Swamp-skulking turtles, bioluminescent jellyfish, various shapes of little balls with eyes and legs and occasional tails – not a moment passes in Omno where its visual identity is not striking in a completely different way to how it was ten seconds previously. From turning your staff into a snowboard capable of ascending stone steps to gliding through the clouds towards fractured islands in the sky, Omno revolves around forward and upward momentum in an inspired world that teems with magic.
Ultimately, Omno is a game about a journey. A bit like the game, Journey, actually. There’s never really any clear end goal in sight – it is emphatically about the act of going /somewhere/, dashing your way through deserts and desolation while harnessing an ethereal light force that can only be manipulated by an arcane faction of people – are they people? Or are they dancer? – known as staffbearers. There are hints along the way that the end of your odyssey will result in a sort of higher state of being – there are constant references to a gate, although these paradoxically become more and more ambiguous the further you progress. That’s probably the most useful way of considering what playing through this game actually feels like – it is an exercise in ambiguity that simultaneously murkies the waters as it continues to make them more buoyant. The more capable you become, the less of a clue you have about what’s actually going on. Ride a flying, supposedly docile Portuguese man o’ war across the most portentous gorge in the universe? Sure, bud. I’ll trust you.
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That’s not to say it’s messy or nonsensical. Omno is gorgeous, with tight, focused design turning each and every biome into a playground you’ll never feel pressured to leave. There’s no combat – even the terrifying dragon vultures soaring through the skies above eventually allow you to hop on their back and go for a spin – and no sense of urgency outside of generous, repeatable puzzles. I occasionally started a puzzle and, after catching a flicker of light darting across an oversized stegosaurus’ paw in my peripheral vision, involuntarily found myself ripping up blades of grass on my staff-board to investigate. Omno is not a long game by any means, but it doesn’t need to be. It has that unique and unquantifiable quality that begs you to linger.
And that’s what you do, for the most part: linger. The majority of chapters are tied to distinct biomes separated into multiple levels – occasionally these are bridged by allying with some weird, enormous animal, although there are times where you propel yourself through a portal to end up somewhere radically different to where you started. Eventually, each level inevitably falls victim to a sort of harsh transience, though – it’s not that there’s nothing left to do or see, it’s that your time has come to move on. In general, most of these areas only have a select few points of interest – tomes with a single line on them, balls of light, and stone pillars serving as interconnected beacons necessary for progression. Every single level is at its best outside of these elements, though, which leads us to both the best and worst parts of Omno.
The single most impressive aspect of Omno is its absolute resistance to instruction. Everything is intuitive – you learn by feel as opposed to being forced to navigate tedious tutorials and menus. Also, it’s not just arbitrary guesswork – the world is specifically designed to make you experiment with what you already know. Turtle in the swamp? That shell’s a stepping stone that – oh no! – it’s sinking. Beams of light can be redirected to power mechanisms that would be much less compelling with unnecessary exposition, each new creature has its own distinct interaction that can only be deciphered with innovative trial and error, and puzzles – for the most part – are great big set-pieces based on retroactive backtracking that is both inventive and infuriating, but in a good way.
But then, unfortunately, you have the parts of Omno that are at odds with all of this. For a game so capable of articulating its mechanical makeup through fluid prompts and occurrences, Omno often leans way too heavily into games that came before. Of course there’s an updraft you can use to elevate yourself after you learn to glide – the thing is, Omno’s gliding is rough and ready at best, and downright incensing at worst.
Most of Omno’s ostensible layout and mechanics are brazenly borrowed from older, bigger platformers, but it’s remiss to say that this is a game with nothing new to add. As I mentioned above, Omno’s willingness to let you figure things out by feel is fantastic both in terms of implementation and execution. But thanks to persnickety platforming based on progressively more gratuitous gimmicks, the game often loses momentum not because it’s bad or uninventive, but because it actively ignores its own inventiveness in what appears to be an attempt at legitimacy. This is a game made by one person that is extremely ambitious in almost every way, so it’s easy to understand why certain parts of Omno were either pared back or pigeonholed in. Really, though, the best parts of Omno are the things it does of its own accord.
Omno is still excellent, mind. Given that it’s on Game Pass, I’d feel comfortable recommending it to almost anyone. It has spectacular art direction, appropriate music, and a whole host of fascinating ideas. Its most singular quality, though, is the one buried beneath all of the borrowing: intuitive exploration that resists handholding without artificially ramping up difficulty. It’s almost as if a kind of cryptography has been applied to all of the creatures, puzzles, and environments, except instead of being protected by hundreds of lines of code they are designed with a failsafe that is human intuition. It would be easy for someone to say that Omno does nothing new, but the reason it’s easy to say that is because it’s completely incorrect. Omno has plenty of imaginative and ingenious ideas – they’re just unfortunately hampered by more established ones that didn’t need to be there.
Score: 4/5. An Xbox Series X code was provided by the publisher.
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