Omensight is a 2018 action adventure role-playing game developed by Spearhead Games where you play as a Harbinger who needs to solve the murder mystery of the Godless Priestess in order to prevent the end of the world.
Developed by the same studio that delivered 2016’s Stories: Paths of Destinies, Spearhead Games takes their direction familiar territory, meshing creative characters into a narrative-driven action adventure. The big question is whether Omensight handles well the balance.
Omensight’s story takes place in a fantasy land. As the Harbinger, you descend into this world innocently and without much knowledge until the first attack happens and our death ascends us to meet the Witch who fills us in about the information concerning our mission and purpose. That purpose? Simple: prevent the end of the world. The mission is to investigate who murdered the Godless Priestess to unleash Voden on the world. In turn, it leads to making choices of whom to meet among three characters, Ludomir, Draga and Ratika, and each time we go back to restart the moments with new knowledge and new paths to discover. The story here works and as a narrative it achieves its goal in being a deep investigative murder mystery.
In terms of action and gameplay, this is where Omensight has its flaws. While the story lets us go in different paths to forge the various endings and clues, the gameplay is rather repetitive as the action revolves hacking and slashing through the corridors. The one redeeming quality is that there is an option when replaying any character to skip to the part before the possible deviation starts. However, it is a tricky choice as only killing enemies and gathering shards will help increase the chance to level up the weapons, moves and health which will prove to be increasingly important as the game proceeds. Luckily, there are some nice touches to pairing up with whichever character as it leads to duo moves that can also be strengthened through the upgrades. The progression of difficulty also is fairly decent and there is a few levels of difficulty to choose and can be changed during the game. This is a challenging game and for more experienced gamers. Even in its narrative focused difficulty that tones the action challenges, it still is fairly hard.
As far as creativity goes, Omensight looks great. The character designs are beautifully done. The environments accentuate the atmosphere. The sound design makes the game immersive. The map that we always return to is dynamic as we see each time the story restarts we see the other two characters move on track to their destined paths. The upgrade system also works fair and well. The details of Omensight do show the intricate thoughts that have gone into it. While the voice acting for certain characters weren’t quite as appealing, the fact that it’s there helps especially in this adventure to increase the narrative elements and elevate the immersive experience as a whole.
Omensight has some gameplay flaws and its demographic is for a more skilled gamer. The balance lacks a little between the narrative and the action gameplay. However, there are some great details here but perhaps not quite enough to cut through the repetitiveness.