Playing bad games in some way is a fascinating experience. Discovering that the game is actually 'that bad' is surprisingly captivating, you genuinely get interested if will it get any worse and analyzing all the fault step-by-step is the most fun part about the experience.

My first experience with Omikron was 5-6 years ago, back when I was hyperfixated on David Bowie's music. At some point I discovered that he had a cameo in Omikron and even wrote soundtrack for it, not to mention Omikron was one of the two Quantic Dream games that were available on pc at that time and I was kinda interested in those after watching Detroit playthrough. Eventually I dropped the game somewhere around the part where you had to mix coffee and sleeping pills, cause the game was extremely confusing and I thought I was too stupid for this.

Well, enough time has passed to give this game another try and it sucked. Genuinely did. Irredeemable piece of garbage and it's what makes it so interesting.

This game has zero self-awareness and it's astonishing! The Nomad Soul is trying to be so many different things at once: open world, point and click, first person shooter, fighting game, rpg... — All of those fucking suck on fundamental level to the point it's utterly baffling! As if making one bad game wasn't enough, there are at least three bad games in one package!

I won't delve into analyzing those aspects, this other review already does that, but i'll say that point-and-click is absolutely disastrous, puzzles are so unintuitive they can be straight up unsolvable without a guide, because David fucking Cage is misunderstood genius and we can't comprehend his methods of problem solving.

The worst part of this game is the narrative. Because, unlike the gameplay, I had moderately high expectations about it, cause a lot of people were gassing it, but idk what they were smoking.

Plot starts with basic 4th wall break, where "the player" transfers his soul into this cyberpunk world, that is written in such a childish way with "thought controllers" and brave "The Awakened" opposition. If you thought "Detroit: Become Human" was blatant with its themes, then Omikron is 10x times even worse. But anyway, at first plot is kinda interesting, you delve into the body of Kay'l, he has a job in police department, a wife and a pet, yada yada. You really feel like an outsider in this weird futuristic world, you have lots of mysteries to uncover and other crap, but all the interesting ideas from first act go absolutely nowhere, because of atrocious plot twist with FUCKING. DEVILS.

That's right! I don't know in what world Omikron is "cyberpunk classic", because it is the most boring, generic, incompetent and corny fantasy story in disguise! Forget about curious detective line, you are the prophesied hero THE NOMAD SOUL that will bring down BBEG Astaroth with Magic Sword Barkaya'l with thousand sorcerers' souls inside of it and that chance can happen only once in 999 000 years!

Sweet Jesus, you see how pompous that garbage is? All of its "profound" ideas never get explored, like "your soul is trapped in videogame that is a portal to parallel universe" never goes past beyond laughable 4th wall breaks, the fact that you literally steal bodies of different people and kill them in process never gets adressed in serious matter, all the abysmal dystopian cyberpunk/sci-fi stuff just sit there as decorations, characters just serve as boring one-note infodumpers, etc.

The "lore" might be actually interesting, but the game did all the best to make it as unappealing as possible with lame infodumping that is supposed to be worldbuilding and I couldn't bring myself to read books with weird names. Honestly the whole setting is weird and exotic only for the sake of it. Lots of the parts were stolen from eastern cultures and twisted in the most stupid manner, while aesthetically technology/outfits/architecture don't make any cohesive sense and just looks dumb. Especially UI and 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂 fonts, that are straight up incomprehensible. Presentation is very poor in general and aged terribly. Toxic oversaturated colors rarely look nice, character designs are dull, environments are painfully empty for its size and cutsceness just use the same fucking diagonal angle over and over again.

And contrary to popular belief David Bowie didn't compose an entire soundtrack, he did only 5-6 tracks(and they're good!), the rest was composed by Reeves Gabrels and Xavier Despas. It's honestly kinda whack. Not truly bad, but gets really annoying quite fast.

This game is pure irredeemable horseshit. David Cage should've put actually realistic ambitions into this project, instead of rape by deception fetish, a sexualised underage girl to possess and asian racist caricatures. David Cage should be on sex offender list instead of making games. Omikron unacceptable in every single aspect. David Bowie didn't make "Hours" for it to end up in one of the worst games to ever exist.

P.S. Astaroth backshots

Look all I'm saying given the context of this game's story you can easily twist it to be one of those games gamers claim to be <intentionally bad> in the same vein as stuff like Drakengard, Spec Ops: The Line, Persona 3, Shadow of the Colossus, most Suda games, the list goes on and on. I'd even argue Omikron has FAR more justification as an <intentionally bad> game than basically every other "intentionally bad" game. For those unaware, in the story of Omikron, the game "Omikron" was created by Astaroth, the antagonist of Omikron. His main goal was to suck the souls out of gamers using Omikron: The Video Game as the method to steal them. With this goal in mind, why would Astaroth create a good game? It makes so much more sense that Astaroth would create a game so dogshit, so comedically unplayable and obtuse to the point that most gamers wouldn't even come close to beating him and seeing the ending (especially in a time where guides weren't prominent, tho even with a guide this sucks ass to complete). There's even a line later on by blue David Bowie that basically says you're the first person to actually make it this far, which only gives more weight to the "this is intentionally bad" claim.

"But Airi why did you give it a 1/10 if you're claiming it's supposed to be bad and serves that purpose extremely well."

To answer that question I have two responses. The first is that David Cage obviously isn't clever enough to do this, especially when looking at all of his other games. It's even more clear when you realize that every game he made after this puts you on rails with the only actual gameplay being QTEs w/ the additional point & clicking, which is really funny when you think about it. Bro made the worst gameplay ever and decided to just make QTE story games after that god bless David Cage.

The second reason is that I think the excuse of "it's actually bad on purpose" is fucking stupid and rarely applies to games people are talking about. It's often used as a coping mechanism for gamers to deal with gameplay that sucks balls in stories they like or different/experimental gameplay used to compliment the story. Basically, I hate gamers, but most importantly I fucking HATE David Cage.
(Ftr I'd consider this easily the worst game I've ever played with nothing else even coming close)
(U also can't be mad at this review bc it's actually bad on purpose sorry)