Nightmare Fuel / OMORI

...Nothing is going to be okay.

This game can be described as Yume Nikki meets EarthBound, so there are a lot of fears in this game. Hope you're ready to face these. Spoilers are unmarked, so beware.

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Prologue

• The game's first real scare:
  • After going through a brief tutorial section in the Vast Forest, the group meets up at Basil's house, where Aubrey and Kel accidentally scatter the photos in Basil's album after fighting over it. They apologize and everyone moves on from this, and you're tasked with putting the photos back together in the right place. Once that's all said and done, Basil starts to walk back towards the front door when a photo slips out. But when he takes a closer look, the serene background music fades out, a hellish high-pitched ringing is heard for a moment, and a black shadowy mass of tendrils (later identified as Something) forms under him while the eyes on his absolutely horrified face glow deep red. You're briefly shown a glimpse of the photo, a black and white photo of a smashed violin, as a distorted noise briefly plays and then you're abruptly back in White Space.
    Basil: Huh? What is this? Did I take this photo? Something about it seems so...familiar. N-no, that can't be...
    (the screen flickers as he turns around, and the next line is presented in a horribly deranged font)
    Basil: MARI...She's...
  • Once back in White Space, you hear only a Heartbeat Soundtrack and the door back into Headspace is gone. Trying to run anywhere outside of your room just gets you teleported back into it by one of the many disembodied hands floating about. Speaking to Mewo causes her to subtly hint that there is a way out; the only time she ever says anything besides a meow that translates to "Waiting for something to happen?" If you open the menu, you'll see a "STAB" option in menacing red font. You get the option to stab the only person in your party now — yourself. And you have to do this in order to wake up.
• The first time Sunny is forced to confront his fear. Driven by his hunger, he's forced out of bed and has to descend the stairs. When you leave his bedroom, the area is illuminated in an eerie blue glow, and the stairs seem to extend into infinity. With each step Sunny takes, hands manifest from the sides of the screen and close in on him, culminating in a large grey one appearing behind him after he picks up the knife. You can't turn back, either, since Sunny is too hungry to think of anything else. Sunny cannot outrun this grey one, and it will abruptly crash into him when it gets close, triggering the first fight with Something, and introducing you to the "Afraid" emotion as the battle interface fades in.
• After Sunny overcomes his fear of heights and sates his hunger, his sleep is interrupted by someone knocking on the door. Approach it, and the voice from behind the door identifies itself as Mari, asking Sunny to open it. If you choose to open the door, you very slowly creak it open, revealing hints of a blue silhouette before it abruptly throws itself open. You get a brief look of its full appearance, twisted neck, and distorted Ghostly Gape before Sunny slams the door shut. This is thought to be a hallucination of Mari's hanging corpse, which many nickname "HELLMARI".

Headspace

• Omori's Happy expression looks pretty creepy, likely because outside of battle, he's always shown with a subtle frown. He looks even more freakish when he becomes Ecstatic, looking less sincerely-elated and more like a Slasher Smile. And when he turns Manic, he starts drooling.
• Acquiring the Keys to fill out the Hangman Puzzle causes the music to fade out as the key takes focus on a black screen, accompanied by the oppressive tone each key emits. Acquiring the correct keys to fill in the blank causes a disembodied voice to count the remaining correct keys left. As you get closer to completion, the font of the text box gets more distorted, and the hole left by the key slowly becomes large enough to look and jump into, and past that point… it's not a pretty sight.
• The bloody footprints you see at certain points in the game. They may lead to certain keys with all the horrors surrounding them, or lead you to Something. One such example occurs at the end of the Prologue, when you follow the footprints back into the Otherworld fields and suddenly your friends are gone along with the enemy encounters as you find yourself led on by a shadowy figure known as the Stranger. Continue following it and you'll come across a barn, and inside it leads you into a mirror… which dumps you into a black hallway with a portrait of a "happy family"… with their faces blacked out and bearing Glowing Eyes of Doom. As you turn back, Something suddenly appears, forcing you to run back the way you came. As you reach the entrance of the hallway, you get brief flashes of Basil and his Something looming over him, before being sent back to White Space (where you have to stab yourself again to wake up).
• King Crawler is a centipede made up of sad-looking Lost Sprout Moles and heals itself by eating more Lost Sprout Moles. In fact, King Crawler is a parasite that extends itself by harvesting the empty husks of Sprout Moles it has killed. Appropriately, you meet the King Crawler after entering a forest clearing full of dead-looking Lost Sprout Moles.
• You know those Sprout Mole masks that the party wears to prevent being detected? They are made of actual sprout moles! You can even find a Sprout Mole in Sweetheart's castle that actually used to know the individual Sprout Mole masks. And you wouldn't even know this if you actually read the item description.
• Once you actually get on the train to Orange Oasis, the train suddenly gets dark. The passengers turn into vaguely human blobs not paying real attention to you. The train goes forever, but, if you keep going left, the train at times keeps turning dark in a few seconds. This increases frequency until your party is in a battle with their first Something. Everyone in the party is Afraid... except Omori. Meanwhile, Something calls out to Sunny (not Omori) and even apologizes, but a voice accuses it of being a liar. Eventually, after you defeat it, the passengers are now TOAST.
• Orange Oasis itself is a pretty bright and friendly place, if a bit quirky while you're underground. When you've found the path to Breaven, you'll chance upon a magic circle and the opportunity to sacrifice various items to summon enemies themed on baked goods. When you sacrifice the Stray Cat, the room abruptly inverts its colors as it spawns five Hush Puppies, which are poorly-drawn dog faces, and the silly BGM gets swapped to the same one used in the shadow fight. The effect fades away after you've killed the Hush Puppies, but it certainly is a Mood Whiplash.
• Rain Town is a small area within the Orange Oasis that has constant gentle, tinkling rainfall with a community of cute vegetable-shaped kids. Their only problem is that the rain is slightly uncomfortable, and you're The Chosen One who's the only one who can reverse the tide. You're supposed to turn the valve to the right, but if you turn it to the left, the sky darkens ominously, Mari and Basil instantly vanish, the town residents become "Lilli"s, and the drizzle turns into a storm, flooding Rain Town and booting you out of it. The narration states that "its inhabitants were never heard from again".
• In one part of Marina's sector in Humphrey, you'll come across her 667th experiment, a strange cat monster held in a large glass case. A parrot next to the case will tell you not to poke the glass, and you can follow what it says and continue on… only for the monster to suddenly break free from the case and start chasing you. Not only do the lights begin flickering and reduce your visibility, but you'll be forced to run around hitting Humphrey bumps in order to create a path for yourselves as the monster actively hunts you down. And if it catches you, your fate isn't depicted in a cartoony fashion like it usually is: the monster opens its teeth-filled mouth wide for a second, before the screen goes black and the horrible sound of bones crunching and flesh squelching is heard. Ever worse, many a player will likely end up poking the glass at the beginning and learn their lesson the hard way.
  • You may run into the Spelling Bee along the way. Hopefully you've remembered their Verbal Tic of slowly spelling out its dialogue one letter at a time, because if you interact with them, they will do it to the point of Overly Long Gag, giving the cat-monster more than enough time to catch up to you.
• Though it's lessened somewhat by the cartoony nature of it, the fight against Humphrey is actually quite disturbing. First it's a fight between an army of pink smiling blobs, all of whom are the same entity. Then the blobs merge into one big blob, with several of the small blobs still sticking out of it, still smiling. Then the party is eaten by the big blob and enters a chamber full of bones, while Humphrey's face and eyes manifest on the inside of his stomach. This face will repeatedly eat the party, sending them into a deeper chamber with another face, all while the lights get darker and the music gets more oppressive. And at the end of this ordeal, they somehow end up in a mouth with a uvula, which also has Humphrey's face on it. It's Body Horror and Mind Screw at its finest, summed up by Omori's succinct description in the Foe Facts book:
  Absolute, pure terror. - OMORI
• You would never expect a character like Humphrey to be such an Affably Evil Punch-Clock Villain, and the Mood Whiplash felt upon going back inside him in the Hikikomori route is suffocating.
  Humphrey: Feel free to struggle, 'cause no matter what...you'll never be able to escape my gut!
• Numbers is an ambient track that plays while you're traveling through a dark tunnel in Deeper Well while a disembodied voice infodumps the nature of Headspace and Omori's past. The whole situation is unnerving enough, but in the middle of the track you hear a creepy voice. It may sound like nonsense to most, but to those fluent in the language, it's a German Numbers Station.
• Over the course of the game, Basil's abandoned house becomes more and more disused and horrifying to look at. The music stops playing in his house and the pond surrounding it, the trees overgrow causing sunlight to be blocked out, and the inside of his house starts to look more and more dilapidated, with thorny vines lining the walls. Once you get all the required keys, a chasm opens up in the floor of the house that leads to Black Space, the pond has turned blood red with hands sticking out, and the trees in the surrounding forest have all turned barren. And the path leading down to his house becomes inexplicably much longer, with no Mari where she normally would be, more and more of the surrounding trees dead as you run further down the path. As you enter Basil's house, the very last words you ever hear from your Headspace friends is Aubrey remarking "O-Omori, I'm scared...Let's...let's go back...", but otherwise nobody else remarks about the Scenery Gorn surrounding them, as if they don't even notice anything besides a vague feeling of fright.
• Checking a floating mirror will display a reflection of Omori with his smiling friends behind him. Rarely, the text box won't appear (see 0:36) and all the kids in the reflection◊ will flash distorted smiles (pictured above) as the scene cuts away.

Faraway Town

• If Sunny checks a mirror, he'll likewise find apparitions lurking right behind him. Most of those are variations of Something standing next to him or watching from outside the room, but it's possible to see Mari's ghost either towering over Sunny from behind or standing next to him with a ghastly bent head.
• To the left of the stairs, there's a chance that the closet door will be visible. Normally, interacting with it will cause Sunny to shake his head and reiterate that there is nothing there, but there's a small chance that instead the door will throw itself open as Something inside pulls Sunny in against his will before Smash Cutting back to Sunny standing in front of the door, where it will be gone again… while this hallucination is rare in the main route, it shows that Sunny having his friends for company doesn't undo his mental health's substantial deterioration.
• On a more realistic note, Aubrey's house is absolutely filled with trash, to the point where it literally blocks access to her mother's room. Said mother just sits in front of the living room TV, absolutely unresponsive to external stimuli, like, say, several children she doesn't know coming in.

One Day Left

• Black Space is where the dark secrets in the background are brought to the forefront as Omori is brought closer to the Awful Truth beneath Headspace. The area takes a leaf out of Yume Nikki as things become incredibly erratic and nonsensical and the music becomes more ambient and minimalistic.
  • One of the doors will take you to a small room with Omori's cat Mewo lying on a table, surrounded by various sharp tools. The only other NPC in the room is a cat butler who says that Mewo "has been very bad," and one of the only things you can do there is selecting "Yes" when the game asks if you'd like to cut Mewo open. What's worse is that you're required to select it repeatedly. You get to see Mewo go from being mildly curious as to what you're doing, to struggling desperately to escape out of sheer terror upon realizing what's about to happen to her. If you go through with it, the game will taunt you with "Waiting for something to happen?" and you realize that you didn't have to kill Mewo to proceed — you could have stabbed yourself to escape at any point.
  • Several doors will bring you to Basil, who's relieved at finally being rescued and follows you around to get home, only to be unceremoniously killed before you get to leave.
    • In one door, you end up a room full of spiders. After Omori frees Basil from a spider web, they travel together, and Basil slowly gets covered in tiny spiders. He tries to play it off, but they swarm him, and he screams for help. The player's reaction in most iterations is to try and save Basil, but he vanishes before your eyes as if the spiders ate him and left nothing, not even bones. Not helping is that you encounter the corpse of a giant spider afterward.
    • In another room, you climb up a run-down treehouse to meet Basil, and start descending. Then Basil, evidently having never seen a horror movie, suggests they use the mysterious treehouse elevator that just appeared. Against your better judgment, you have to listen. When the elevator ends up not moving, you exit, but Basil's body gets stuck in the door. The elevator proceeds to decapitate him as he calmly asks for help and it starts moving.
    • Another room lets you meet with Basil and go on a river raft ride. Just as Basil is about to ask Omori something, the raft enters a tunnel. When it emerges, Basil is cleanly decapitated. It's strongly implied that Omori decapitated Basil himself.
    • The last room reunites him with Hero, Aubrey, and Kel, but Hero is eerily quiet while leading you down the room. When you escort Basil to the rest of the party, Kel pelts Basil with several balls and Aubrey brutally smashes his head in, while Omori and Hero just stand by and watch. Everything at that point is distorted — the tiles are incoherent, Omori's friends have over-saturated portraits and only repeat lines from the very beginning of the game, the Big Yellow Cat in the back wall has a Thousand-Yard Stare that pierces through the screen, and the Background Music is a malfunctioning version of "Lost At A Sleepover" with an occasional Last Note Nightmare.
  • One of the doors leads you to a room filled with a red mist, floating red faces, and mirrors that shatter when interacted with. Its "music" titled "Friendsssssss" is nothing but distorted noise. And if that doesn't make you feel unwelcome, each smashed mirror makes Omori's reflection look worse and worse, and the last one causes a photorealistic Hellmari to follow him around until he leaves.
  • The scene where Omori ascends the Black Space throne. It's made of hands, and the background is blood-red. Basil begs for help, but Omori casually kills him.
• The One Day Left title screen has a blood-red background, high-pitched ringing as "music", and Omori and Sunny glitchily alternating between each other.
• Basically everything to do with the reveal of what really triggered the story four years prior to its start, and especially the conclusion that results in the "birth" of Something.
  • We find out that Mari didn't hang herself. While practicing for their duet recital, Sunny got frustrated and smashed the violin that his friends had spent months saving up for as a Christmas gift. Mari went to talk to Sunny, and he didn't want to discuss it, believing that he wasn't good enough. Sunny tried to walk away from her; when Mari wouldn't let him leave, he pushed her down in a fit of anger. Unfortunately… she was right next to the staircase. Cue a photograph of Mari's crumpled body over the remains of the violin with her neck snapped. Sunny then panicked, ran downstairs, and begged her to wake up. After apologizing for what he did, he puts her to bed. Sunny was all alone in the house, with neither of their parents in sight.
  • Sweet Basil ended up being the one to cover up Mari's accidental death. While Sunny was watching over Mari's corpse in her bed, he ordered Sunny to bring Mari outside, and to get the jumprope. It was his idea to hang her body from a tree. Even when Basil talks with Sunny about it before his boss fight, he's at a loss for why he thought it was a good idea.
  • Then after we see the final photo of Mari's hanging corpse, it transforms into Something before the game Smash Cuts back to Basil's living room in the real world while this hideous noise is droning in the background, really communicating the sense of dread Sunny must feel now that he knows the truth and how he realizes what might happen if he doesn't confront Basil.
  • Datamined text tied to the photos show what seem to be Sunny's thoughts of the incident picture by picture, cementing just how accidental it all was. And if that wasn't bad enough, he says how it seemed like Mari was sleeping when he failed to wake her up... yet one eye was open, after she died.
  • Sunny's sprite gradually becomes bloodied and disfigured as you get closer and closer to filling up the album, likely representing how he views himself as a result of his actions. By the end of it all, he looks outright demonic.
  • Near the end, you're placed in a room that contains a mirror. Looking into it after collecting the photo in that room lets you get a better look.
• When Sunny barges into Basil's room to stop him from killing himself, Basil gets upset that Sunny's moving away and goes completely insane, manifesting his Something while Sunny's own Something keeps him from leaving. The two boys get into a fight. Let us repeat: Sunny visiting his flower boy friend that night causes the latter to pick a brutal fight with him. All your skills are countered by an oppressive force interrupting you, leaving you with no choice but to fight, and the new "Energy" meter isn't so much a meter for a super attack as it is a measure of his stress, appearing as an EKG that gets faster as it builds up. When it hits maximum, shit truly hits the fan when Sunny adopts the unique Stressed Out emotion, and the EKG twists into cursive writting that reads a chillingly familiar phrase: "Everything is going to be okay". This culminates in Basil stabbing Sunny through the eye, complete with the right half of the screen going black and Sunny's eye in his battle headshot bleeding profusely.
• The Final Boss battle with Sunny versus Omori. It starts simple enough as the latter utterly tears into Sunny verbally about everything he's failed and how there's no hope for him, but as the fight progresses, it gradually distorts into blood, carnage, and insanity as the background becomes covered in Omori's red hands, gets a distorted Hellmari as an overlay, and worst of all, adds silhouettes depicting Sunny's friends' hanging corpses in the background. The best way to describe it is trying to survive against the very personification and culmination of one's suicidal depression as it relentlessly tears you apart.
  • What hammers it home is that not only is the fight unwinnable, but unlike most games with similar psychological themes, Omori has no abominable/monstrous One-Winged Angel form to change into, even as his image is bloody and distorted. Omori is Sunny, and Sunny cannot destroy his inner self and live. The only way to placate it is by refusing to give up and accepting his mistakes. Even if he's overcome them, his trauma and guilt will always be a part of him.
  • The sixth and final phase of the boss fight against Omori adds distorted sound effects to the music that are meant to sound like Mari screaming and falling down the stairs.

Hikikomori Route

• Even if Sunny doesn't commit suicide and moves out quietly with his mother… he's gone in another sense, as that's not Sunny anymore, but Omori having assumed complete control. Sunny as a person has completely ceased to be, willingly consumed by his own alter ego whose grip on reality is loose at best. Mistakenly killing himself trying to warp back to White Space is the least destructive thing he can do; even without his Headspace powers, Omori trying to apply Headspace's rules to other people can only end badly…
• Try stabbing yourself and walking around Sunny's house. The hallucinations that Sunny usually experiences here are even worse:
  • Something will always be in the room from where you enter. It won't move or harm you, but it will always haunt you as a representative of the guilt you didn't address.
  • Looking into the mirror reflects Omori back in all of his monochrome glory instead of Sunny, signifying that Sunny is gone for good. If it's nighttime, the image is darker and blue-tinted.
  • If you opened the door for "Mari" in the prologue and approach the stairs, there is a chance that HELLMARI will charge right at you before the visuals glitch out and she disappears.
  • There are strands of hair coming from under the back door that disappear if you approach them.
  • After defeating all three phobias in the Lost Library, the piano in the music room vanishes, and the window casts an eerie red glow over where the piano was. You can still collide with the invisible piano, but if Sunny examines it, he monologues that there is nothing there.
  • If you re-enter the room behind the living room, there's a chance that a bloody Sunny is waiting for you at the top. He slowly descends the staircase, before turning around and walking away.
  • If you enter Sunny's bedroom, there's a chance that strands of hair will hang over Sunny's bed. There is also a chance that someone, or something, is sleeping in Sunny's bed, blocking access to Headspace, and forcing the player to leave and re-enter the room for it to go away.
  • There is a random chance that seems to be increased on Hikikomori — when falling asleep during One Day Left onward, Sunny can see more Mari-related hallucinations◊.
• Losing the Hangman game or collecting all of the keys for the hangman shows Mari's face and SOMETHING appears and crashes the game.
• Black Space 2. This version of Black Space is only accessible in the Hikikomori Route, and it's even more bizarre and nonsensical than the original Black Space. After all, at this point in the plot, Sunny has fully rejected the Awful Truth that the original Black Space was trying to get him to acknowledge, and the new Black Space can be said to represent what's left of our boy losing himself.
  • Its take on the Playground area. There's a "Pinata Guy" cheerfully spinning around!... and also disembodied heads of Omori buried into the ground. Entering one of them shows Sunny asleep in his bedroom and the HELLMARI stretching her neck out of his bed's headboard. The other accessible head reveals a long corridor where Aubrey, Kel, and Hero silently avoid Omori by walking backwards.
    • The console ports add an extra creepy event in the Hellmari bedroom: There's a picture on the floor that once collected causes the sleeping Sunny (who is described to be "breathing steadily") to be swapped with Mari, who isn't breathing, and makes a few other pictures appear in the nearby forest, with the screen becoming covered in black hands as you collect them. Those five pictures progress from showing an obscured young Sunny (represented by Omori) with the dead Mari hanging behind him to a clear shot of a lonely, crying, monstrous-looking present-time Sunny looking pale and terrified. Once the last one is shown, the area turns pitch black and Omori stabs himself. He then wakes up back in the Hellmari bedroom, taking the place of the dead Sunny figment.
  • Touching the floating pieces of TOAST within the RED MAZE in Black Space 2 will transport OMORI into a different section of the maze populated by hanged Maris. Continuing forward will gradually cause the music to shift in tone and eventually present you with a red, pulsating room. Walking further into the darkness causes the HELLMARI to swoop in from the top of the screen.
    • If you linger around the RED MAZE long enough after touching the TOAST, the hanged Maris will transform again into a photorealistic variant of a smiling HELLMARI that shrieks at you the moment you get too close. Just seeing the thing in motion is unsettling, especially when you're surrounded and can't even run from them.
    • What's even scarier is that, prior to version 1.0.5, if you left this room or stab yourself in this room, HELLMARI will still be following SUNNY when transported back to the hub. It does nothing but float in place, but simply leaving Black Space does not cause HELLMARI to disappear and neither does stabbing yourself in White Space — you must take it back to the dark room and then leave. This was patched out in 1.0.5.
• On the way up Snowglobe Mountain, the party will encounter enemies known as Snow Angels. Resembling stoic swordsmen, they look more sinister than any of the enemies previously encountered on the mountain. When they see Omori on the map screen, they make a ghastly sound and pursue him. Then once you begin fighting them, the battle music is the same droning ambience usually reserved for the dark Something-related monsters. Strangely enough, after defeating Space Ex-Husband, they go back to using the regular battle music for the area. This only happens once, however. Once you leave Snowglobe Mountain and then come back, they'll still be using the same creepy music.
• The console version adds another version of the Boss Rush that can only be tackled if you have beaten the original boss rush and then take only Basil with you. The extra battles at the end include a fight against Kel, Aubrey, and Hero, followed by one against Mari. While the Headspace Trio is challenging, as they're a Wolfpack Boss outnumbering you, Mari will refuse to lift a finger to harm you, and will even heal you… And then when you "defeat" her, the game abruptly cuts to Sunny and Basil staring at her hanging corpse, both too fearful to do anything or even run. After a few rounds of futile struggling, Hellmari jumps you… and you are abruptly returned to the Boss Rush lobby. Even Omori's relentless repression will not overcome the trauma of that fateful day.

Unused content

• A datamined picture called "nowyouknow.png" shows Sunny waking up with really scared detailed eyes that verge on Uncanny Valley, considering his normal blank expressions. It's believed to be an unused picture of his reaction to recovering his repressed memories.

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