Omno (Xbox One)
When you are first placed in the world of Omno, you are given very little idea of what your purpose is. You are a humanoid character with a glowing staff and set forward to find the answers on what you are doing and where are you going, and that ends up being the crux of most of this adventure. While Omno is a platforming adventure with puzzle elements, there are no battles to be fought or really much punishment for failure. Instead, discovery is the focus, and that process is given the room it needs to be a fascinating driving force on top of the game knowing to evolve its mechanics some so you can strengthen your ability to explore.
Omno does have a story that lays down its roots after a bit of that early exploring to make sure you’re not wandering around in the metaphorical dark for too long. Your unnamed character is undergoing a pilgrimage that many like them have gone on before, the world littered with the ruins left by those who traveled this same road. While a good degree of meaningful imagery is found just by looking at what was left behind by previous bearers of the light, there are some records left by an individual who went on this pilgrimage before you. While at first the details they leave are practical so you have the baseline context for your journey, soon the writer becomes more contemplative as they reflect on the motivation behind their pilgrimage and share their thoughts on the value of both the journey and the destination as they evolve through their own experience. The player is given due time to consider the musings of their forebear and how they feel about their own adventure, and while the story reaches a predetermined conclusion, it is one that makes you wonder how it will unfold based on this deeper level of thought layered over it as you venture closer and closer towards its end.
While the written words are certainly the most concrete form of story-telling presented in Omno, your experience in the world definitely feels just as important in shaping how you perceive its underlying messages about the purpose of this pilgrimage. Omno’s world is presented in a simple style with flat colors and objects are often formed from basic geometric shapes with few extra details applied to their surface. However, through lighting, color choice, and a sense of space, Omno’s areas become beautiful locations to explore, even if it might lead with the fairly weak swamp to start. Once you are out in the vast desert moving around bones of unknown creatures, flying between mountaintops that barely poke through the clouds, or heading out across an icy lake, the game’s environments show they can be gorgeous despite the simplicity of their individual parts.
A great contributing factor to the appeal of these locations is the wildlife that inhabits it, new areas having unique species to discover that pose you no threat but can have interesting interactions. Motes of light fills the world at many points and can be collected so there is a tiny reward for interacting in creatures in that most shed a little light when doing so, but the variety in their design and behavior is the greater treat. Some are close to real life animals and vegetation like moving cacti, large turtles, or the airborne jellyfish, but they fit well alongside the sometimes ethereal and alien creatures you encounter due to their somewhat askew adjustments. When you enter a new area and find some new plant, you don’t know if it might spring to life and run away on legs or propel a mushroom cap up into the air like a kite. Animals might be timid when spotting you or even happily run alongside you as brief companions in your journey. Some tower over you like gentle giants, others can even ferry on their back between areas as moving music kicks in to help accentuate the beautiful scenery you pass by as you go. A floating green creature in particular takes a liking to your staff bearer, the two having more involved interactions as the adventure moves along to give you something personal to invest in beyond the more philosophical elements of this pilgrimage.
Uncovering the new details and wildlife of a location is already an interesting motivator that isn’t too demanding, but Omno makes sure you don’t move on without having your fill of the current area. A percentage marker for area completion can be pulled up by raising your staff that also gives small clues to where meaningful content can be found, although it doesn’t trivialize it all as you still need to poke around to locate some of the area’s unique findings. Instead the main focus of this radar is to help you find special spheres of light that are used to open the way forward. Every light orb is placed behind some sort of challenge, and when things begin, these are fairly simple. Every area has one involving those motes of light you can collect to point you in the direction of learning about the unique wildlife and testing their special interactions, the game giving a name and brief descriptor even to the most insignificant of them. Most light orbs are rewards for puzzle-solving or good platforming though, and your early skill set is intentionally rather limited. As you press into new areas you’ll acquire new skills such as surfing on your staff, a vital way of making huge areas like the icy lake and barren desert easier to traverse to find the spots of interest. Being able to achieve that sense of size without bogging down the exploration is one reason the game’s environments feel like more than places to find puzzles and jumping challenges in though, and other skills continue to increase your maneuverability with things like a midair dash so the game can make better trials to overcome while feeding into your ability to traverse these spaces that value the feeling behind the experience as much as the action.
Omno’s puzzles never really drift into complex territory but can still require a good bit of thought to overcome. Sometimes it will simply involve figuring out the proper positioning for your jumps to actually reach an area, this sometimes involving ideas like moving blocks around to jump onto but it starts to evolve into more involved concepts like moving limited sources of energy between activation points to power mechanisms. Reflex challenges start to get into the mix later down the line as you chain together windows of opportunity either in how your enhanced movement works or how the objects you interact with function, but again this won’t ever enter outright demanding territory so the meditative journey doesn’t strain itself trying to get any blood-pumping action in the mix. A good amount of spheres can be gradually worked towards just by exploring how your abilities can open up the environment even deep into the game, and while the teleport points that enter the picture require a quick button press to reach at times, missing it often leads to a fairly quick opportunity to retry. Some light will leak out of your character when you fall too far, but it’s often easy to immediately grab it and you can always go interact with the environment more to refill if you truly needed it anyway. While Omno is willing to ask for some reflexive action at points, it isn’t going to obstruct its focus on exploration to achieve it, allowing it to instead be a more involved moment of platforming and puzzle solving to ensure Omno can retain the attention of less meditative players on top of those intrigued by its developing central themes of purpose and fulfillment.
THE VERDICT: Omno builds beauty from simplicity, the details it does focus on allowing it to build lovely environments that feel like they have history and life to them despite the art style. The pilgrimage at its center is a wonderful reflection on the purpose of personal journeys with possible deeper metaphorical underpinnings to ruminate on, but Omno gives you more than just a philosophical story to engage with. The puzzles and platforms put your slowly growing set of skills to the test without feeling too basic or too advanced, their completion requiring thought and some occasional quick action but generally adding an interesting gameplay element alongside the simple joys of discovering new species and new locations.
And so, I give Omno for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. While the start in the swamp is maybe a bit too simple that it could scare off people dipping their toes into the game, once you start to understand the basics of your journey and get to new environments with more compelling designs and proper platforming puzzles, Omno becomes a charming adventure with refreshing reflections on the nature of such a journey. The writings of your forebear are an important part in giving that game its philosophical core and some of the directions the writer’s emotions head are actually similar to those the game tries to instill in the player before they ever read the relevant passages. The world of Omno isn’t a gigantic universe filled to bursting with things to discover, but the exploration is still rewarding as each piece of it is crafted with creativity and an attention to how everything hangs together as an environmental space. These aren’t just hubs for jumping around and interacting with light-based mechanisms, they have life and spaces with things you can only look at and wonder how it fit into the pilgrimages of those who came before, and if they felt the same things you do now as you discover how lovely the world you’re in is. There are some graphical glitches at rare moments, mostly just black squares appearing on the edges of the screen as you rotate your view and even a black bar appeared over some unimportant space in the final cutscene for me, but they are brief and unobtrusive for the most part and don’t damage the moments that emotional music and compelling environments can work hand in hand to inspire beauty even when it can’t lean heavily into detailed graphics to execute such a thing. The color choices, lighting, and spacing mix together with the inhabitants of the land to make your pilgrimage an emotional one, and while a game with more resources to focus deeper on such things could surpass Omno, Omno manages to extract a great deal from what it has to focus on the idea of a meditative journey without compromising moments of more involved play to achieve that.
One interesting aspect of this poignant adventure though is its nature as a solo project, Jonas Manke developing almost every aspect of the game besides things like the musical score. A vision certainly comes through because of it and few compromises feel taken in bringing this journey to life. While the start in the swamp is a bit weak it’s also a deliberate low point to start from narratively, so it’s hard to even push too hard against some of the choices Manke made with the game. Perhaps more detail could have ruined the appeal of simple discovery or your ability to form opinions on the meaning of this pilgrimage, so again one must wonder if Omno really did come out in about the best shape it could have. Rather than trying to find the little moments that feel weak like a specific jumping challenge that was a bit rough, it feels better to commend Omno for executing on its more interpretative elements and reflective moments while finding ways to keep the play involved in progressing entertaining but not distracting. It’s remarkable that one person alone could achieve such a solid balance, but Omno does feel like it is focusing on the full experience over just going for a story or action adventure, as meeting the wildlife and exploring new environments all contributes to how you gel with the message at Omno’s heart.