TW: Suicide, mental illness, murder, death of loved ones

Mental health has been a massively growing problem in today’s society, specifically with youth. As isolation from Covid has worn off and the demands of school are higher than ever before, stress has built up in our population. To counteract this, we, as a society, need mediums to convey messages about mental health, along with coping mechanisms and other aspects of it. As one specific medium, video games have become a popular topic for discussion, and I believe that they have the potential to be the most effective method available, which is specifically shown in OMORI.

There are multiple games that convey messages of mental health, such as Celeste with its themes of depression, Spiritfarer with its themes of grief, and OMORI, with how it perfectly shows the full potential of mental health representation in video games. I played Omori in 2022, and one way I’ve heard it described sums it up perfectly. “The game with a perfect portrayal of trauma.” You play as Sunny, a 15 year old boy who isolated himself for the last three years (and in japanese, a self-isolator is known as a hikikomori), ever since he and his friends Kel, Aubrey, and Basil were 12. The game begins with you three days before you move to a new town, so you finally leave your house to give a final goodbye to your friends, and as the story progresses it ultimately culminates in the discovery that you’ve been locking away the memory and guilt over the accidental killing of your sister, Mari, three years ago. Before your discovery of the truth, however, the real perfect portrayal is how a figure named “something” haunts you, and you have that looming feeling of guilt and despair, but without accepting it, the problem is just there, with no reasoning behind it, which often feels worse than dealing with it in the first place.

OMORI takes complete advantage of the interactive media of a videogame with how it handles its endings, having three main endings depending on how you played the game and coped with the trauma. The first of the three endings, and the objectively worst ending, is the Hikikomori route. You enter this playthrough if you never open the door for your friends on the three days of the game, and it ends with the suicide of both you and your friend Basil committing suicide before the game ends, on a completely unsatifsying note. The “bad” ending, which is the second worst, ends after you go outside every day of the playthrough, but choose to hide from real confrontation with your friends, even after you come to terms with your actions. It ends with the suicide of only yourself. The final ending, and the one meant to promote a good coping mechanism, is the “good” ending, which ends with Sunny and Basil in the hospital after having a fight, and Sunny coming to terms with his mistake, and then admitting it to his friends.

Interactive media is already very competent with its communication of messages, considering how involved it makes the player in the story, but OMORI takes it a step further. In the dream world and real life, it lets you choose how you cope with the trauma and guilt of the major accident of the story, and in the different endings you can see how these all affect the player’s mental health and stability in positive or negative ways. If you take the “Hikikomori” route, you end up bottling up all the emotions you have without ever reaching a conclusion with your friends. Similarly, if you reach the bad ending by deciding to hide the truth in the main route of the game, it shows that trauma welling up inside of you with no way to drain only builds up a similar self-hatred, and it ends up leading to suicide. Finally, only in the good ending, in which you confess your actions to your friends, do you truly learn to come to terms with yourself. Being able to see the cause and effect of each action you take as the player character makes you much more aware of what in specific makes a healthy and unhealthy coping mechanism, which is amazing for communication to the player. One of the best parts of the good ending in terms of player-communication is that after you confess your actions to your friends, it doesn’t show their reactions. This may seem like a random fact on the surface, but it shows the player that the viewing of the reactions of Mari’s friends isn’t the important part, but instead the fact that you were able to finally get it out and come to terms with the past.

The coping mechanisms and examples of what can happen if you badly cope with trauma and other mental illnesses in OMORI serves as a warning to those in real life who push away others and bottle their guilt up within them. People who are suffering from real life trauma and guilt such as that in OMORI, be it more or less extreme, can take these lessons from how Sunny succeeds and fails to cope in the game, and apply it to their own life. It also helps those who know people affected by trauma to be more understanding and care for them, with a greater knowledge base of how badly it can mess somebody up in the head. Overall, OMORI has a perfect portrayal of trauma, and perfectly shows how to cope with it.