As the Harbinger, you have been called upon to rescue a world from its fate. As you repeat the final day over and over you will step closer and closer to the truth, but is it the truth you were expecting?
Omensight takes place in Urralia’s final day – the Godless Priestess is dead and the god of destruction Voden has been summoned to destroy the world. As the Harbinger you possess the ability to solve the mystery as to why the Godless Priestess was killed, and the ability to work to stop Voden’s destruction. You do this by repeating that final day over and over again, gaining more and more information as you join each of your four allies in their last day alive. As you do this, you will gradually gain key insight – Omensights – that you can then use to influence the decisions of your allies.
The Omensights guide your general flow of gameplay. Once you find one, you will be shoved into a new act, and you must now use them on your allies. This is a double edged sword – being dumped into a new act locks out anything you may not have previously explored. For example, in Act 1 I completely missed out on following one of my allies – Ratika – all because of when I got the first Omensight. This ultimately seemed to snowball into missing parts of the investigation board as a whole, so even after I had beat the game I was still missing two pieces. With no way to go backwards through the acts, your only choice is to replay the full game to find these pieces.
Combat in Omensight flows generally well as a whole, but there are definitely some hiccups within this flow. The game has an action-based combat – you go from enemy to enemy attacking them and dodging their attacks. The hiccups come when you start really trying to do in-depth strategies on certain fights. Dodging was the roughest part for me. First off, if you try and do three dodges in a short period of time the Harbinger will become stunned for a few seconds, leaving you completely vulnerable. I also just found that the button for dodging was awkwardly placed compared to attack (Square for attack, Circle for dodge), so I would frequently get hit just because my finger didn’t go across the face buttons fast enough.
Then there’s those escort sections. Well, I say “sections”, but it’s just one character across different acts that has this section. As they are riding a giant machine across an area, it is up to you to stop the enemies from hitting the detonators that’ll cause bombs to blow up the machine. Fun! Actually, no, it wasn’t fun at all. Out of everything in the game, these escorts parts made me the most frustrated at the game. This includes certain bosses, which also made me frustrated, but not as frustrated as the escort areas.
As you progress through the game, you’ll also unlock certain Seals. These Seals will allow you to access bonus areas, sometimes containing shortcuts to avoid combat sections. You’ll also gain two forms of upgrade currency – Experience and Amber. Experience is earned from both defeating enemies and chests (though not all chests), whereas Amber is primarily found in chests with bonuses obtained for doing flashy things during combat. Experience is used to level up which will unlock different skills you can use in combat (most are useful, though some I almost never used). Amber gives you direct upgrades, allowing you to do stuff such as increase your health, weapon damage, or decrease the cooldown on some skills. The bonus areas will frequently let you access special chests to get Amber, along with bonus story/backstory bits.
Visually Omensight is very impressive, though this came at a bit of a price, at least on my original PS4. Throughout the game I experienced some severe framerate drops if too much started to come onto screen at once. Thankfully this mainly happened outside of combat, although I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the reason behind at least some of my dodging issues. The soundtrack and voicing, however, are both excellent, and work wonderfully with the game.
Overall, Omensight had both its good and bad parts. The dodging issues were a massive source of frustration for me (alongside those escort parts), but then there were times that combat just felt extremely fluid and I was easily able to go from enemy to enemy. Well, until they blocked, then my flow got broken, I got hit, and… Well, that happened multiple times. The framerate issues were also unfortunate, although I can’t speak for if these happen on PC or PS4 Pro, since I only played it on an original PS4. As a whole, I did enjoy the game, but the massive frustrations I had at certain parts make me a bit more leary of recommending it. My best suggestion would be to look up some gameplay and see if this is a game for you.
I was provided with a review code for Omensight by Evolve PR. All opinions are my own.
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