Everything Is Going to Be Okay: Analysing Emotional Landscapes in Interactive Digital Narratives Through the Exploration of Complex Psychological Themes in Omori

This analysis argues that Omori (OMOCAT, 2020) demonstrates how Interactive Digital Narratives can render complex psychological experiences such as depression, anxiety, and trauma tangible and emotionally accessible to players. Its central thesis is that player agency and multimodal design, spanning narrative, mechanics, and audiovisual elements, intensify emotional and cognitive engagement in ways that passive media cannot. The work treats Omori as a focused case study, drawing on established frameworks for understanding how players position themselves relative to a narrative, whether as observer, victim, or partaker.

The analysis identifies the game's dual-world structure, which contrasts a whimsical dream realm with a grim reality, as a deliberate device that mirrors the processing of trauma and fosters empathy with the protagonist, Sunny. Its aesthetic choices, including the white, head, and black spaces, reinforce this fragmentation. A key finding concerns the emotion-based turn-based combat system, in which characters' emotional states affect combat effectiveness. This mechanic is read as a narrative device that parallels experiences of depression and bipolar disorder rather than as a merely decorative system.

The conclusions emphasize the integration of mechanics and narrative. Emotion-driven boss battles, a relationship-based follow-up combat system, and the tag mechanic are shown to reduce ludonarrative dissonance, the gap that often separates what a game's story says from what its systems demand of the player. The analysis concludes that interactive storytelling can portray mood and mental health disorders effectively, while cautioning that the game's disturbing psychological content may be unsuitable for some players.