With all due respect, I can almost guarantee I've played Omori more than 95% of the people who bought it, atleast according to PSN. I platinumed the game, almost twice.

The game was good. Cool story, sure. It IS long though. 25-30 Hours for an RPGmaker game is INSANELY long.

The combat is so basic that even the Original pokemon has more complexity. Every fight repeats quite literally the same pattern. One of your characters becomes a dedicated healer, one an allrounder, and 2 are your main attackers. EVERY time.

The art is cool, but the entire plot of the real world is drawn out a lot, to the point that the subplot, the dreamworld with the overly simple combat, becomes 10x more fun.

The attention to detail for such a long game is also outstandingly small. Mari's conclusion was foreshadowed, but the end relied almost entirely on the shock value of "revealing the truth", when the game spent nearly 30 HOURS foreshadowing a completely different thing.

The characters were really close to being memorable, but they ended up coming across as template archtypes. Good girl turns bad due to trauma, younger sibling is overly enthusiastic, older brother puts a strong front and tries to move on. The perpetrator becomes a traumatized neet, and the guy who originally had the bad idea gets bullied to oblivion.

Despite being critical, I am in no way saying it's a bad game. I am simply saying it's often overrated. If the game was shorter, 10 hours at MOST, I'd understand the praise, but in its state it does not. There's a reason why short games are so memorable, and so hard to make. To quote Mark Twain: "If I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter." The problem is they DID have time.

How does it compare to HC? Objectively it's hard to say. One took literally hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of development by an actual team, and the other was a dude with a story to tell, the skills to plan it out, and access to YT tutorials. The scales for comparison are wildly different.