Foreshadowing / OMORI

Due to the nature of foreshadowing, all spoilers on this page are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

As a game centered around remembering a forgotten truth, OMORI has a massive amount of Foreshadowing for its major reveals.

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Something

The true nature of Something's appearance as an abstract representation of Mari's hanged corpse is hinted at through increasing connections between the two as the game goes on.

• All of the hallucinations that Sunny can see when looking in his mirror relate to either Something or Mari in some way. Initially, only Something itself or Hellmari can appear, but the connection becomes more pronounced later on with the appearance of a less distorted Mari looming over Sunny◊ with a Face Framed in Shadow.
• Several locations which Something appears in turn out to relate to Mari or allude to her death in some way:
  • The first location you can find it, potentially before even meeting Mari, is at the end of the pier north of the playground. Of course, you later find what is implied to be Mari's spirit there upon returning to Headspace after Two Days Left.
  • Another early location that Something can be found in is a cave in Vast Forest, where it'll be standing in front of a tire swing hanging from a tree. Revisiting this location after defeating Humphrey causes an event where a silhouette of Mari's hanging body fades onto the screen,◊ before the screen suddenly glitches and the tire swing disappears. Nanci, one of the Something variants, appears immediately after exiting and re-entering.
  • In one of the hidden areas in Pyrefly Forest, you can see Something standing over a tree stump before disappearing. The stump turns out to represent the tree in Sunny's backyard that Mari was hanged on, and which their father cut down afterwards.
• Upon returning to White Space after the first Faraway Town segment, interacting with the laptop after the tutorial section will bring up the Hangman menu. For a split second, you can see Something appearing onscreen before it changes to the Hangman screen.
• During the Prologue, you can see a funeral photo of someone in the Neighbour's Room and in the Junkyard. There's a random chance that, after interacting with the photo in the Junkyard, Something will appear and disappear for a split second. Take a guess why.
• On the Sunny route, the fights with both Something in the Walls and Something in the Water are preceded by the appearance of a ghostly version of Mari, meeting Sunny at the top of the staircase and leading him down to the bottom, respectively. In both cases, Mari disappears just before Something attacks, establishing a connection between the two.
• One random Easter Egg that can occur is if you return to White Space early on Two Days Left. Omori can run around and chase sprites of Mari, who inevitably vanish every time he gets close. After several times, Mari turns into Something and vanishes, accompanied by the Something Scare Chord.^note Mari can also appear in White Space during Three Days Left, but she can only appear once and will not be replaced with Something.

The Truth

Though Mari's death is established relatively early in the game, the true manner by which she died — accidentally being shoved down the stairs by Sunny and having her body hanged by Basil in an irrational attempt to cover it up — provides the game's biggest Plot Twist. However, together with the accompanying reveal of what Something represents, there are a number of hints towards the truth which can be found throughout the game.

• Early in the game, Kel and Aubrey get into an argument which knocks Basil over. The others are shocked, but Basil brushes it off, saying "Accidents happen." In the endgame, we discover the whole story was kicked off by two people arguing and someone being knocked over, except this time it was fatal and Basil was definitely not okay with it.
• When Omori becomes Furious, his entire face is blacked out apart from his left eye. The photos of Mari’s corpse show that she was blacked out in the same way and her right eye was visible.
• The staircase in Sunny's house is a focal point of all three of Something's phobia fights in the Sunny route, reflecting its role in Mari's death and, by extension, the "creation" of Something:
  • Something in the Dark attacks Sunny while he is descending the staircase, with its only actions being to shove him or "taunt [him] as [he] falls." Notably, the background of the fight◊ is angled in such a way that Sunny could be looking up or down the staircase, allowing Something in the Dark to simultaneously represent Mari's body at the bottom of the stairs and Sunny shoving her from the top.
  • The lead-in to the fight with Something in the Walls requires Sunny to ascend the staircase instead. This time, there's a strange black mass at the bottom of the stairs that vanishes the moment you interact with it — later revealed to represent Mari's body.
  • Finally, the encounter with Something in the Water begins with Sunny following Mari down the staircase… just like in reality, when Sunny ran down the stairs after she fell. Something in the Water itself also has tendrils which resemble hanging bodies.◊
• One of the trees in the western part of Vast Forest can be fought: it can be identified by its different sprite and having shadows unlike the other trees. In battle, it has incredible durability and defense, requiring defense-piercing attacks; in the Foe Facts, Omori does not comment on the Big Strong Tree but rather Kel does. In addition, the shadowy figure who can be found attempting to chop down a tree with a noose hanging from it in a Hangman sequence will in his frustration ask why it won't fall, hinting at where Mari's suicide was staged.
• At the beginning of Two Days Left, Sunny's mother's voicemail has her ask him if there's anything he wants to keep in the downstairs closet, since she'll be throwing out anything left in there. The closet is not typically visible outside of the phobia segments of the game, but the space where it should be can be interacted with to yield a comment that "There is nothing here". This hints at the fact that Sunny is actively repressing its existence, since it contains the toy box used to hide his broken violin after Mari's death.
• Completing the Arrow Maze in the optional Orange Oasis area congratulates you with a "You did it!" poster with a smiley face on it, and an inconspicuous jump rope lying on the ground. It becomes a lot darker in light of the truth: the jump rope was used by Sunny and Basil to stage Mari's suicide, and "You did it!" becomes a lot more accusatory, as in "You killed Mari!"
• Mari only joins your party once, when everyone else has gone missing and she wants to take you to the water. If you run, she chides you because her bad knee means that she can't keep up. Doing it a second time causes her to raise her voice for the only time. It's hinted that Mari's bad knee contributed to her death, leaving her unable to cushion her fall when Sunny pushed her.

Omori

Omori's true nature as a mechanism of repressing the truth and his status as the Final Boss of the Sunny route are hinted at through various elements of the game.

• When Basil is showing the party his garden after the initial fight with Boss, he associates each type of flower with a particular person based on their personality or character qualities… except for Omori, who is associated with the white tulip for being "plain, simple and bulbous". This hints at Omori having no independent personality to speak of as a dream avatar for Sunny. Sure enough, before entering Black Space, the flower conversation is repeated, with the change that Basil now discusses how the tulip relates to Sunny instead.
• There's an unspoken rule that only bosses have 3-Stage Emotions, as your party members only have two. Omori, however, is the only playable character to have three, despite seeming to be emotionless. Sure enough, he gets his own boss battle, though ironically, he does not actually use any emotions beyond inflicting Afraid.
• After defeating Space Ex-Boyfriend and having no idea what happened, Captain Spaceboy explains to the group that his Split Personality took over before Omori and his friends defeated him. While Omori himself is not a split personality, he is capable of doing effectively the same thing at the end of either route as Sunny lets his guilt consume him and retreats fully into fantasy.
  • Space (Ex-)Boyfriend's general attitude is also worth noting: upon awakening from Captain Spaceboy's grieving and bedridden state, he declares that "feelings are for losers" despite obviously having very strong feelings about Sweetheart leaving him. This turns out to parallel how Sunny represses his own grief and guilt over Mari's death through Omori: a seemingly emotionless shell, yet also the only member of the party who can feel the extremely strong tier-3 emotions.
• Similarly, the boss battle with Humphrey involves a Genius Loci that looks cheerful on the surface, but gradually becomes more dangerous and hides horrors that you discover the further you descend. Not unlike Omori himself, who is actually the Dimension Lord of Headspace and grows increasingly twisted and hostile as Sunny inches closer to the truth.

Endings

• In Faraway Town, Basil says it's nice to see Sunny even if it's just for a little bit and gives him his prized photo album… all before he even knows Sunny is moving away. This heavily points toward Basil planning to commit suicide towards the end of the game, as people giving away their prized possessions is a sign of suicidal behavior.
• In Faraway Town, a picnic basket can be found inside Basil's house. While this could be there just so there's a save point roughly on every east-west road in Faraway Town (one at Faraway Park two blocks up, two at Sunny's house one block up (and one block to the left)), Basil's house turns out to be the site of some very critical plot developments on One Day Left; when spending the night at his house, saving before going to sleep both times is very crucial, as once you go to sleep, you will have a lengthy set of narrative sequences in the Spaces with major plot developments and very few save points.
• If spoken to in the cemetery on Two Days Left, the gravekeeper Old Beardy mentions that the spirits are restless, and suspects that "someone closeby will be joining them very soon". On One Day Left, he makes the even more ominous remark that someone will be grieving that night. Sure enough, Basil attempts to commit suicide on the same night, potentially succeeding, and Sunny can end up doing so himself regardless of whether or not Basil dies.
  • This could also refer to Basil’s grandmother passing, which happens no matter what.
• Like Omori, Basil also has 3-Stage Emotions in his playable appearance for the console version of the Hikikomori route's Boss Rush, hinting at how his real world counterpart serves as the penultimate boss of the Sunny route.
• The titles of the two non-spoiler achievements, "Good Morning" and "Oyasumi", reference the main words of the themes of the good and bad endings respectively.

Miscellaneous

• Very early on, you are given an Emotion Chart as a reminder of how the emotion system works. The chart has cute drawings of your party members as examples, with Omori as Neutral/no emotion, Kel as Happy, Aubrey as Angry, and Hero as Sad. This arrangement doesn't quite fit their in-game abilities, but is very reminiscent of how their real-world selves tried to cope with Mari's death. It also, by omission, links Basil to the Afraid status, which is also quite accurate to his situation.
• After defeating him, Kite Kid will mention that he's spotted a dark void in the sky more frequently in the past few days. This foreshadows Black Space seeping into Headspace.
• When discussing the Three Great Creatures, the Branch Coral tells you the Oldest has lived for so long he has Immortality Immorality. It's a warning about Humphrey's true nature just before you meet him.