Intermittent Mechanism

Ian here—

Upon first playing it several years back, it struck me that OMORI, while having rather spectacular high points, it didn’t quite cohere and stick the landing as much as Rakuen, with which it shares many similarities (and which I dearly love). It took me awhile, but with this eleventh video in my Shape Up! series, I break down why. (And define an entire genre along the way, with plenty of graphs.)

Script below the jump.

Okay, first up: If you’re spoiler-averse, you might wanna skip this video. While I don’t think I spoil anything too egregious in my two main case studies, I will be discussing the structure of plot reveals within them, as well as and numerous other side examples. If you like to go into things completely cold, and be surprised by narrative developments, this video is not for you. Cheers—I’ll catch you on the next one.

Alright. All clear?

Dream logic: It’s everywhere in games. I can name off the top of my head several games structured as a series of dreams, experienced by your player-character after they drift off to sleep. And that’s just your most straightforward variety. You also have games that simulate a bad trip. Or place you inside the paranoid fantasies of an unsettled mind. Stories of writers who have fallen into a warped version of their own creations. You have your hallucinatory landscapes emerging from attempts to recover memories, and also your hallucinatory landscapes emerging from attempts to erase memories. And don’t forget your hallucinatory landscapes emerging from attempts to manufacture memories! Then there’s the memories and fantasies of the dead, resurrected through technology, or grief, or good-old fashioned hauntings. I’ve played multiple games about working your way through the hallucinations and recovered memories of someone who sustained a brain injury in a car accident. Then of course we have that old horror game chestnut: trips through a character’s personal psychological hell, in which memory, fantasy, and conscience freely intermingle.

Why is “it was all a dream” such a popular framing narrative for games? You could venture a historical explanation. Success breeds imitation. Silent Hill 2 featured a protagonist exploring a haunted town that doubled as a metaphoric manifestation of his own guilty conscience. And it was a big hit, so subsequent developers borrowed its approach of transforming memories and emotions into level design and monsters. Yume Nikki gained cult popularity for its surreal exploration-based gameplay, and enough aspiring developers played it that it inspired an entire generation of indie games.

But influence aside, hallucinatory stories are also attractive from a workflow perspective. Your project lead can say, “Okay: this game is a child’s nightmare about their alcoholic parent. The writer’s still working out how all of this will play out in the dialogue, but for now, work with that.” And if you’re a level designer, you can say: “I’m going to go with bottles. We’ll have bottles strewn about this level, and you can interact with the bottles, and, uh … we’ll have stealth encounters around the bottles! If you knock them over the sound attracts a monster to your location.” And the writer’s over there doing their thing, but you don’t have to worry about that too much, because you have a job. Your job is bottles.

This also works if you’re a solo operation. Figuring out all the assets you need for a game is a huge deal. But if you know your game is about a dream someone’s having while in a coma after a car crash, then that gives you a starting place. Focus on cars. Make or license 3D models of cars.

The overall effect is to turn what would be a weakness into a strength. In a different context, re-using an asset over and over again across levels is cost-effective, but comes across as cheap and lazy. But now, you don’t just have a 3D asset you’re re-using again and again. You have a symbol, and that symbol’s recurrence in different contexts is thematically significant. It is meaningful that we return to these objects. These objects tell a story, in some sort of piecemeal and sketched-out way.

And let’s be honest: the incoherence is a selling-point here as well, in terms of workflow. You can add levels and cut levels as your budget and schedule allow, without worrying about the narrative (or geographical) connections between them. Who needs story logic when you have dream logic!

But let me ask you a question: When’s the last time you saw a movie, or read a book, and the twist reveal was that it was “it was all a dream”? Probably not too recently. In other media, that twist is considered hackneyed. The sign of a writer who likes symbols but doesn’t have the skill to properly fit them within the surrounding diegetic tissue. Or the last refuge of someone who’s written themselves into a corner.

There is, however, one significant exception where it’s more allowable: the Allegorical Fantasy Tandem Narrative.

What is an allegorical fantasy tandem narrative, you ask? As a beginner example, let’s take The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. Our protagonist, Bart, hates his disciplinarian piano teacher Dr. Terwilliker, and hates how much his single mother seems to take his side. He falls asleep and has a dream of Dr. T as a fantastical authoritarian, who locks his mother up. But with the help of the heroic Mr. Zabladowski, the analog to a real-world plumber working at his house, he destroys Dr. T’s project and frees his subjects. At the end of the movie, he awakens, and we’re supposed to understand his dream as an episode of moral growth. From now on, he’ll be more likely to stand up for himself. Also, it’s good that he grew fonder of the plumber in the dream, because his mother seems to have eyes for him. Yes, in the end it was all a dream—but the dream wasn’t meaningless synaptic firings. The dream helped this protagonist make sense of his world and proceed down a path of moral development.

Very simple, obviously—it’s a children’s film. As a point of contrast, consider Heavenly Creatures. In that film, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme write fantasy stories together, and as they fall more and more in love with one another, the film depicts them as spending more and more time in a shared fantasy world. Through the course of their shared fantasy, Pauline and Juliet go through their own moral journey, just like Bart—but it’s an antisocial moral journey, in which they pull away from the real world, and ultimately murder Pauline’s mother.

Both these films are allegorical fantasy tandem narratives. But they’re at opposite ends of a spectrum: fantasy as healthy working-through, versus fantasy as escapism trending into paranoia and psychosis.

And we can add an additional dimension to this spectrum. In both 5000 Fingers and Heavenly Creatures, it’s clear that the fantasy world is only emotionally real, not actuallyextant.

But other stories suggest to a greater degree that the fantasy elements are a parallel world that exists independently of the protagonists’ minds. Pan’s Labyrinth. Or A Matter of Life and Death. Here, allegorical fantasy tandem narrative shades into the neighboring genres of magical realism, or what Tzvetan Todorov described as literature of the fantastic.

But despite its proximity to these other genres, I contend that allegorical fantasy tandem narrative remains a distinct thing, recognizable once you see the pattern. I’ve detailed some examples, I’m throwing some others up on the screen, and you can probably think of even more. The key elements are a “real” world and a “fantasy” world running in parallel, with the fantasy world serving as an allegory sometimes for the protagonists’ healthy working-through of emotions, other times for their descent into reality-denying escapism or outright hallucination. (And sometimes something in between those poles.)

So let’s get some games up on this board! First up, OMORI.

You begin OMORI in a blank white void, devoid of most detail except a sketchbook full of macabre drawings, before going through a door and emerging into a children’s playroom. Cloyingly childlike music greets you, as do your friends Aubrey, Kel, and Hero. They’re rendered in purples and blues, in keeping with the soft pastel color palette of this world, but your silent protagonist—the titular OMORI—retains the monochrome color palette of the white space you just emerged from. You subsequently meet your sister Mari (perpetually seated by a picnic basket) and friend Basil, who, after showing you some photos, invites you over to his house. But after seeing a strange photo fall out of his album and muttering something about Mari, Basil is engulfed by a black shape and vanishes.

At which point your character awakens in a dark house, eats a late-night dinner, and goes to bed again. You move through the white space again, and into the pastel world. There, you begin the main quest of the game: to find Basil, after his mysterious disappearance. This quest proceeds in phases, marked by you overcoming various fears. First, you must overcome your fear of heights, so that you can ascend a ladder into space, to a moon-like location. Here you fight a boss called Captain Spaceboy, slapping him out of his catatonic state after his break-up with someone named Sweetheart. (This is as good a time as any to mention that the game’s combat system revolves around emotion-based buffs and debuffs with a rock-paper-scissors relationship to each other.)

Captain Spaceboy comes to his senses, and you catch glimpse of a ghost-like apparition of Basil, who leads you to a series of tableaus, and finally to an abandoned barn, at which point you wake up in that house again, this time in the bright sunlight.

Kel knocks on your door—he’s real, and he’s your friend, but you’re both teenagers now, not children. Oh, and your name is Sunny, not Omori. (Omori is the manufacturer of the piano you have in your house. Extra-textuallly, it’s also an abbreviation of the Japanese word hikikomori, referring to someone suffering from isolation and social withdrawal.) Kel leads you on a series of errands around your hometown of Faraway, which is infested with random encounter monsters—except, when you approach them, they fade away, as if you’re slowly shaking yourself out of your imagination and separating your reality from fantasy.

And also recognizing that there was an original reality underlying the fantasy. The big yellow cat overlooking your playroom was a memory of a cat-shaped playground feature. Many side characters in the pastel world have real-life analogs in town. The busker’s even playing the same song. And those details of the pastel world that weren’t drawn from your real hometown were drawn your media consumption. Captain Spaceboy is a videogame character; Sweetheart is a cartoon character. What we have here is a classic case of childhood regression.

Sunny and Kel rescue Basil from Aubrey, who has fallen in with a different, rougher crowd over the intervening years. And during the subsequent fight, Sunny attacks Aubrey with the same default weapon you’ve been using in combat the last several hours—a knife. And Aubrey recoils, pointing out just how dangerous and psychopathic it is to bring a steak knife to a brawl between teenagers in the park.

At this moment, OMORI completely enraptured me. What better way to illustrate a dangerous regression into fantasy than to habituate us to an RPG battle system, then transpose that system into the real world, and point out how fucked-up it is? Soon after this, we get an indication of just why Sunny might be escaping into fantasy: Mari, his sister, is dead. We don’t yet get any concrete details on how this happened. Basil mentions that it happened four years ago, it seems to have hit him and Sunny especially hard—he references a darkness following both of them, which we can see in the mirror.

Sunny heads back to his house, and goes back to bed, bringing us back into the pastel world—which at this point I’ll acknowledge is officially known as “Headspace.” What adventures await us now, now that OMORI has carefully set up these questions about what happened to Mari? Well, we get over our fear of spiders, which allows us to explore a castle full of sprout moles, where the monstrous Sweetheart holds a Bachelorette-style game show, imprisoning Hero when he rejects her affections. So we have to find our way out a dungeon, and traipse around in sprout mole disguises, and bake a cake, and figure out a donut-based password, and … I’m sorry, what? What does this have to do with anything?

We now know that this world is a fantasy concocted by Sunny as a way of emotionally escaping the reality of his sister’s death. That’s interesting. But the contents of this fantasy don’t transitively become interesting because of this. In order to be interesting, we need to see the contours of the reality Sunny is trying to escape. If we don’t see those contours—if Sunny’s escapist fantasy succeeds—then it becomes generic and dull, and it feels like the game is wasting our time.

Now, to be fair, there are a few isolated moments in this portion of the game where you can feel reality poking through the fantasy. Mari has a line about “always being there to help” that feels very pointed and purposeful, knowing what we do now. And it is possible during this section to have two conversations with two characters who both acknowledge that the world we’re inhabiting is a dream, born from an attempt to deny the dreamer’s inner darkness. But one of these characters is out in a remote area that’s optional to visit, and the other resides on what is genuinely one of the the hardest-to-get-to screens of the entire game, hidden behind multiple puzzles and mazes. These moments—though appreciated—are not representative. Mostly this section is just Sweetheart and her game show—and it stopped the game dead for me.

I’m going to show you something now. This bar represents a timeline of my roughly 23-hour playtime of OMORI. The green represents playtime spent in the real world with Sunny’s real friends. The purple represents playtime in the Headspace fantasy environment. The areas that remain gray represent time spent in White Space or Black Space, which are also mental landscapes, but distinct ones where Sunny can actually confront his demons.

Now I’m going to show you a bar representing the runtime of Heavenly Creatures. Most obvious thing first: it’s much shorter. We’re comparing a 109-minute film to a 23-hour game. But if we were to adjust the scale, you can see that the overall portion of Heavenly Creatures’s runtime spent on actually depicting Pauline and Juliet’s fantasy world is much, much smaller than the portion of OMORI’s playtime spent exploring the Headspace.

And you might say: Aha! The segments of Heavenly Creatures set in the character’s shared delusions are effects-heavy. Special effects in cinema are expensive, and Heavenly Creatures didn’t have a huge budget, so it makes sense to reduce these sequences to a minimum. Fair enough. It doesn’t cost any more money to create a fantasy world in RPG Maker that it does a realistic one—maybe another reason why dreamscapes are so popular in games.

But while that’s part of it, I don’t think it’s all of it. Heavenly Creatures’ budgetary considerations go hand-in-hand with good storytelling technique. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh knew when they were writing their screenplay that narrative momentum would have utterly collapsed if we spent extended portions of the film in Pauline and Juliet’s inner world. Those scenes have no stakes, definitionally, because they are pure psychological escapism. What does have stakes is Pauline and Juliet’s mounting hatred for everyone they see as an obstacle to them spending all of their time in their imaginations together. The fantasy world is a device—the real world is where all the drama is. And that’s represented in the proportions we see.

OMORI has the same basic dramatic emphasis, but with drastically different proportions. This segment in the real world is dramatically successful. We’re introduced to Sunny, as distinct from Omori, and the game raises the storytelling stakes. We have new questions: What happened to Mari, and how were Sunny and Basil involved? Is Sunny a danger to himself and his friends? Then we return to headspace for the Sweetheart segment, and those stakes just evaporate. Nothing of dramatic import happens for several hours, because we’re stuck in the head of a character who’s in denial.

I’m happy to say that OMORI does recover. The game finds its footing again in the next real-world sequence. And then when we return to Headspace again, the fantasy evolves in exactly the ways it should be evolving. Mari remembers she’s supposed to be dead, and disappears—only to be replaced with a new Mari, creepily chipper, with no memory that the previous one departed. Your friends have abandoned their nominal quest of saving Basil, distracted by bullshit. Even when they pull themselves together, they realize they can’t remember Basil’s face, and eventually forget his name, and that he ever existed in the first place. This is good—this is how you give an escapist fantasy sequence some stakes, by hinting at the mind at war with itself underneath.

Which makes the Sweetheart segment even more unforgivable in hindsight. Why does it exist? What work does it do, beyond stopping the narrative momentum dead? I’d love to be able to call OMORI a great game. But the pacing is so bad it almost single-handedly turns me against the game’s whole allegorical fantasy structure. And the frustrating thing is that the pacing could have been completely solved just by excising this portion of the game, and having the fantasy fall apart sooner after our first extended foray into the real world. But I guess the creators were attached to it. Just a textbook example of “kill your darlings.” Kill your … Sweethearts, I guess.

So I’ve just shat on a game that I know a lot of people love. It gives me no pleasure to do so, and for all I know some of you are sharpening up your steak knives to come after me. But there’s a lesson to take away: if you’re telling an allegorical fantasy tandem narrative, don’t have a reveal that obliterates the stakes of the fantasy too early on. Find a way to keep the machine going. Let’s swap out our graph of Heavenly Creatures with one of the 2006 movie The Fall. Look at it! It’s not an exact match of OMORI’s proportions, but it similarly alternates between lengthy real world and fantasy segments. How does it do it?

Well, for roughly the first half of The Fall, the fantasy doesn’t seem like an allegory for anything. It’s just a story that a hospitalized man tells a little girl to trick her into stealing morphine for him. The story is entertaining in its own right—as it ought to be, since it’s being used as enticement. Since its stakes are initially entirely internal, the story remains coherent and enrapturing even as we continually check back in on the real world. It’s only in the movie’s second half that we start recognizing the lurking autobiographical details, and only at the film’s climax that the story becomes a psychological battleground between the man’s desperate nihilism and the girl’s naïve but tenacious compassion.

And games are perfectly capable of this balancing act of stakes. Case in point: Rakuen.

In Rakuen you play as a young boy who, like the girl in The Fall, is in the middle of extensive hospital stay. You begin by exploring the hospital, getting to know your neighbors in the other rooms, and eventually sneaking into areas of the hospital that are boarded up and off-limits. At first this seems sort of spooky and gothic, but it has a historical explanation: the game takes place in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami and subsequent Fukushima nuclear accident. The boy’s father died in that accident, and parts of the hospital have been closed off due to earthquake and flood damage. None of the characters you meet are hospitalized for reasons directly related to the disaster—the Boy himself was already in chemo treatment for cancer when the disaster occurred—but the personal stories you encounter all occur within the context of that larger national tragedy.

So here we are, in the midst of this grounded story about pediatric oncology set in the wake of a real-life disaster, when suddenly the Boy’s mom announces that the storybook she’s reading him about a fantasy realm called Morizora’s Forest can actually conjure portals to that realm. And then you’re off, searching out secret doors in the hospital leading to Morizora’s Forest, on a quest to get a wish granted by the Guardian of the Forest. And from here on in, the game segues back and forth between sections set in the hospital and sections set in the fantasy realm.

Now, OMORI makes it clear that everything that happens in Headspace is an escapist fantasy. In Rakuen, things aren’t so clear cut. Much like, with, say, Pan’s Labyrinth, you could choose to believe that Rakuen’s fantasy world is “real.” Patients in the hospital have fantasy-creature counterparts in Morizora’s Forest, and when the Boy repairs relationships in the Forest we see subsequent effects in the patients’ lives. That’s one point in favor of Morizora’s Forest being a genuine parallel reality that exists independently of our protagonist’s imagination, and can even causally affect the mundane world.

But you could also just write this off as the boy’s mom telling him stories and encouraging fantastical thinking to boost his optimism during chemo. Maybe when he’s solving problems for fantasy creatures, he’s actually just talking to his neighbors, while playing pretend. A portion late in the game where you take control of the boy’s mom supports this particular interpretation, strongly suggesting that this is a heroic act on her part, giving her son courage and resilience in the face of uncertain treatment and possible death. Or, perhaps giving herself some solace during an unimaginably bleak time in her own life.

Rakuen does have a sequel, Mr. Saitou, that follows another character who becomes aware of Morizora’s Forest, during a stay at the same hospital. So that seems to tip the scales in favor of Morizora’s Forest being “real” in some way independent of this one boy’s imagination. But if we limit our text to just Rakuen, things are much more ambiguous, and the idea that Morizora’s Forest is just a fantasy to help a boy find the strength to get through chemo is a valid and coherent reading.

Gonna leave it at that—don’t want to get bogged down in a lore debate. Let’s talk pacing and large-scale segmentation. Here is Rakuen’s runtime. (This was an eight-hour playthrough for me.) Green is the hospital, purple is Morizora’s Forest. And the gray bits here are the extended puzzle-solving sections of the game where the Boy explores characters’ memories and repairs relationships with their loved ones. These don’t fit neatly into either realm, because the game uses the “shared souls” conceit to simultaneously tell the backstories of a fantasy creature and their corresponding hospital patient.

 We don’t spend a majority of either game in the baseline “real” world—the lion’s share of both is fantasy and/or memory.

But although the proportions are similar, Rakuen has stakes that remain unified across its reality and fantasy portions. The boy wants to awaken the forest guardian to get a wish granted; to do that he needs to learn a song. To do that he needs to help people, meaning both the Morizora’s Forest fantasy creatures and their hospital patient counterparts. Each time you return to the hospital you unlock some gate or find some key item allowing you to access a new area of Morizora’s Forest, where you can enter a memory and help someone. Then, back to the hospital, where the patients’ stories resolve, and you unlock a new gate, rinse and repeat.

It may be the case that Morizora’s Forest is an escapist fantasy. This boy might literally not get his wish granted. The possibility that this is all make-believe is one we can ponder, as players. But as we ponder it, puzzles and problems and motivations remain smoothly distributed across both realms, which keeps the story moving, without that vast disconnect that opens up in something like the Sweetheart segment of OMORI. The ambiguous nature of the fantasy in Rakuen actually gives it a big advantage here.

And now it’s time to acknowledge something I hadn’t before: there’s an alternate route players can take through OMORI, known as the hikikomori route. Triggering it is simple: when Kel knocks on your door in the real world, you just don’t answer, and spend the time you would be advancing the plot with your friends doing chores instead. Players are most likely going to be curious about real-world Kel, and opening the door is the default option, so I can’t imagine that many players stumble on the hikikomori route on their first playthrough. The route also locks you out of the best ending, relegating you to only neutral or bad endings, so I can’t say I recommend it unreservedly. But, all of that said: I actually think the hikikomori route is a better-paced experience. When it’s not placed directly after major revelations, the Sweetheart segment feels like a kooky little frolic rather than a momentum-murdering distraction. And overall the Headspace sections benefit from a greater sense of ambiguity about what’s going on. Revelatory countercurrents seep into the fantasy only gradually, giving players an opportunity to unravel the mystery at their own pace, with the most significant detective-work being optional and entirely motivated by players’ own persevering sense of curiosity. The hikikomori route’s story is worse, in that it lacks the default route’s big cathartic emotional highs, but I think it tells its story better, if that makes sense.

So those are some pointers for pacing and stakes for future allegorical fantasy tandem narrative games. And mark my word: there will be more games like these! As we’ve already established, dream logic is ubiquitous in games. And so is allegory, when you get down to it. I mentioned Silent Hill 2 as an especially notable historical example of using environmental and enemy design as a metaphor for character interiority, but you could also point to Psychonauts. Even something like Braid uses its main levels allegorically, mechanically hinting at story details that are more explicitly laid out in text. As Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell have pointed out, narrative contradiction, non-Euclidean spaces, and impossible temporalities are frequent features of videogames, and it’s actually kind of easy to see why.[i] Metalepsis is a near-universal feature of games, simply by virtue of real-world players controlling a fictional character like a puppet. This preps players for the possibility that characters might move between storyworlds within storyworlds within storyworlds. Gamers are used to multilinear narratives with mutually-incompatible story events because we’re constantly re-loading saves after we fail. From here, you get games with elaborate branching narratives, where playing through different routes is necessary to fully understand the events or psychology of a character. Most of the examples of allegorical fantasy tandem narratives I gave at the top of this video were movies, but games do this thing better thanmovies. They’re basically built for this type of storytelling.

And that’s why I’m okay being a bit critical of OMORI. I don’t think it quite reaches greatness—but I do love how it uses the medium. And I’m enormously excited for what comes after it.

[i] Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell, Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2021