Omori and the white room: when remembering is unbearable

Omori (Omocat, 2020) opens in a white, empty space with a notebook, a door and a cat. It is pleasant in a strange way, like a room that has been tidied too thoroughly. You leave it for a colourful world full of friends and jokes, and it takes hours before you start suspecting that the opening was not a loading screen. It was the subject of the game.

A fantasy too good to be innocent

Headspace works as a light adventure: saturated colours, humour, simple combat, friendship. The trouble is that it is too good. Nobody ages, nobody really fights, nobody is missing. There is a friend there who is always present and always the same. A world where nothing is ever lost is not a cheerful world, it is a world built so that one specific loss cannot fit inside it. The fantasy is not there to give pleasure, it is there to occupy the place of a memory.

The game makes this explicit through its alternation: whenever Sunny wakes in the real world, the setting is a nearly empty house, drained of colour, with few objects and an enormous effort required to cross the front door. The contrast between the two worlds is not aesthetic, it is functional. The more unbearable reality becomes, the more vivid the fantasy has to be.

Freud and the difference between mourning and melancholia

In 1917, in Mourning and Melancholia, Freud separated two reactions to loss that look alike from outside and are very different inside. In mourning it is the world that becomes impoverished: the person has lost something and knows what was lost, suffers, and gradually manages to withdraw investment from that object. In melancholia something else happens. The person cannot let the lost object go, and incorporates it instead.

Freud’s phrase for this movement became famous: the shadow of the object fell upon the ego. Which is to say, the loss of the object turns into a loss of the self. And the clinical consequence is the most revealing part: the accusations melancholics level at themselves, which sound wildly disproportionate to anyone listening from outside, are usually reproaches that were addressed to the lost person and ended up turned inward.

Why the character is called Omori

With that in hand, the structure of the game becomes legible. Sunny is the one who lives. Omori is the figure who inhabits the fantasy and who, at several points, acts against the player, pushing towards isolation and the worst outcome. He is not an external villain. He is the part of the psychic apparatus that formed around guilt and began operating against the subject, in exactly the position Freud describes: a critical agency turned against the ego as altered by identification.

And the game is honest about the cost. Inside Headspace nothing really hurts, but nothing moves either. Sunny spends four years without leaving the house. The defence works, and it is precisely because it works that it charges an entire life in exchange.

Remembering is not the end, it is the beginning

What the game asks for on its best path is neither heroism nor instant forgiveness. It is going through the memory. Facing what happened instead of keeping the white room tidy. And the ending offers no easy redemption: it offers the possibility of telling someone. The decisive scene is a conversation, not a battle.

That matches what Freud describes as the way out of mourning, which is slow and done in pieces. It is not about forgetting, nor about absolving oneself by decree. It is about finally managing to actually lose what was already lost, and releasing what had been frozen alongside it. Omori is heavy because it offers no shortcut. And it is good because it understands something almost no fiction about trauma understands: the problem is not the bad memory, it is the energy spent holding the door shut.