YMMV / Omikron: The Nomad Soul

• Awesome Music: Having someone like David Bowie to compose the OST of your video game wasn't really common in 1999.
  • The story behind it makes it even more awesome. As the game and universe were in an early stage of development, the staff started to think about the music that should go with the whole story. Given that it was a weird alternate universe, David Bowie came on the table pretty often. They finally decided to licence songs from Bowie. A meeting was scheduled at Eidos' headquarters in London between David Cage (head of Quantic Dream) and David Bowie. David Cage told in an interview that he couldn't believe that David Bowie would actually be there. He kept supposing Bowie would cancel. He didn't. But the meeting didn't turn out as David Cage had hoped. David Bowie basically told him that he found the idea of licencing his music for a videogame pretty uninteresting. But that he found the idea of designing the whole music for a videogame VERY interesting. And that's how David Bowie spent several months in Paris discussing with the game designers to understand the setup, the world, the ambiance of the game, and composed songs in the hotel with Reeves Gabrels based on what he understood. A fine example of artistic collaboration, and a confirmation of David Bowie's openness to novelty.
• Complete Monster: Astaroth, Prince of Infernal Darkness, was sealed away after trying to conquer Phaenon. From his prison, Astaroth, to restore his power, hijacked the supercomputer Ix and sent his Demons to prey on and consume the souls of the people. Said souls would be sent to the Reservoir to be tortured, the pain restoring Astaroth's strength. Astaroth also created the game itself to ensnare the gamers in our universe and eat their souls, his ultimate goal to enslave both his universe and ours, devouring millions of souls to do so.
• Designated Hero: The Nomad Soul (aka, you, the player), maybe. You can get the people you possess outright killed, but even if you don't they will fade away permanently when you take over a new body. This is never addressed one way or the other in the story. If it means what it looks like, this results in the protagonist killing lots of innocents — sometimes even outright good guys! — in the course of solving the game's puzzles. The morals of this are never commented on by anyone in the game, ever; they just praise you for being such a heroic person instead.
• Disappointing Last Level: Background lore in the game would lead one to believe the last leg would be a climactic assault on the Legate's palace, and from there to discover the location of the supercomputer Ix and descend there. Instead, at a point that feels like it should be at most two thirds through the game, you just sort of come across a cave system that leads you to the resting place of an ancient hero where you pick up a mythical sword and then teleport right to Astaroth. The ending cinematic tells you at the same time the resistance assaulted the Legate's palace and Ix, offscreen.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: For a certain kind of enjoyment at any rate. The story is deemed So Bad, It's Good by most, and provide many delightfully Narm-y moments, the open world cyberpunk setting it takes place in does admittedly show lot a bit of in promise and imagination in its ambition (though the execution cannot quite live up to it), and David Bowie prominently appears in the role of a recurring character and does genuinely put in some effort. The gameplay, however, is seen by many as tedious at best, and an absolutely miserable slog to get through at worst. For the bulk of the gameplay, the player is tasked with advancing the story by wandering the Hub Level to find locations where the next story-event takes place based on descriptions, which is made harder that it has any right to be, by a combination of samey environments that are hard to navigate, said descriptions being somewhat vague, and having to walk long distances between locations a lot of the time. Whenever in a mission area, the gameplay is occasionally broken up by Fighting Game sequences and First-Person Shooter sequences, but these Unexpected Gameplay Changes very quickly wear out their welcome by being half-baked and having awful controls respectively.
• So Bad, It's Good:
  • This being a David Cage game, Omikron has garnered this reputation among most of those who've played it, with the general sentiment being that the game is so swallowed up in its own pretentiousness that it becomes hilarious to watch.
  • "Training Room" is one of the most well-known songs in the game, even overshadowing David Bowie's contributions, which is certainly quite the feat.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Nomad Soul crosses it when he kills his then-current body in order to trick a kindhearted non-human animal tender into trying to help and then possessing said animal tender, so he could move a big rock using one of his pack animals. All this despite the fact that he could have simply asked the guy to use one of the animals to move the boulder.

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