of his friends but up until now she's been mostly in the background much like everything else you're repressing it's starting to become clear why you're never spending a prolonged amount of time with mari there's something holding you back from interacting with her we know for a fact that everyone else is your friend but there's clearly a much stronger connection to mari which we can now start to assume this is revealed in the final line where she refers to you as her little brother confirming any suspicions you might have made about how mari treated you with extra care like how you were the only one she hugged when returning to headspace she turns around and steps into the window a whirlpool is left in its place entering takes us to another part of this ocean eventually leading us to a well climbing down we see all kinds of freaky creatures beside us and discover that we can in fact breathe underwater at the bottom is a letter m and upon picking it up we can enter the hole left behind this was one of the first substantial holes in my play through bringing me to a darkened version of basil's room and letting us look at the scribbled out pictures that we've seen be referenced in earlier events of course with this appearing in basil's room it still implies that basil did this but for what reason we still don't know what makes everything especially strange is basil's attachment to this photo album getting incredibly upset and panicky when it was taken away from him despite aubry's rough exterior it may be genuinely true when she mentions trying to keep it safe we emerge at the seabed where we can take a taxi to a place called the last resort and upon arriving are greeted by kell who's just waiting at the entrance talking to cal we find out that whilst we were gone everyone got tricked into signing contracts and getting a job this is a very clear representation of how everyone seems to be moving on in the real world and have changed a lot more than you expected as the camera pans up to show us the last resort we can just barely see mari on the left and when we approach her much like you may have done omori simply stares back at her i know that's all he does anyway but it's made clear by the dialogue that you're acting even more unusual than typical i like how she mentions she's your big sister again despite never doing it at any point before the curtain scene as it now seems that your mind and the darkness within it are beginning to lay on the truths you've been hiding i'm not sure if it was intentional to make mario appear slightly villainous now but to me i definitely felt that way perhaps not against her character but headspace in general the last resort is the penultimate gameplay section of the game where you can either decide to fight or ignore these patrolling crocodiles no matter what you decide to do i think in most cases you're now a high enough level to where the game's not really going to trouble you again you can also play on the slot machines although i ended up losing every time aubry is supposedly at level 5 which isn't yet open needing a special key card to access you can explore every floor from the basement to level four however if you want to find the key it's on the first room on level one and also make sure to inspect the lockers in the basement for bottled water you'll need it in a bit now that we can access level 5 we make our way up there which takes us to a door being blocked by burley and two crocodile guards after a back and forth with burley they eventually agree to move if you get bottled water for them if you've already picked up from the basement lockers you'll be able to give it straight to them inside we find aubrey sitting at a reception desk getting stressed out and taking a lot of phone calls after a short talk with her you end up convincing her to quit and come with you up to the boss's office who's known as mr dawson the second you see this guy you know you're gonna have to end up fighting him however before you do first you have to get hiro to quit his job too he comes into the room and basically seems like the perfect worker doing all of his jobs and even doing things he wasn't asked to do i always felt this was some kind of bitterness and jealousy coming out in our minds despite hiro acting fairly similar like this throughout the game i thought it felt pretty intentional that he's painted as this hard-working and highly praised person right after he saved you and basil as well as the subtle things like how well he can play piano despite being so modest mr dawson's willing to let aubry and kell leave but puts his foot down when hiro also tries to come with us taking us into a boss fight i personally think this one is a huge letdown in comparison to sweetheart this fights heavily based on a mechanic and a set way of doing things there'll be two crocodile guards standing in front of jorson and whilst they're in the way you can't get any damage off on the boss only problem is that after every turn he'll call in another fresh guard to stand in the way so what you're essentially doing is trying to get off as much damage on the guards so that you can have a chance of damaging dawson he has a very low amount of health so you could pretty much take him out with one big hit however i just found this fight incredibly easy intentional or not it was just a slightly dull battle because i didn't have to think about my approach at all and was almost encouraged to just brute force my way through it don't get me wrong i haven't got a huge problem with it i was kind of just expecting an elevation and difficulty as the game progresses as opposed to a regression take out dawson and it seems you're free to go however before you can leave dawson calls in one final person to stop you here you fight pluto expanded which once again is a pretty easy fight although i'd argue this one's slightly harder due to pluto's sheer strength throughout the fight he'll gradually get more and more powerful until he reaches his limit so just make sure to use the emotions to your advantage and you'll be fine it seems like you're about to go into another stage of the fight however before pluto can feel his best dawson stops the fight in a hilariously anticlimactic way and just tells us we can leave before you leave though don't forget to follow pluto as you'll be able to get quite a significant health boost for kell you may have forgotten but as we try to leave the gang remember that all this time they still haven't found basil they tried to draw up a picture to show people for reference but it ends up looking uh make sure to check out the pool of water outside which makes literally no sense considering we're underwater because there's an essential key in this ghost party area that you could easily miss after everything in the last resort is taken care of we can head back to the deep well and start traveling across the underwater highway we quickly end up encountering sweetheart once again who within a day has already broken up with captain spaceboy despite this she's still focused on finding her one true love now resorting to making a suitor of her own we still have no idea where basil is so just decide to follow her in hopes that we'll stumble across something there's two approaches we can take here one either being to pay the tolls to these gates and have an easier time getting to the end of the highway or two being to go above the tollbooths and battle your way there instead the first time i played i just bought my way to the end but upon replaying i think going above is the best way to go there's lots of fun enemies you can battle there my favorite being the muscle which is both very easy to beat and gives you a lot of xp in return going this way also gives you more time to appreciate the absolutely incredible music playing in the background there's also lots of items you can find in this area which will help you out later on although as i said sweetheart is still kind of the peak of difficulty in the game so you won't be going up against anything too tricky if you head this way you can also run into snaily once again who has been trampled on by a planet and electrocuted to death how is he still here turns out he wants to be a fighter so asks us to train with him which true to everything surrounding his character ends with us beating the [ __ ] out of him journeying to the end of this section you'll have to battle him two more times increasing in difficulty every time you fight although he's never much of a challenge you don't even get anything from him except coffee which i don't think i ever used reaching this final section make sure to head down and back the way you came as there'll be an s key waiting inside a clam entering this hole i was brought to a dark room with a tv and two tapes lying on the floor looking at the omori tape we appear to be looking at us in the real world playing the piano in our house despite this we can see a reflection of ourselves which appears to look much more similar to omori i'm still not entirely clear what this means but perhaps it could simply once again be showing the merging between realities in our mind and showing the more we try to escape into headspace the more we lose perception of the real world and who we are as a person the basil tape on the other hand shows basil worriedly looking down and then straight at us a very obscure and strange tape but one that clearly shows basil in some type of distress heading onwards i can confidently say that the upcoming section is where i went from very much liking this game to loving it there's nothing i love more in games where over a gradual period of time everything just starts to fall apart games like metal gear solid 2 and undertale do this particularly well with the arsenal gear segment and flowey boss fight being two of the most memorable moments i've ever experienced in a game i also just like the idea of getting lost especially in the context of this game as it not only serves as a way of showing how far we've come on our journey but also being a physical representation of us diving into our minds and trying to track down the truth we've been repressing all this time it's all shown without a single word alluding to the idea presenting these interesting and abstract ideas and leaving it up to your imagination to fill in the rest some may call it lazy i on the other hand call it genius having the restraint to not spell these things out despite knowing a large amount of your players will want a definitive answer on what these things mean before you start journeying down this deep well you have a short talk with the gang about basil as it seems like all of your friends are starting to forget him perhaps as an attempt to stop you finding the truth your mind is trying as hard as it can to forget the person that seems to be a source of a large amount of your problems they remember him as a person but the details are starting to get a bit foggy however despite this they still were determined to find him this leads to a segment where you almost start aimlessly wandering around as an attempt to find your way to literally just somewhere there's certain entities that you can interact with as it starts becoming clearer that this isn't like the place you've just come from but instead a place where your mind is once again starting to manifest elements of the real world one thing called empty tells you with time what is important will change you must choose what you will keep and what you'll cast away another tells you what if it's up to you what if it's only up to you carry on dreamer you're the only one who can reminding us of daddy longleg's speech from earlier where he alluded to the idea that omori is in fact truly known as the dreamer an entity called absent tells us the universe is full of questions that you will never answer yet there are also ones that only you can answer when the truth is revealed what will you do it's quite clear that this is simply our character's mind talking to us on a subconscious level basically preparing ourselves for this almost inevitable truth which could shake our foundations to the core we eventually make our way to a cave and have to swim through a very tight pathway i think it's excellent how in between this time your friends don't say a word of dialogue despite how bizarre everything is getting it really lets you get immersed in your environment without any interruptions along the way it could also work in terms of how your mind's processing everything with you taking your focus away from your friends and instead turning it to discovering the truth much like how earlier in the game your friends always disappeared when your memories started to collide heading up at one point takes us to a branch coral with a swing attached where we can just for a brief second see basil looking back at us this branch coral for some reason ends up being the first real info drop in the entire game which i find both strange and hilarious it reminds me of the way daddy longlegs spoke to us being very matter-of-fact but also mysterious stick with me here because this coral lays it on thick which may lead to some people getting confused it's apparently been a long time since we've been here alluding to the idea that we're trapped in some sort of cycle where all of the actions we've already taken on our journey have been done countless times before we get to ask about three different things those being our lost friend basil the big yellow cat and white space first we ask about our lost friend in which the coral replies that he's not in this world and that the day he was removed he was reborn elsewhere fate apparently ties us to him and in order to save him we'll need to remove ourselves from this world as well this could allude to the idea that whatever fate it is that bonds us and basil basil has already come to terms with and is living primarily in reality basil in the real world still struggles with his dark thoughts but has accepted them as a part of who he is whereas we on the other hand have chosen to completely ignore them secondly we ask about the yellow cat where the coral starts to elaborate on the creation of headspace he brings up three separate entities the oldest the wisest and the favorite the oldest is apparently still alive but age has removed his conscience apparently he can be found if we keep following the cave the wisest committed an act against the dreamers will but what this act was is not known even by the coral as a result the wisest was stripped of her wisdom and banished to isolation the favorite is the big yellow cat who was chosen to watch over the dreamers most precious room all three of these entities can actually be found in headspace but i'll talk about them more when we get to them finally we ask about white space in which the coral branch replies to be in white space is to be nothing touting it as a place to survive but not live mentioning the hanging black light bulb was the repression of an idea this is what we speculated earlier about the white space simply being the in between from our real world and dream world it's where we can decide to jump into headspace or just spend time in isolation no matter what the black bulb now becomes very clear as basically our darkest thoughts lingering inside our white space but currently out of our reach the coral branch adds that upon the knowledge he's just granted us he can also give us power asking us if we'd be willing to take the sacrifice this leads to us getting submerged in red water which could be blood but is never confirmed to be inside this place we discover an apple which ends up transforming into our real world head we are given the option to eat it and doing so gives us numerous large stat increases i'm still unsure on what all of this imagery entirely means but upon thinking about it the only thing i could come up with is that this represents an element of headspace that being the dreamer consuming an element from the real world this means that omori may have not literally eaten your head but the apple represents the real world and our true thoughts and emotions we're now beginning to confront our real problems in real life so by consuming this element of reality we can finally start our discovery of the truth again this is my own personal theory because i literally couldn't find a single person discussing the meaning of this apple however deciding to not eat the apple doesn't end up changing anything either when we return we discovered that the branch coral was no longer alive and has turned black and white the sacrifice it previously mentioned now being clear that it was referring to itself we keep following the pathway until we end up entering yet another cave quite literally being a representation of how we're beginning to enter the deepest layers of our mind and upon entering a final cave after climbing some ladders to another one of my favorite tracks in the game we meet a whale called humphrey who despite his silly appearance is actually the oldest character which the coral branch mentioned it may seem unclear currently why humphrey has such significance however we'll touch on that later we talk with him for a bit and end up diving into his mouth in pursuit of sweetheart this takes us to the final true gameplay section of the game and i think it just manages to top sweetheart's castle for the least interesting part of the game for me it sounds so unfair when i say that because ultimately it does nothing wrong i think it's mainly because it seems like such a diversion and distraction from the insanely interesting things the game was tackling only mere minutes ago whereas before we were diving into our mind and discovering the truth now it seems like clockwork we have three areas we have to go to in order to unlock the next section all of these three sections are all right in themselves and i don't have as big a problem with them as much as i saw some other people did but i can't deny the pacing just feels like it slows right down here essentially what it boils down to is going to three areas and discovering three different sweetheart prototypes that she's having developed by a few scientists i like the idea of having all these different humphries running everything but it's literally just humphrey's insides you deactivate a bomb in one section which has some pretty clever puzzles in another section you build a bridge of humphries and you also have to escape from a freaky cat monster there's several secrets scattered throughout these areas like the reappearance of snaily who this time has no face and literally just kills himself you can also save a sprout mole called big molio who will in turn obliterate that cat monster when he has you cornered and there's also some interesting enemies in this section like the sprout mold experiments and these water mimics i think that might be my biggest gripe with this area it's the fact that there's still a lot of stuff to witness and observe it's just that it comes at a point where i'm not interested in this quirky stuff anymore i've seen it too much so i haven't got a problem with it i just want to get past it as quick as possible to get to the real interesting stuff upon finishing the final area we acquire the slimy key card which gives us access to the humphrey face in the middle this leads to a confrontation with sweetheart and the three slime girls where she reveals that she doesn't have enough money to pay the slime girls for their work dashing out of there and saying that we would pay for it sweetheart gets stopped by humphrey with him alluding to just straight up eating her she isn't dead however and can be found alive in an alternate route it's revealed that they need the clams to sustain humphrey's hunger and that upon digesting sweetheart she had a total balance of zero clams on her the slime girls say they need a million clams which we're of course not likely to have if you do somehow have that amount of clams the only thing it changes is when aubry says we don't have that kind of money changing it too we can't just give you all that money so no matter what you're gonna have to end up fighting these girls this takes us to a boss fight which opens with a detailed look at their character designs which i thought was particularly impressive but i still don't really know why these girls in particular got their own opening when basically no one else in the entire game does i know the fan favorite tune from the game is most likely the sweetheart boss but i can't deny this may be my favorite battle theme in the entire game i love the intensity of it as well as how spacey and grand it is and the way it leads in from the ethereal introduction gives me chills every time i wouldn't say that this fight was difficult although will definitely give you more of a challenge than dawson simply due to how much damage these girls can give off you'll want to be particularly focusing on pulling off a couple ultimate attacks in this battle and preparing for when they turn angry a short way into the fight unlike other bosses they don't get progressively angry however and you can still change their emotions if you've already altered yours a certain way they do also have a couple attacks which randomly switch your character's emotions so you'll also want to be planning how to appropriately deal with that when the time comes in general it's a good boss and will actually test your abilities unlike jawsome did and i also appreciate that they didn't split them up into three different sections and let you attack all three simultaneously once you're done with them humphrey re-emerges still not being satisfied with his hunger he swallows all three of the slime girls while dozens of humphreys start surrounding the screen as we try to escape humphrey ends up stopping us which takes us into another boss fight this one is arguably the easiest in the game although serves more as a way to show your resilience against this seemingly unbeatable foe you start off attacking numerous humphreys until he transitions into a bigger combined version once you've dealt enough damage he'll then begin swallowing you leading to this extremely freaky segment where the scene gets darker and darker as humphrey swallows you i'm not sure if it was intentional or not but the imagery combined with the music led this to be pretty frightening humphrey uses solely brute force so make sure to use the emotions to your advantage as he'll never change yours or his in this segment you just have to keep attacking as you get swallowed hoping at some point humphrey will give up we eventually just get pulled out of the battle and approach humphrey's uvula with his face appearing on it simply attacking once and you've won very anticlimactic but also pretty funny you get shot back up through all the different humphrey layers and emerge back where you started along with you there'll always be the letter w that lands beside you although any keys you also missed which were located inside humphrey will also come along with it humphrey disappears into the water with a whirlpool appearing in his place the gang talk about everything they've just been through with them at this point completely forgetting basil's existence as well as what they were even here for going into both of the holes under the keys shows one scene of omori falling through the water eventually falling past a hellish version of murray's face and the other shows an extremely dark image of a reflection of someone's beaming red eyes it's not yet clear who this is but we'll be finding out later on with nowhere else to go we dive into the whirlpool emerging in a pink ocean with a singular pathway leading upwards there's several beams of light in our path and every time we cross under one we get spoken to by an unknown being the voice refers to the ideas brought up by the coral branch first talking about this idea of being stuck in an endless loop with all of the actions we've taken throughout headspace being done previously with us always ending up back here the truth always being the same the way to the truth has supposedly been removed moved first to a lighthouse then to a library deep underground and after that to an old barn on a distant planet this time it will end up in the vast forest the flower boy will always discover this truth and our sister mari will always try helping guiding us to it it's revealed that the reason mari was given the picnic blanket was in order to protect her the pain of her dying in real life was already too much so to see that happen again in headspace would destroy the happy and carefree illusion it was trying to put up however we of course know mari did eventually leave the picnic blanket guiding us to the deep well across the ocean in which she then left us and was born anew we're finally asked if we're able to discover the truth this time round before being brought to a room with a window being fairly similar to the window that mari stepped into earlier this is where the scattered keys come into play with this unknown voice telling us that we need them in order to have a chance at breaking this cycle we've created in our own minds if you haven't collected all of the correct keys up to this point you'll get taken back to the starting area and will have to track down any of the remaining keys with bloody footprints giving you a guide when you're somewhat close to the key however by this point you should only be missing a couple once all of them are collected you get a cut scene showing basil's house now surrounded by elongated hands and blood with the floor inside rotting away leaving a large black ravine in its place upon entering the final hole i was brought to a black and white area with a path leading up and upon following it we see a vague shadowy man chopping down a tree with a noose attached to it when interacting with him he initially says stay away you're not my son and trying to talk to him again simply leads to him repeating the phrase why why won't you fall this is a very important detail to know and we'll be focusing on it a bit later on although you can already assume this may have something to do with the emphasis on stumps that we've seen both in and out of headspace you're given the chance to spend as much time as you want in headspace before going to basil's house however you'll inevitably have to go there in the end depending on whether you were keeping an eye on the flowers they'll either be fine or all withered away and as you pass every different type of flower you're reminded of what basil said at the start of the game and how he compared each different flower to one of your friends when we reached the white tulips which he initially compared to omori we find basil waiting there who this time compares the flowers to our real-life counterpart as we make our way down to basil's house fog starts to roll in and the trees become increasingly dead and as we're about to enter basil's house aubry for the first time in a while speaks to us simply to say she's frightened and that they should all turn back with all of the knowledge we've gained over the course of the game we know this is essentially our mind trying to dissuade us from discovering the truth however we push forward nonetheless inside the house basil enters and disappears into the black void with us following behind jumping down the hall while friends disappear with omori landing in what sounds to be water we head upwards and into a forest slashing through some spider webs and eventually coming to some stairs we find mari laying in an open casket and as we approach she transforms into some horrible creature and comes towards us everything disappears with only a black door being left in its place the phrase welcome to black space comes up on the screen as we're brought to my favorite section in the entire game well second favorite if you're not counting the second part of this place black space is where amore goes full yume nikki and just becomes one of the most intriguing haunting and strange experiences i've ever bared witness to in a game as you can tell by the title of this place it's the complete opposite of the white space whereas the white space served as the repression of an idea it's almost like we've entered the black light bulb and are now stuck within the idea itself if you decide to quit the game while you're in black space you'll notice that upon opening the game up again the title screen has changed now showing you shrouded in darkness with the text now appearing white being the complete flip side of the initial title screen this happens a few times as you progress through the game but i'll show them when we reach them black space includes a number of doors all housing some of the darkest and most bizarre things you'll see in this game i wasn't aware of how much inspiration this section took from yume nikki but upon checking out some videos of it you can clearly see they took the dreamlike environments of yume nikki and cranked them up to scary levels there's even certain callbacks to yume nikki which i didn't initially notice with things like the floating hands which we've seen frequently throughout the game being a reference to the floating hands in that game looking very similar in appearance the several tracks which are played across this entire section are some of the most haunting things i've heard in a game some adroni and dark some sound spacey and some in the right context would sound bright and happy but under these circumstances they all play into making you even more freaked out and it's one of the only times i've played a section of a game and thought it was honest to god perfection no matter what doors you open the game gives you a set rule every time due to how disjointed and strange everything in this part is what i'm about to do may seem fairly insane but i'm gonna try give my best guess on what everything here means there's a lot of stuff enclosed inside these areas so i'll try my best to tackle everything but i don't doubt there'll be a few things i might miss i think because of how ambiguous the imagery is here it's safe to say that multiple opinions on what this stuff means can be garnered so i just have to preface by saying this is what i personally think if you think something different you could be just as right or just as wrong as i'm about to be let me know your own takes in the comments so heading into the first room we're greeted by basil who says that whilst we're in the black space he can see who we really are mentioning how it's become more powerful than us that's pretty clearly shown by how our character has been acting in the real world whatever event caused this black space to form in our minds led to us isolating ourselves for what we can assume to be years ignoring our friends and staying inside as much as possible we were no longer in control of our lives but instead our emotions were we follow some blue footsteps and find a key which takes us back to the hub area this is the process of every door we enter wandering around finding a key heading back to the hub going into the second room is where i found that despite their potentially being meaning in some of the images which crop up in these rooms there's also just as much stuff here which clearly is just representative of things we've witnessed throughout our lives whereas before things were subtly being injected into our dream world like the watermelons and characters in black space it takes more of a no-holds-barred kind of approach everything and anything could appear here it's a lot more dreamlike than your actual dream world was we find basil again who acknowledges the confusion around you reassuring us that lost somewhere in here lies the root of everything and that we need to find it for the sake of both of you looking at the sketchbook shows us a much more disturbing version of the one in whitespace with several different images being added which call back to certain events we saw previously in the game in the third room everything seems fairly barren with there being certain scribbles and stickmen around you can in fact interact with someone called scribble who will ask you questions like are you lost are you looking for someone if you were lost where would you go we then enter what appears to be a town with disfigured tall looking drawings appearing as we head down basil's at the bottom staring into a small body of water apparently when we hid the truth from ourselves we locked a part of him away with it on the day we became nothing basil was split in half asking which one did you think was more painful i'm not as sure on what basil was talking about here the most i can extrapolate from this simply reinforces what we already know that whatever it is that we hid away had a heavy connection to basil as well the next room also includes several disfigured apparitions which upon interacting with them will make strange distressed human-like noises you have to keep walking to the right as the phrase liar comes up on the screen slowly increasing as you keep walking the level will eventually appear like it's starting to corrupt with several floor tiles completely missing we stumble across something waiting for us on a stump and when talking to it tells us it loves us the only thing i could think of in terms of this scene would be that something is repeating a phrase said to us either by basil or mari once again serving as a way to torment us for our assumed wrongdoings in the background you may be able to catch a few images of maori and our real world house which leads me to believe something is most likely reminding us of how much we loved mari serving as an even crueler reminder that she's dead we then get brought to a small room with a cat appearing as a waiter and our cat miwoo who's always appeared in white space we get the key straight away by talking to the cat who tells us that miwoo has been very bad however no red hands appear and we still can't leave the room turning to miwoo we're given the option to cut her open with most people's minds obviously thinking this sick act will serve as a way of escaping the room the best and most twisted part of this is that you don't even need to do this you'll find that upon killing miwu nothing will happen and talking to the cat he almost mocks you by saying waiting for something to happen this is when you'll discover that you simply need to stab yourself next up we're back in some kind of forest where we can immediately see basil's flower crown sticking out amongst the darkness watermelons start cropping up the more you progress until we eventually see basil he talks to us like nothing's wrong and still interacts with us under the impression that we've just managed to find him after all this time searching we give him back his flower crown and he follows our lead as we walk basil will say things to you which will either make you reminisce on your memories or feel guilty like when he mentions his garden asking us if we've been taking care of his plants while he's been gone we head right until the screen is completely enveloped in darkness taking us to an unknown area surrounded by watermelons with no other option we begin smashing the watermelons one by one until you smash one open and instead of the watermelon bursting open basil does behind you i can't be the only one that thought this was quite funny you'll find the key in whatever watermelon you bust open next and are taken back to the start by the red hands we then emerge at a beach reminding us of the gang's fun day out at the beach in the real world we talk to basil who says our friends have suffered because of you two alone and that no matter how much we may want things to go back to the way they were they never will around the beach you can find pictures presumably from basil's photo album where upon interacting with any of them they turn into a scribbled out mess you can also find someone called blue girl who refuses to talk to you and simply says don't talk to me it's unclear who this may be representing precisely so i'm guessing this could just be a representation of our character's social anxiety with a common trait of people who suffer from that being a large amount of self-doubt when entering conversations turning away from the idea due to the thought that you'd be boring the other person or they'll end up hating you for the things you say to them it's at this point where a red door appears in black space giving you the option to end your time here earlier but i'd highly recommend you check out the remaining doors as they house some of the strangest content out of all the doors so far the next area seems to have some kind of photo negative filter over it with basil being trapped in a spider web and also these strangely realistic hands flying through the sky if i had to guess it looks like hands attached to a spinal cord the emphasis on hands and fingers have been littered throughout the entire game but it's in these sections where they really lay on thick the significance of them despite not currently knowing for sure why they're so important you follow a similar process to the watermelon area saving basil and having him follow you only this time he gets gradually overwhelmed by spiders who start eating him the next area is quite soothing bringing back the theme that plays when emerging from the stump we find basil standing by himself looking at the key he tells us he misses us and that we were someone he could always rely on all of his fears and worries we knew as well this is where things start becoming clearer in relation to the connection we have to basil and make certain things like his reaction to us moving away more understandable we then get a very short but freaky area which features all of your friends wandering around this time appearing faceless you can also see several of them clipping into the ground other than that just being very weird i believe this could also serve as our character's slow acceptance that these characters aren't real and are just inside his head they're faceless they're no one except what we personally manifested inside our own minds this leads into arguably my favorite room in black space with this haunting industrial soundtrack paired with the beautifully dark background we climb up to the top and find basil gazing at the moon for the third time now despite dying twice he thanks you for coming to find him and starts following you beside you was your old tree house which hiro and kel mentioned before you were going to bed and when we enter everything is distorted and unclear perhaps being a representation of how foggy your memory is from not seeing it for so long when we head back down an elevator appears out of nowhere and when we try to take it nothing happens we end up getting the key in here but as basil tries to leave his head gets trapped in the door eventually being cut off there's nothing else we can do except listening to his garbled deathrattles so have to just leave it's unclear at this point why our mind is constantly killing basil over and over whether it's a manifestation of our hatred for what he represents or perhaps as a last-ditch effort to hide the truth the next room shows who we can assume to be mari hanging by her hair wearing the white robes that she's frequently seen in we find basil a short way up as he brings up yet again how we abandoned him we can assume he's telling the truth because of how isolated and closed off we've been in the real world but for what reason we still don't know this is where i have to mention some people theorize that there's a supernatural element to the game implying that while basil is talking to you in black space he's connecting with you over some kind of spiritual level i wholeheartedly disagree with this theory i can see why some people would think it but taking into account aspects like the obvious distinction they made between the real world and dream world as well as how well we're supposed to know basil according to what he's saying it's very clear that all of this is still taking place in our minds alone i think those who believe this supernatural theory tend to want solid and concrete explanations to all this stuff when there's large parts of this which are supposed to be left up to interpretation we find basil again in the next room emerging from the stump much like we did earlier in the game heading upwards we find a raft and upon riding it through a tunnel we emerge with basil's head being completely removed i can't lie this did make me laugh as well one thing you might also want to do before entering some of these doors is interact with the several other basils wandering around black space there's nothing too integral that they say but they give you some stuff to think about like when one of them says this place has changed a great deal since you were last here will you be able to find your way back or will you finally lose yourself showing that despite being here before everything's a lot more twisted due to how long we've been repressing our feelings the next area includes one of the most messed up sounding tracks in the game being completely erratic and majorly distorted strange red faces float around this space and you can also stumble across several mirrors upon interacting with them they smash into pieces with each mirror you find making you appear increasingly bloody and disheveled destroying all the mirrors causes the appearance of a twisted and bloody version of who we can assume to be mari we then get brought to an area filled with beds clocks fill up the background as we can hear several alarms going off basil can be found in this section mentioning how we've gone too far now to turn back only being able to escape once we find the route to all our problems there's also several tally marks which we can see in the background which could possibly be a representation of all the days we spent inside isolating ourselves from our friends and the outside world in general the reef area is very similar to the deeper well from earlier even having the same music we see the reappearance of the faceless versions of our friends who we can either see clipping into the floor or swimming around in this bloody looking liquid we can also see our friends with their faces but they appear to be stuck inside these columns with only their heads popping out i'm still unsure on what this one means although the only thing i could think of is that this room simply shows the contrast between your friends in headspace and the faceless ones manifested in black space in the game files these faceless ones are even labeled as mannequins showing that there's clearly a difference which is trying to be made here we then come to the final black door which takes us back to an area which we're familiar with and only really associate with calm and happiness we yet again find basil who follows us upwards but as we keep progressing things start to get stranger as hero steps out in front of us observing us for a few seconds and then walking away following him up the level starts to appear corrupted as we encounter a hero again who uses the red hands to create a bridge walking away from us again basil decides to run ahead of us and as we follow them up we can see that not only is hero here but so is aubrey and kell the music in the background starts to distort and mangle and as basil tries to talk to his friends they all turn against him and start throwing things at him first kel throws a baseball then throws what appears to be a shot per before basil collapses to the ground prompting aubry to smash him over the head with her bat killing him instantly talking to the three afterwards shows their characters in a distorted fashion who simply repeat lines that they said to you earlier in the game the big yellow cat or rather the favorite can be seen at the top also appearing in this twisted and distorted fashion heading back to the start you now have no other choice than to enter the red door and upon doing so we're brought to a snow-filled area with a somber piano playing in the background we head up several sets of stairs and eventually reach a church appearing very similar to the one in the real world this is where depending on which route you've decided to choose on your playthrough events can start to play out drastically different we'll stay on with the sunny route for now but we'll be touching on the different outcomes of the hikikomori route later on we end up discovering a faded looking basil being held up in the air by black strands behind us emerges the other version of basil who tells us that we've reached the truth and have been running from it for too long reassuring you that you aren't tackling this alone we turn around and talk to the headspace basil as he slowly gets consumed by the darkness finally giving us the option to save basil we step into the darkness and emerge at a scene with a beaming red light coming in through some glass doors looking very similar to the ones in our house basil stands in front of us exclaiming that something's out there before being dragged away following his blood trail outside we can see several fingers are lying to the left and right of us and when we finally reach basil who this time has turned completely black with red eyes we stab him this in turn puts an end to our dream world killing the headspace version of basil as a way to put an end to this repression of the truth if you hadn't noticed already the clear distinction between the headspace and real version of basil is that instead of a flower crown basil simply has one flower in his hair as well as obviously him also not having green hair in the real world we walk upwards trampling on basil's corpse and eventually arrive at a throne of hands omori takes a c and simply stares prompting our character in the real world to wake up presumably shocked at what's just happened we awake to a piano being played assuming it's probably hero considering he's no longer asleep next to kel if you decide to go into the bathroom and look in the mirror you'll notice the hellish version of mari standing behind you which is extremely unsettling it turns out the hero in fact wasn't playing the piano but instead you were hallucinating mari playing it instead she talks to us about how she loved to play piano and how when we first got our violin how avid we were to play a duet with her she apologizes for perhaps pushing us too hard and asks if we want to play our last recital as we never got to before presumably with mari dying before they had the chance before we can answer mari disappears as hiro steps into the room he starts talking to us about how much he still misses mari saying that he never understood why she chose to leave us the way she did finally revealing that mari's cause of death was apparently suicide we head back upstairs to bed and go back to sleep taking us straight into our final day we see kell and hiro have already woken up and listened to another voicemail from our mum simply reminding us that we're moving tomorrow hiro comes into the room and says he's made breakfast and going downstairs we can see kell chowing down he says and we hear our doorbell ringing kell answers and we can hear him scream in shock with it turning out to be aubry's friend kim apparently aubry was really upset from what happened the previous day so ended up locking herself in her house and ignoring their attempts to get her out despite kell initially seeming hesitant hiro convinces him that despite how she's been acting we still should go see if she's okay going outside we give kel the last solid high five of the game and make our way to aubry's house despite everything seeming happy once again let's not forget the state we left our mind in last night the title screen reflects this reality becoming even more twisted than previously and showing the constant transformation between omori and you in the real world arriving at aubry's house we discover the door is actually a jar which is a surprising revelation considering her friends apparently banged on her door and chucked rocks at the windows but whatever we find the state of her house inside is just as messy as the exterior with junk all over the place and seemingly no working lights on the couch is aubry's mum who simply stares into the garbled mess that's being shown on tv it's never revealed what's happened to aubry's family or where her dad is but it's not really necessary with this scene alone we can piece together why aubry may have this rough and brazen exterior kellen hero even mentioned outside howa's kids aubrey always came to hang out with them with the gang never deciding to go round aubry's house her home life clearly wasn't ideal and as we can see by our surroundings it doesn't appear that anything has changed from four years ago aubry's room appears to be in the attic where we climb up and talk to her like everything's normal despite entering private property without any permission we end up having a heart to heart with aubry where she apologizes for pushing basil into the water but still tries to make you understand how hurt she was when it seemed that everyone abandoned her after mari's death there's a kind of full circle moment here which i really liked where much like the start of the game aubry and kell get into an argument leading to hero calming everyone down and getting them to make up it turns out that aubry did in fact end up keeping the photos of mari leading to you putting them all back in the photo album i especially like the reintroduction of mari's theme while doing this it's not only appropriate but does a lot to show how far you've come with these characters and most likely how attached and familiar you are with all of them by this point these missing photos of mari are reflective of some of the ones we saw in headspace and give us more insight of the dynamic in this group we see how often the gang hung out with each other how attached we were to our big sister mari and also how hiro is shown to not just be a friend of mari's but clearly a boyfriend this is where things like kell's story from earlier make more sense with hiro being especially broken up because at the time he had just lost someone who had the potential to be his partner for life with you and kell being neighbors it's shown that maybe the entire foundation of this group spawned out of the romance between mari and hiro both being older than you kell aubry and basil we even get to see mari practising her piano and both you and her practicing for the recital which was mentioned earlier of course with that recital never coming to fruition there's apparently still one photo missing but with that intimate delve into their past kel and aubry apologized to each other as you decide to head to basil's so that aubry can apologize for how she's been treating him we head out the house and talk to some of aubry's friends i like how aubrey still treats these guys like normal and still cares about them i think it would have been so easy and cliche to write in that aubry realizes who she really is and tells her new friends to go away we go to basil's and discover that he's at the hospital with his grandma clearly her condition has gotten worse from when we last saw her so decide to check back later in the day we're then given the option to roam far away town at our leisure but eventually we'll have to head back to our house there is in fact a very missable gameplay section on this final day where you fight against the recyclotists despite the real world still firmly sticking to the idea of being real as possible in order to appropriately contrast with headspace this recycling coal is about as wacky as the real world gets despite it still taking place inside your mind in order to access this you had to do a side quest on the second day and buy a floor lamp for a woman and by doing this on the final day you'll unlock this side quest located in your old hangout spot where you have to defeat the recycle path and his cult it's not just the fact that this is an insanely easy to miss quest but also how detailed it is even including all new variations of the tag photos from headspace it's elements like this where you have to take a step back and realize why this game took so long to make over ambition may have been one thing but it's undeniable that the pure dedication and passion from the developers can be seen in every single aspect of the game anyways spend your last day doing whatever you want there's some nice interactions you can witness between you and the gang some freaky hallucinatory stuff and also several people you can talk to like aubry's friends and kell's family but you'll always end up heading back to your house once you enter everyone gathers round in a circle as it really starts to set in that you're moving away tomorrow the plan was to go to our old tree house which we saw in the photo album but now that we're here everyone seems fairly hesitant to go outside for some reason kellops to go first with hiro following behind aubry tries to ask us something but loses track once she's called out by kell we then see why everyone was so hesitant to come outside as they all approach a tree stump and remember that this is where mari killed herself it's excellent visual storytelling being set up constantly throughout the game with the imagery of the stumps forests and the images in black space of mari seemingly being hanged by her hair everyone recalls the day mari killed herself and recounts what they were doing that day which is where it's also revealed that the night murray died was the same night of the recital you were going to play we keep heading forward to the tree house and upon entering see that has become overgrown with vines however still has everything in the same place as they left it next to the door we can see the big yellow cat which we know holds a much larger significance within our minds as well as several other items found in the first room of headspace like the mask the toaster the tv and cards it becomes clear that this room was manifested out of our fond memories spent in this treehouse we noticed what we can assume to be the final missing photo taped onto the wall however upon turning it around we see the key and message which was hinted at way earlier in the game this wasn't simply something we dreamt up but an actual physical item the hollow sound which plays upon turning it over implies that whatever it is that's inside the toy box it's likely to have a key item that will bring us closer to the truth we pocket the key before inserting the picture back inside the photo album giving us one final chance to look over all the photos the gang gets upset while looking through their old memories causing aubry to dash out of the treehouse we follow them out and see they've returned to the stump aubry puts a pinwheel on it and starts to explain why she's been acting the way she has and how mari's suicide affected her she gives us a run down of everything that happened after with her pushing everyone away and feeling the loneliest she had ever felt you and basil ended up closing yourselves off kell focused on sports and made new friends in the process and hiro focused on studying aubrey took their ways of handling grief as abandonment so became upset and aggressive saying she's regretful that she didn't understand that at the time despite you and basil isolating yourselves it's clear that we had a harder time coping eventually leading us to stop coming into school leaving basil by himself aubrey recounts a time how she went round basil's house one time after school and checked out his photo album only to see that all of the photos had been scribbled out with marker we can now understand why aubry would have held this grudge against basil but what she doesn't know is that you had just as or maybe even more involvement in that action than basil only thing is that if aubry just took the time to ask him why he did it she may have begun to find out the truth herself but instead took the approach of stealing his photo album and bullying him for what he'd done aubry breaks down in tears for her past actions as kell and hiro comfort her weirdly with you stepping back you all end up having a group hug which takes us to a nice detailed drawing of this awkward tear-filled group hug i like how they include the detail kel mentioned earlier about finally being the taller brother showing us that both him and hiro were considerably taller than you and aubry aubry says she needs to go apologize to basil and that's exactly what we do heading out of our house and straight to basils a beautiful piece of visual storytelling can be seen here with basil's grandma being seen in the middle of the road looking around before slowly fading away immediately clueing us in that perhaps basil's grandma has passed away upon knocking we're once again greeted by basil's caretaker polly who thanks us for coming back and explains that since basil came home he went straight to his room and hasn't talked to her since we go into the house and try talk to basil hiro lets basil know they're all here for him and aubry apologizes for how she's been treating him both of which get no response the gang set on the idea of staying the night round basils so decide to just hang out and watch some tv together until the sun goes down this is really the last time you'll be properly hanging out and talking with your friends so enjoy it while it lasts the gang talk together mainly about how no matter what they'll always be there for one another until kel announces his tiredness and falls asleep within seconds you aubrey and hiro start talking about the future with aubry asking us to stay in contact after we move away hiro starts talking about how they should all meet up and just hang out with each other from time to time not wanting to completely lose his friends upon us moving away aubry asks if her new friends would be invited with hiro telling her the more the merrier and with that you all go to sleep getting close-ups on all three of your closest and best friends as we fall asleep the cut scene from the start of the game seems to repeat with the phrases don't worry everything is going to be okay we then see basil surrounded by something before asking will you forgive me it seems like we're just about to discover the truth once and for all we awake in white space but are still our real world selves which also translates to the gameplay walking up we discover omori waiting for us now blatantly showing the separation between us and him he says nothing to us but watches as we move around him we approach the black light bulb which we now know represents black space and the repression of the truth and end up destroying it letting all of our deepest and darkest secrets out with it everything becomes dark instantly as we slowly start to see a beam of light fade in ahead of us something fades in along with it as we're brought into a battle there's several phases to this battle all of which are reincarnations of all the fears we'd previously conquered in the game our only options are to calm down focus and persist however after we defeat our fear of drowning for a second time we're brought to almost complete darkness with the vaguest blur being seen in the background we first need to calm down so that we can focus and upon focusing can clearly see the image of our sister's lifeless body hanging this battle against something is our final stand in trying to accept the death of our sister focusing on the graphic memory in detail and persisting as we keep persisting we keep getting damaged almost killing us in the process despite this we keep going eventually learning how to overcome with that something seems to disappear with the light bulb being left in its place we enter the light and are brought to a colorful and calm looking forest heading up the path we come across a black and white photo of a tree and keep following the path we then find another photo of a tree before being greeted by the headspace version of basil he's glad that you've come back for him but says that it might be too late he tells us the truth of that day will be hard to accept but upon seeing it we have to stay strong this tells us that we're not entirely out of the storm yet with us initially thinking we'd conquered all of our deepest fears when overcoming mari's death however here it seems like basil was alluding to an even deeper secret one that we may have been repressing so deep that it's been forgotten entirely up to this point basil once again tells us to forgive him for what we're about to see and gives us his photo album we enter the hole at the bottom of the tree and are once again shrouded in darkness the music turns incredibly hollow and bleak as we emerge in what appears to be our living room red light shines in through the windows and we can also see that some pictures are scattered on the floor the first shows a reflection of basil in what we can assume to be the glass doors leading out to our backyard we're then given the chance to put all the pictures we currently have inside the photo album as we finally start piecing together this final truth we've been hiding looking at our family portrait all of our faces are scribbled out apart from mari's and upon interacting with our mum who sat on the couch she says my only daughter is gone and you you are my only son i can't lose you as well this along with the tree cutting area from earlier are the only times you've interacted with and seen your parents only being inside your mind looking at the photo to the left of her seems to not give us any new information being a fairly dark and blurred image entering the room in front of us brings us to walls and walls of people in hospital beds we find another photo of what appears to be us with our back to the camera on our knees we then find one with who we can assume to be mari laying in bed with us placing our hand on her the time frame is still unclear on when all this happened and how all these photos are connected but will slowly be revealed as we acquire more we can notice that upon interacting with the photos several of the people in the beds have disappeared another photo shows us balled up on the ground with our hands on our eyes like we're crying to the side of us we can just faintly see a hand hanging down it's starting to become clearer what we may be about to discover one of the people has seemingly had their blood bag cut with us noting that this person is not breathing a red light comes on in front of us and when interacting with it we appear at the top of our staircase with blood splattered across our face we pick up another photo this time showing a body being dragged up some stairs the next photo shows us on the stairs looking down to the ground the next a lifeless body laying at the bottom flashing on the screen for a brief second and transporting us to our bedroom beside us is mari lying in our bed where we once again know this person is not breathing our face is even more bloody than previously and the next photo we pick up is assumedly basil with his hand on our shoulder basil stands in front of us and repeats the lines once more don't worry everything is going to be okay leaving our bedroom we're brought to a stage with a music stand in the middle making us assume this is where our recital would have taken place we find some more photos one shows basil covering his eyes with his hand upon picking it up a hand flashes up on the screen with one of its fingers being removed the next photo shows mari's lifeless body once again at the bottom of the stairs another finger gets cut off the next photo shows us in basil beginning to pick up mari's body and the next shows us dragging mario into our bedroom one more photo remains on the stage that being our broken violin lying at the bottom of our stairs an image which was already briefly flashed on the screen earlier in the game we're brought to another section the light illuminating only the photos the first shows us and mari at the top of our stairs simply looking at each other our face is now completely mangled with our eyes turning crimson red the next photo shows us and mari fighting at the top of the stairs a spotlight seemingly made out of pointing fingers envelops the screen in white light taking us back to the living room we can screw in the light bulb on the lamp and look at our reflection our face is completely warped and our eyes are beaming red this is the exact same image we saw earlier in one of the holes we pick up another photo showing us pushing our own sister down the stairs crashing towards the bottom where a broken violin lays sitting in the chair strangely brings us back to normality a brief image of what could have been heading outside we're brought back to the gates which initially led us to this place we walk up collecting the final photos in the process the first shows the ground along with the noose to the left-hand side the next shows either us or basil tying this noose the next shows an image of two feet hovering above the ground we then see mari who's been brought out by you and basil strung up to the tree a toy box lays beside her and finally we reach a large tree with a noose attached a photo laying in front of it upon picking it up we once more look through all of the events which took us up to this point the truth finally being revealed the first shows basil's presence within your house with all of these photos being captured from his perspective we don't know why he's here but with all of you being friends it's not a stretch to say that perhaps he had come round yours to hang out with it being your recital that evening perhaps he felt it would be nice to give you some moral support he witnesses you throw your violin down the stairs your sister mari was pushing you far too hard with practice and playing constantly was killing your fingers leading to you both having an argument it should be clear now that all of the hand imagery in the game up to this point relates to this your fingers were in pain because of how much you were practicing not by your own accord but because mari was forcing you to she wanted the recital to be perfect who can blame her and her stubborn little brother wasn't gonna mess it up for her she looks at you stunned that you do such a thing especially with the recital being tonight you simply look down slightly hunched over perhaps regretful of what you've just done it's unclear who initiates the fight but you and mari both begin tussling with each other at the top of the stairs leading to you pushing her down one accident which came out of a minor argument changing the course of so many people's lives in an instant you love your sister and always have but nobody can spend their life with someone and not have the occasional argument at least not with someone you truly care about this was just one of those times and you didn't mean to push her the moment just took you it's no one's fault really but we can see why we've been tormenting ourselves over it because when it comes down to it we pushed her mari lands at the bottom if she had just hit the ground she would have most likely been okay but instead she lands right on top of your broken violin striking her so hard it kills her instantly we slowly make our way down the stairs in shock at what we've just done we get our friend basil to help us drag her body up the stairs and put her back in bed she's dead and they know that but they're just kids accidents never seem to turn out like this usually something bad happens you get upset and things go back to normal what will happen when your parents find out what you've done you're still young but can grasp the magnitude of what's just happened and like a scared kid who doesn't want to get into trouble you try to cover up your wrongdoings as opposed to telling someone about it you and basil were naturally distraught at what's just happened overcome with shock confusion and anxiety however basil comes up with a plan to get both of you out of trouble you drag mari's body out of the bed and back downstairs you head outside to your garden and fashion a noose out of some rope despite the obvious bruising that would appear on mari's body upon being discovered treating her death as a suicide is the only plan you two can come up with to get yourselves out of trouble at no point are you thinking how this will affect you later in your life or how much more trouble this could get you in if you end up being discovered in situations of immense shock and anxiety it's well known that acting out of character and being on higher lower is very common these two boys are committing a heinous action by acting on this plan and not just calling for help but at the very least you can understand their mindset they love their life and everyone in it they never want anything to change they were never bad kids and never have been but their actions would make you think otherwise and just like that you string mari up packing your broken violin or rather the evidence into a toy box and locking it away but before you head back inside you take one last look at mari's hanging body where we can see one of her eyes is still open glaring back at us this is the something we've been running from the image of our dead sister's eye glaring back at us we wake back up and are signaled by the music in the back that something's clearly off our first instinct is to go check on basil perhaps as an attempt to confront him upon discovering the whole truth for the first time entering his room we can see basil is awake staring outside his window as we walk towards him he turns around relieved it's just us he immediately starts talking about the day mari died and how it couldn't have been our fault but instead something behind us the way he speaks in this part seems very disjointed and strange almost like basil himself hasn't yet accepted the truth blaming the supernatural entities for the death of mari despite it being our fault basil gets upset and starts shouting at you he thinks it's unfair and mean that in the four years you were all separated we only came out of our shell when the last three days that we were here we know that basil would be the most affected by this not only because of the immense guilt he's been carrying around after framing mari's death as a suicide but also because he's the most similar to us being fairly reclusive and shy basil says there's something all around us now and if we try to leave the room we can see that getting rid of our inner demons might not have been as easy as we thought basil appears right behind us shouting at us in a crazed fashion before stepping back and saying that he can't be alone again we step towards basil as something appears all around him appearing in a form which looks like it's consuming him as basil goes on we can see that just like we previously had done he's repressing the truth repeating how something killed mari and how something ruined all his photos it wasn't our fault this also gives us concrete proof that it was most likely us that scribbled out all of basil's photos with him still taking the blame for it but telling no one in order to protect you basil at this point has completely snapped with too many of the events in his life leading him to the point where he truly believes in all these supernatural forces that are destroying their lives despite us now knowing the truth there's still clearly something attaching us to the same idea as we try to leave but get blocked by something and push towards basil initiating a fight trying to use any of our skills is useless with us not being able to calm down focus or persist we also can't run away eventually leading us to the point where we have no other choice than to attack basil what you might not be able to see is that basil is equipped with garden shears meaning that this isn't just a typical scrap but perhaps a more severe situation you fight until the energy bar reaches 10 which makes the message everything is going to be okay appear within it this then brings us to a cut scene simply showing us confused and in a state of complete distress this brings us back to the fight where we can see the numbers on the energy bar erratically changing and also have a new unique emotion that being stressed out it only shows up in this part of the game and has no real effect other than the visual change you keep attacking each other back and forth until basil stabs you in one of your eyes causing you to stare back in shock we hear both of you collapse on the ground as an ambulance is heard you may have both been severely injured but you've saved your friend's life in the process we then appear in the middle of the road much like basil's grandma from earlier walking up we can find the white curtain looking identical to the one that mari walked into earlier being a clear representation of death and passing on to some kind of ethereal afterlife we still know our way back home however so close the door on the possibility of death we end up back in the street following a black cat who's most likely me woo back to our house basil stands outside and upon talking to him apologizes for causing so much trouble we can see why he became so withdrawn as whenever he tried to help someone out it always ended up with them being burdened however in a moment of relief and realization basil tries to let go of the past and accept all of these problems which have been plaguing his life for years now he tells us that despite bottling these feelings up for so long they'll all end up coming out eventually with us only having to hope that our good friends aubry cow and hero will find it in their hearts to forgive us basil ends the conversation in a very conclusive and optimistic manner showing us that perhaps he's one step ahead of us in this mission to a feeling of complete freeness and contentment with our future still being uncertain he gives you a hug before leaving and asks if you can make some new memories we have no other choice than to enter our house where the toybox key flashes on the screen once again your house has taken the form of how you most fondly remember it with the portrait of your family on the wall now being entirely clear we hear the piano being played and upon entering see mari playing it once again she talks to us and says she knows how stressful and intense these last three days have been but says that we should forgive ourselves there's apparently one final thing left to do exiting the room and immediately noticing the appearance of the closet to the left our mind is no longer rebelling against us everything is now free to think about which means no more repressing memories or any other aspects of our life we see the toy box at the back of the room and unlock it seeing the broken violin and sheet music inside we collect the sheet music and head back outside taking us to a rainy highway with no other choice than to go up we see a light flicker on to the side of us and stepping into it brings us into one of our memories what follows is several sections of memories which we've witnessed within the photo album playing out in real time you're showing your time at the tree house at the beach at your hangout spot having fun on a rainy day basil's birthday and finally christmas the last one being the most significant considering this is where you first got your violin in between each memory a piece of your violin mends itself regaining its shape entirely upon the final memory walking up we end up getting brought back to the stage where our three childhood friends wait for us they take the form of when you remember everything was perfect in your life and upon entering they all greet you they all show the love they have towards you and each other with aubry describing how before she found you guys she felt like she never fitted in with the things hiro and kel say it's clear our mind is setting us up to accept this horrible feeling we've felt for so long telling us in the form of our imaginary friends that upon telling other people the truth of our actions they will forgive you in terms of the real world we're not entirely sure if they will but if we stick with the mindset that they won't we'll end up falling into the same traps as before and re-entering this cycle of torment they then all transform into their current day appearance showing that despite them all growing up and seeming so different to you at their core they're still the same people you knew four years ago and you have to have that same level of trust that they'll forgive you as we step up to the stage everything turns dark except the music stand we place the sheet music on it and begin to play our recital by ourselves to no one we stop and collapse to the floor erupting into tears and finally accepting what we've done we transition back to the white space and confront omori who still stands by his mat he's the final thing that's still left from our repression of the truth so it becomes clear that you'll need to be taking care of him as well he pulls out a knife as you're brought into a battle it's more of an endurance test seeing how long you can survive against omori's onslaught remembering your friend's encouraging words restores all your life and juice and upon defeating omori he still doesn't succumb you have to do this as many times as possible each time with omori becoming more twisted and distorted i love the way the music keeps in line with this idea becoming increasingly intense and overdriven as you progress through the fight images start to appear behind him and everything starts becoming a blur he taunts you by saying things like aubry loved her and you killed her omori will eventually overwhelm you and kill you taking you to a game over screen like usual however this time we can see the figure of arse lying in bed showing that perhaps the choice everyone has been telling us about lies here this is where you can either get the good or bad ending we'll touch on the good ending first and go over the others in a bit choosing to continue we pick ourselves up and prepare to play our violin we get brought back to the battle where the only option is to play which in turn takes us to one of the most excellently crafted pieces in a game i've ever seen not only do we get to hear the duet between you and mari which you never ended up playing but we witnessed essentially our entire life play out in front of us i hate to say it but your boy was incredibly teary-eyed at this one i [ __ ] hate feelings we see us and mari slowly grow up beside each other slowly having our friends introduced as we grow up we can see that we became friends with aubry when we found her crying by herself with her also bringing basil into the group after meeting him at school subtle imagery like the flower in your hair at one point establishes that despite everyone being best friends there was a particularly strong connection between you and basil we also witness where some of our fears may have come from showing us that image of mari pulling us out of the water certain images like the transition between her hugging us and then immediately cutting to us sitting by ourselves are so incredibly powerful we end it off on stage as we look at mari entering the blindingly white window taking us back to whitespace collapsing into omori's arms we appear exhausted omori drops his knife and fades away we enter a normal looking door in front of us and are awoken we're all bandaged up and burst into tears at how overwhelming everything has been despite this there's an undeniable sense of optimism we finally conquered our demons now at least getting a chance of having a better life i have a theory about this section which i'm not sure is entirely correct but it's definitely plausible i'll talk about it in a second [Music] we leave our room and make our way to the right where we see our headspace friends who run up at this same time we also see the dark version of basil head downwards who you'll inevitably have to follow as heading up leads to the exit which you can't enter we step into basil's room and see all of our friends surrounding him they all turn to you when we're brought into a cut scene we speak our only words in the game saying i have to tell you something before cutting to black and leading us to believe that we finally overcome everything that once plagued our minds and are ready to be open and honest with our friends that takes us to the end of the game an excellent and pretty optimistic end to a game filled with self-doubt self-hatred and depression but of course there's a few other endings to tackle as well as another route before that though i noticed some people had some qualms with the ending so i just want to respond to those first the most common one i saw was how some people didn't think it made sense that you and basil would be able to pull off the plan first because of how difficult it would be to drag a fully grown body up a set of stairs which i admit would be a fairly difficult task but nowhere near impossible mari always looked pretty slender so it's not like it would have been so hard for two kids to drag a teen up some stairs secondly some believe the plan they came up with was just too morbid for these kids to even comprehend which i totally disagree with i don't want to go too deep into it as it starts to get very dark but you can naturally assume that stuff like this has happened before in real life by kids around the same age as basil and us the point is that ultimately no i wouldn't put it past these kids to come up with the plan to make it look like mari killed herself they even touch on that in the game about how dark their actions were in relation to how they normally act and finally people have an issue with how we just got away with it surely with mari falling to the ground anyone would be able to see clear bruising and injuries on her body i would agree with this point and have seen people genuinely bring this up as a criticism of the ending however what they may not realize is there's certain details within the game that allude to a darker secret did you ever wonder where our dad was during this time we never see our mum in person but at least get voicemails from her cast your mind back to these two instances the one with your mum sitting on the couch and the man cutting down the tree with a noose attached from what both your parents say here as well as the action of cutting down this tree it's heavily implied that upon discovering mari's body your parents did in fact notice the clear markings on her body whether they ever confronted you about this is unknown however it's clear that upon this revelation your parents decided the best course of action was to hide any evidence that someone else may have been involved in murray's apparent suicide however it's also heavily implied they know you did it with your father abandoning you in the real world leading us to remembering him cutting down the tree and telling us to stay away and that we're no longer his son in his eyes your dad clearly isn't happy with the course of action they're taking however does it for the sake of your mum who as we can see in this scene is so broken by mari's death that she doesn't care if you did it or not but simply can't take losing another one of her children i'd say it's even a stretch to say this stuff is implied because all the pieces are already there it's just discovering them which may be the hard part the only minor thing i personally questioned about the ending is where were our parents at the time you would think because we were getting ready for the recital they'd be somewhere around especially somewhere close enough to hear mari clatter down the stairs but apparently not wherever they were is never revealed but it's strange to say the least so before we dive into the different endings let's first talk about the other route of the game known as the hikikomori route you're put onto this roux upon rejecting kel's offer to come out on the first day deciding to stay inside and do your chores instead i enjoy how the game purposely becomes tediously boring in these segments almost as a way to show you that living this way is a boring and dull experience i think giving us the option though once again shows how dedicated this team are to making us feel like when we have choices they genuinely matter despite what i just said though most of the events play out pretty much the same until the final day with only certain characters being swapped out at certain points to compensate for you not discovering the truth the bigger change is come towards the end of the game where after entering the church after the black space segment you cut basil loose from the black strands and actively reject the truth this leads to a fight with basil being very similar to the one at the end of the normal route you end up losing and get transitioned into your real world self inside of headspace we then witness omori take over control watching as basil gets eaten by something this being representative of our complete rejection of the truth we then end up back at the church and wander through all the different layers of black space eventually ending up in a room with all of our headspace friends cozily sleeping we go to sleep alongside them and awaken the real world to something simply beside our bed watching us these are the details i really love and actually make me want to go these separate routes not to mention in this final day whilst you're packing away all your things you get hints at some of the key influences on headspace like your guide to the solar system book most likely creating otherworld and most notably your hungry humphrey burke creating humphrey who we know is also called the oldest this would most likely refer to the idea that humphrey is one of our earliest memories and was created when being told the hungry humphrey story we've just found so many missable details which enhances this world and gives answers to lingering questions that you may have forgotten about looking into the mirror on this day also shows omori instead of yourself being completely consumed by your dream world and not knowing what's real or not anymore talking of the oldest we know he's humphrey the favorite is the gold cat but who's the wisest well entering into our final day we're gonna find out it starts with a cut scene that we saw from the good ending of the game however this time we're the one who disappears leaving omaree standing by himself this takes us into the final day where we can pretty much do what we want in the end we'll always have to go back to white space and stab ourselves to wake up so the game becomes much more focused on gameplay there's some notable differences like basil returning to the blanket now being present for the rest of the game and new areas and side quests which open up as well if there was a time to be nitpicky it would be during this segment although i've only got a couple things to comment on it becomes very clear while traveling from area to area in this part that the fast travel was just too slow it's obviously a lot better than walking there on foot but i didn't appreciate how every time you had to witness pluto come down with kel not being able to get on and then counting for takeoff i just feel like after the first couple times you should have been able to skip that on top of this because you're going to be doing things like hunting down the last remaining keys and completing side quests getting into encounters with enemies which are far below your level just becomes tedious i tried my best to run round all of them but sometimes they trap you into a corner making it so you have to fight them i'd say either remove these enemies entirely as they don't scale up with you both in terms of difficulty and rewards or raise their level to be more similar to yours there is a lot to do here which i find to be admirable considering most people won't go this route at all and miss out on all this content you can head back to humphrey to see sweetheart who's been turned into a cleaner for the other sweetheart replicants you can also battle these three however make sure you're at least at level 40 and ideally somewhere near level 50 as these are some of the toughest fights in the game you can also track down captain space boy in a completely new area called snow globe mountain who's now referring to himself as space ex-husband his boss fight i found to be very interesting and brings in new mechanics which weren't even hinted at in the main game it's all reliant on emotions with his dialogue hinting to what emotion you should give him so that you can deal any considerable amount of damage it's all really fun stuff although i would say unlike a lot of the stuff in this game feels very optional if you don't feel like fighting these incredibly difficult sweetheart clones i don't blame you and you won't be missing out on much think i forgot about the wisest well this is something you definitely don't want to miss out on upon collecting most of the keys you'll notice that z is still missing and heading down to the deep well we can see that a new character with a trench coat has appeared he offers to take you to a place known as the abyss and when you get there you find the z as well as seeing all the other letters floating around you if you hadn't noticed already all the missing keys end up drawing a picture of mari hanging and when it's complete your game will crash opening it back up will put you in the exact same place you were last at so don't worry about losing any progress this gives us access to the maze inside the abyss and as we journey down we discover more and more twisted versions of something appearing in all different types of forms they're all called the same thing in game but have specific names attributed to them in the game files can i just take a second to say how [ __ ] incredible this game's music has been not one track has sounded bad from ambient to intense to jazzy to electronic not one track has faltered i'd have to say it's easily my favorite soundtrack in any game topping mgs2 undertale and lisa we find several skeletons down here and after interacting with one that appears to have a bow attached to it it's shown that it was in fact the skeleton of aubry alluding to the idea that all of these other skeletons we've stumbled across have also been dead versions of our friends i'm not entirely sure what this means however can only piece together that much like we've experienced on this final day here lies all of the friends that have been banished to the abyss by previous resets essentially upon entering this final day the entirety of headspace resets with all the characters acting like nothing's ever happened so perhaps rather than just having their emotions reset the key characters we're familiar with in headspace get sent to the abyss to die they had a taste of the truth so they can no longer be trusted we progress through this maze until we finally reach a ladder leading down to a flat plane this is where we come across abby or rather the wisest this has been speculated to be our imaginary friend sent to the abyss due to her discovery of the truth we get into a fairly tricky battle with her however come out on top she begs for you to stop and bows down to your commands of denying any knowledge of the truth you can either choose to forgive her or not forgiving her causes her to give you eight gifts scattered around the map all being located at one of the red tentacles that you might have seen throughout headspace and if you decide not to forgive her she drops abby's eye which is also an extremely useful item no matter what you'll be getting some of the best gear in the game after you fight abby make sure to head to the deeper well and collect three pieces of sheet music you'll have to take these back to sweetheart's castle and place them on the piano within the lost library doing so spawns three versions of something taking the form of your fears they may seem initially impossible to be but just make sure you get all your team to feel an emotion other than afraid so they can use their skills get aubry to use her power hit constantly to lower their defense and basically just repeat that process while keeping everyone alive there's a certain amount of turns to these fights but i never really came close to running out you're most likely to either win or lose by the time they run out once you defeat all three you can now head back to the white space where you'll be able to access blacker space this is what i meant earlier when i mentioned that black space is my favorite place if you aren't counting the second part the feeling i get when interacting with black a space i feel is very specific to me and is the reason why i enjoyed it so much a lot of games scare me and can make me jump but rarely have this crushing sense of dread i got while exploring blacker space it's similar to the first time round except there's only five doors each of which being even more twisted than their black space counterparts the only way i can really describe these areas is feeling like i shouldn't be here the levels start becoming so broken and abstract that despite obviously being programmed in they're hidden behind so many layers of specific steps and secrets that i was wondering who they were making this for despite being so gray i can see why they left this content to the most dedicated player as it not only serves as an interesting reward but also works in making you feel even more alone while exploring once again like you weren't supposed to see this part of the game i'd argue in saying that these five areas are a lot more detailed and layered than the normal black space rooms leaning even further into the abstract yume nikki ideas which we saw previously there's a lot of stuff here which i literally have no idea what they mean despite me giving a detailed analysis of the entire game up to this point i'm gonna draw the line at this we already know the story from top to bottom so for me to explain blacker space would pretty much only be my interpretation of these abstract scenes everything here is to do with these strange events which play out and the bizarre visuals so everything here we already know but it's well worth experiencing so finally let's look at these other endings first the bad ending you once again have to fight basil and omori but once omori defeats you if you decide to not continue you'll be brought back to white space as omori everything seems normal setting off with your friends to adventure only when you leave this time we're brought to a rooftop our clothing shows unlike the good ending we've woken up and upon learning the truth of our actions have decided that we don't want to go through with telling our friends and hoping for forgiveness we can't even forgive ourselves leading to us jumping off the roof and plummeting down to the ground the ending to this one is of course very bleak let's not forget we're literally witnessing a kid kill himself here although i do like how the trailer music is brought back for this specific ending as well as the callback to the multiple times in headspace where we jump down those seemingly endless voids i should mention that these endings also bring along their changes to the title screen with the good ending showing us looking straight into the camera with the cloudy background and bad ending with the same background with us nowhere to be seen both of the neutral endings either come about when playing the hikikomori roux or deciding to go back to sleep and not confronting basil this leads to you waking up and seeing all your friends distraught in the hallway we peek into basil's room to see him consumed by something it becomes clear that from us not confronting basil with the height of his paranoia filled depressive mindset he takes his own life we have no other choice than to silently walk home where we can either go to sleep wake up in the next morning and drive away with our mum to the new place we're moving to or upon returning home we can pick up the steak knife that's in the kitchen and go to sleep of course this takes us to white space where upon stabbing ourselves to wake up this time it turns out we've also stabbed and killed ourselves in the real world some people argue that these neutral endings are even worse than the bad ending and i can totally see why no matter what basil will always die because you're just not there for him when he needed you but on top of that you can also kill yourself in the process or just leave without saying goodbye to your friends leaving them in a state of distress with them never being able to find the answers they're looking for what makes it even worse is when you think about it in terms of something if we look at something in terms of someone's deepest darkest fears this means that kell aubry and hiro will all be so traumatized from seeing basil's suicide that they'll most likely create some things of their own perhaps being destined to this never-ending feeling of anguish and sadness you started off this game fighting turning and that is it omori hands down one of the best games i've ever played period i don't care how much time you spent waiting for this game you have to admire the finished product and appreciate how immensely powerful detailed and incredible every element of this game is i think ultimately like homo cap mentioned herself it was a passion project and was only made into a game because that's how they thought the ideas would be best presented you can really tell that all of these ideas have been thought about extensively and for a debut and possibly only game from omokat it's incredibly impressive that they managed to make a masterpiece from the get-go other than the minor nitpicks i had which basically are nothing in the grand scheme of things i can't really think of any element where the game stumbles it's consistently entertaining from start to finish beginning as a strange intense dream-like adventure and slowly transforming into a gritty realistic depiction of someone's twisted mental state despite how long this video is i think there's still a lot to be discovered in this game especially in relation to areas like the black space and i also think the game is presented ambiguously enough where you most likely have come to different conclusions than i perhaps have which i always appreciate in any form of media calling omori a game feels like an understatement purely because of how artistic it is it's bold in the places it chooses to go but also sensitive about the topics it tackles and because of how grand the game is there's still many parts i'm yet to experience for myself so i encourage you to buy this game play it for yourself even though i've just analyzed the hell out of it and experience one of the most carefully crafted and unique games i've ever played anyways that's the video if you guys enjoyed make sure to subscribe with notifications on so you know whenever i upload like the video share to someone you know and let me know your thoughts in the comments below anyways hope you guys enjoyed and i'll see you in the next one peace