The following piece spoils bits of Omikron: The Nomad Soul, a video game from 1999.
The year is 2016. Almost a lifetime ago, it feels like. David Bowie has just recently passed away. Square Enix decides that the best way to honour the legendary artist’s memory is to offer the 1999 Dreamcast game Omikron: The Nomad Soul for free to all Steam users who might be interested. A fine and generous enough offer. The only problem? Omikron isn’t really very good.
Its biggest plus these days is easily the fact that it is the one and only game that has Bowie as both a character, and as a direct musical contributor. His music for the 1999 album, “hours…”, incorporated pieces of music that he wrote directly for Omikron.
It’s also worth noting that somehow (I didn’t realize this until I begun writing this article) the game’s been almost predictably (and tiredly) connected to conspiracy theories about COVID-19, just because it happens to use the same letter of the Greek alphabet as a variant of COVID. The internet really is a mess. But, let’s get stuck into the reality of Omikron: The Nomad Soul, the first game from Quantic Dream, peddlers of interactive inanity to this very day.
The Context of the Future
The part of Omikron I find people struggling with the most when I watch playthroughs of the game or read reviews of it is the jargon. Well, the jargon and the controls, but we’ll get to the controls. The words used in Omikron rarely have context, nor appeal. The heck even is a “koopy sandwich”? The text that Omikron uses to tell its story when it doesn’t rely on its often stilted dialogue is nigh on unreadable, especially at the start.
Put simply, Omikron is a crash-course in how not to tell a story. The game opens with a truly mindboggling premise – a character from the game pops out of the screen, says “I’m going to need your permission to stick your soul – your actual soul – into my body, so you can roam the streets of Omikron, which, by the way, is a real place, and if you die, your soul will be trapped within Omikron for real.” This all happens basically as soon as you hit “Start Game”. The onslaught of context-free information merely continues from there.
After giving the nice police officer Kay’l permission to grab your soul and pop it in his body, you wake up in Kay’l’s body in Omikron. You are then subsequently attacked by some large alien thing (which is later revealed to be a demon), and then a big police mech stomps in and scares it away. It says “better go to a hospital to get that checked”, and leaves you to die in that alley for all it knows. Okay, no, what it actually says manages to slip some more meaningless jargon in, just because you already needed more to parse. See below:
Throughout its entire runtime, Omikron is basically a string of silly non sequiturs and dropped plotlines. The game opens with a murder plotline that is basically never properly resolved, and the game then transforms into an underground rebellion story, which then transforms into a “the entire world is going to end unless you slay mega-king demon”. Bowie’s character feels like the only one who really tries to even make sense of the jumbled and messy plotline, but he appears much too late in the game and for a too-brief period to really save the game’s story. Part of the problem comes from the fact that the game is using the titular concept of the “Nomad Soul”. The exciting gameplay premise is that you can pop your soul out of the body you’re currently inhabiting, and switch into someone else, giving you a whole new set of stats. But this means that Kay’l’s story – the only character with really any context beyond the last demon-slayer character – dies when he dies, which is scripted and inevitable. Any grounding the story had (and there wasn’t much) dies at that moment.
This isn’t even mentioning the fact you’ve got to grapple with the controls, which aren’t easy to figure out on a modern PC, and even when they’re figured out, aren’t great to handle. The game is designed very much with the idea that you’ll have a physical manual on hand, so you can pick that up and flick through it. Virtual manuals, on top of being just less fun, are also more annoying to reference while playing a game. At least if you’re me, gaming on a laptop with just a single screen. You’d probably want to have a controller to play this game – but I’m pretty sure that requires even more technical set up than is already required to get it running on some modern machines. The control problem is compounded when you realize that the game insists on shoving several different gameplay styles into the mix.
Still Breathing But You Don’t Know Why
I do have to admire Quantic Dream’s unbridled ambition. But I think their ambition was ultimately eclipsed by two things – firstly, the technology, and then, sadly, I think, their actual talent. David Cage (who has been awarded France’s Legion of Honour and has won two BAFTAs) struggles in this adventure (as with many of his others) to ground his ideas in any sort of reality or sense. But at least actually playing a game like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls or Detroit: Become Human doesn’t feel terrible, and the games after Omikron and Indigo mostly at least manage to keep some gameplay focus. Omikron, on the other hand, does not. Presumably, they looked at the success of games like Tekken and Virtua Fighter and decided that the best way for their already hugely ambitious futuristic open-world game (starring David Bowie!!!!) would be to attempt to shove a fighting game into the mix. The fighting game feels mostly just like a matter of luck – there’s a training ring or two where you can practice the moves, but the controls never feel responsive enough to create any sense of fluidity in the combos you can futilely try to pull off, and enemies can pull off their own truly insane combos that will send you right back to the last save point. Still, it’s admittedly kind of cheesy fun. It has its own, janky charm – even if only for about five minutes. You can see there’s potential there, anyway.
So there’s a huge, futuristic open-world, and a fighting game. Next on the list? An FPS, of course. An FPS with some of the worst-designed levels I’ve ever seen, with ultra-aggressive and deadly AI that also manages to be stupid, a gun that lacks any kind of power or punch, and inane objectives. In my opinion, the FPS segments are the worst in the entire game. At least with the fighting game segments, there is some evidence that there are skills to be learned, and methods that you can use to beat the harder enemies. But with the FPS segments, you will just be wishing that death in Omikron really did bring death in reality. It’s an appalling addition to a game that didn’t need more gameplay elements.
The further two gameplay additions to the open-world that they decided to include boggled my mind then, and they still boggle my mind now. There are adventure game item hunts, and platform game jumping segments. We’ll deal with the latter first.
The characters you play as control like unruly pigs made of clay. They are sluggish and weighty to control, overly slow but under-responsive when you want them to stop. They always take an extra step or two that you don’t want them to take, and this might be okay if the game was just a free-roaming adventure around town. But no, it has platforming elements! Late in the game, there’s a section in like a jungle garden area that requires precise jumps. Early in the game, there’s a bit where you have to jump through a ventilation duct hole, and if you fail, you have to clumsily and slowly swim back to the start of the duct so you can try it again. Oh yeah, there’s swimming in this game. And yeah, I don’t want to talk about it. I wouldn’t even consider it gameplay. It’s just pain.
One of Omikron’s biggest mistakes was slapping the item hunt in there. You have to be in the perfect spot to interact with items – already a problem when you consider that the characters move too far most of the time, so you have to waste time lining them up with the thing you want them to interact with – but you also have to find them first. Imagine finding an item essential for story progression in a map the size of a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 or Just Cause without any map markers, and just vague log entries to guide you – sometimes, not even that, just the mutterings of expository NPCs and illogical “hints” to the puzzles you are supposed to solve. Are you imagining it? And how terrible it would be? I hope so, because it is terrible. It’s a decision that just hurts the desire to play further, if you know you’ll be wandering around the same maps for hours on end, catching taxi cabs back and forwards, combing over area after area, til you find the little thing you were looking for or the little corner of the map you were supposed to stumble across. And then you have to figure out what the heck it is the game wants you to do with the damn thing – and you have to do the whole sordid process over again, searching and bashing your head against a wall until something falls over.
Omikron’s failings are many, and they run deep in the lifeblood of the game. In the first FPS shootout or two, you’re saved by an inexplicable medic who shows up in the middle of a flaming supermarket or rough, seedy downtown bar, revives you, and just leaves. The currency you need to save the game can be wasted on useless hints in the save menu – if you spend all your currency on hints to show your current objective (how insulting is that!), you can’t save. And given the unreliability of the controls and the unfairness of many of the segments in this game (especially shooting), being without save tokens in this game is basically a death sentence for enthusiasm.
The sun machine is coming down
In spite of all of this criticism I have levelled against Omikron, there is something genuinely admirable about that ambition, as I said before. There are nuggets of fascinating content in this game. I think one of my favourite things about video games in general is their ability to bring fictional spaces to life in an interactive way, that no other medium can possibly hope to achieve. Despite all of Omikron’s flaws, when it remembers to stop jamming platforming into a game with bad controls, and just lets you inhabit one of its better designed spaces, there’s a raw magic, a way in which you can finally appreciate just what it was Omikron was going for. The maze-like library in the late game is cool. The gardens, as much as I hate the platforming, are actually pretty neat to explore. That promise perhaps make the final state of the game even sadder. The moments of “wow, this is a cool environment” (see the header image of the temple!) are just stomped into the dirt by the gameplay and story failings, time and time again.
I think it’s important to treasure these insights into the gaming past, however. Because so many games from that era are already obscure and/or lost. I can only imagine how many more important games will be unplayable to future generations in twenty years. Despite how terrible Omikron is, it’s important that we still have access to it. Because despite the fact that David Cage has no idea how to write (I was going to say women, then minorities, but I think no idea how to write basically sums it up), Omikron is an ambitious experiment. The one and only video game starring David Bowie. An investigative murder-mystery cyberpunk occult swimming fighting shooting adventure featuring your soul as the main character. A voyage into the future from a team that clearly had the ambition to make something that would change the world. As a representative from the future you clearly intended this game for – I am very sorry I just had to beat your game to death with a baseball bat. My dearest apologies.
You can buy Omikron: The Nomad Soul from Steam or from GOG. I also recommend checking out Bowie’s 1999 album, hours….
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