Described as a “A punishing fever dream combining abject terror, dark comedy, and many, many deaths” on its official Steam page, OMUT was one of the most unique indie games we saw at PAX West 2024. Developed by Madame Cyclone and published by Megabit, players embark on a mysterious quest to find a woman from your dreams along with a wise-cracking yet ominous companion as you battle through strange and terrifying entities as you traverse the Red Abyss.
Equipped with a gun and limited bullets, you’re forced to manage your combat by understanding exactly how bosses move, attack, and where their weaknesses are. With a hub where you can buy new gear and outfits, you’ll get ready to tackle new enemies. We attempted to beat three separate bosses throughout our time with the game.
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The first boss looked a little like the moon from the iconic 1902 silent film A Trip To The Moon. Having just acquired your gun, you must use your bullets to not just attack this boss, but to also keep it from hitting the ground. If he drops, you’re done. The second boss featured what looked like a giant, embodying the run styles of the titans in Attack on Titan.
Throwing out shock waves, you have to utilize your dash to both dash through the running monster and his attacks, timing it perfectly with your attacks as well. And finally, we tackled a turtle that can only be defeated by parrying attacks and using your gun and dash, pulling together the mechanics from the two previous bosses.
OMUT’s take on combat is unrelenting, but, more importantly, it’s quick. With the keyboard commands correlating to A to move left, D to move right, and R to respawn, inputs are consolidated into one space. As such, every time I failed to time my dash correctly or got hit by the boss, I was just right back in it. The loop of failure and attempting again immediately was rapid and that’s what made it feel good.
I could tell that the developer was worried at my constant failure, and as she pushed me forward to another boss for another attempt, I couldn’t help but be struck by the game. I was compelled to respwan over and over again. In our 30 minutes with the title, I thought constantly failing against bosses and not exploring the world would make me frustrated. Instead, OMUT was the game of the show for me. I thought about it nonstop and even now, as I think about what this horror title can be, I get excited.
This isn’t some large swinging game with high-fidelity graphics. It’s a punishing action title with a simple color palette for its pixel art sprites. OMUT was able to consume my thoughts for most of PAX by just being a creepy little game that I couldn’t overcome. It’s beautiful, difficult, and a breath of fresh air.
OMUT is a unique horror game that fuses a dark fairy tale aesthetic with the twisting grins of a creepypasta. The art style, sound design, and use of simplicity and empty space are striking, to say the least. While the game’s launch date hasn’t been announced, the developer let us know in the event that it is currently going into alpha testing with players in order to understand and balance its difficulty curve, using the community to help make the game even better.
We may not know when OMUT is going to be released, but I do know it’s one you need to wishlist immediately.
