I don’t think I can recall a time when I’ve been more divided on a game than with Onirism. On one hand, it’s a big, ambitious 3rd-person-shooter/platformer with a lot of huge, detailed levels that are all surprisingly varied, but it’s also remarkably unpolished. I cannot deny that there’s a very good game that you can clearly see amongst all the bugs, jank, and bad design decisions, but it desperately needed a focus on polish before it needed more and more content added to it. It’s still worth playing overall, but you’ll need to put up with some serious head-scratching while doing so.
Where do I even begin with Onirism‘s issues? For starters, there are times when our hero, Carole, is called by another character who often gives her guidance. There’s a high chance that, once you enter the dialogue of these calls, you won’t be able to exit them, as the final text boss will get stuck onscreen, requiring you to reload the last checkpoint. This bug has apparently persisted for literal years of the game’s Early Access period. Carole will start drifting randomly in a direction during these as well. It’s bizarre that this remains unpatched.
When Carole falls into the void, the game respawns her in the spot in which she was standing before this. Unfortunately, you can find geometry below you with collision detection that allows you to stand on it. If this happens and you can’t reach the platform you fell off of initially, falling again will reset you to a position that makes it impossible to return, requiring another restart. This can happen on several levels, including areas where there’s a bottom you can fall into and use to walk through an untextured valley beyond where a boundary should have been.
It’s worth mentioning that Onirism uses a save system where you find a save point in the level. If you die or get locked in one of the above situations, you have to go back to your last save. Levels can be massive, with save points somewhat far from one another, so it’s very possible (and one might say probable) that you’ll have this happen on more than one occasion. It’s another in a line of baffling decisions that the game makes when far better ones should have easily been on the table. In one level set mostly on a sea dotted with lots of frozen chunks of ice, you can find huge, invisible parts that you can walk on, which led to me wrecking two boats that became impossible to move as they seemingly floated mid-air.
The end of the aforementioned ice sea level sees you go up against a veritable army while on a timer. The section can take upwards of 20 minutes, but if you run out of time, it’s back to the beginning. I’ve had the game lock up after entering new areas, and the vehicles are practically impossible to control on a controller, as they were designed with digital inputs in mind. Every level has expansion capsules to find, but the game makes absolutely no attempt to signpost many of them, so I went six or seven hours of gameplay without even realising they existed.
The levels are so large that finding them on your own can feel like looking for needles in a haystack, and the map tells you nothing about them other than offering a percentage of what you’ve found. Additionally, the camera clips through everything, as you can see right through the levels themselves nearly every time you turn it near any surface. This extends to Carole’s head, as you can clearly see her eyes and teeth eerily floating inside it. The English translation of the game (which is French) is also completely riddled with constant typos and grammatical errors. There’s seemingly no end to the issues.
Onirism can be described as a blend of Ratchet & Clank with Serious Sam. You’ll run, jump, and drive a surprisingly large collection of vehicles through the levels that mostly all have different themes, but not always (the ice sea takes place after a glacier, which was preceded by a snow level.) Carole can fight with her umbrella as a melee weapon, or she can use a seemingly endless stream of guns. There are four types of ammo: foam, fireworks, soapy water, and energy. These are used for the dozens upon dozens of guns you can purchase and find in the game.
The issue with the weapons is that most of them differ only slightly from one another. There are lots of pistols, shotguns, explosive launchers, and machine guns to be found that are all mostly interchangeable. I wish Onirism had copied Ratchet & Clank instead and had a small set of weapons that upgrade with use. Levels are mostly well-designed, although they can feel lacking in landmarks, which leads to them seeming labyrinthine and monotonous at their worst. There are seriously so many levels in the game, many of which are creative and unique.
One level sees Carole sneak through a dam that’s obviously a nod to GoldenEye. She’ll also ride unicorns and motorcycles through a wide field, platform in a volcano, and so much more. The amount of ideas on display in Onirism can be jaw-dropping. The developers might be stunningly terrible at polishing their game, but I’ll be damned if they aren’t incredibly good at designing it. The game is undoubtedly enjoyable when it functions as intended, which makes all its shortcomings all the more irksome. With some polish, this could be a great game.
However, even with that in mind, it does start to wear out its welcome. The aforementioned huge timed battle seems like it could have been the end of the game, but it goes on and on for quite some time. The gameplay here is undoubtedly solid, but it really doesn’t have enough depth to stay all that interesting hour after hour. Granted, “too much of a good thing” isn’t exactly the worst accusation you can levy against a game, and your mileage will obviously vary. Levels also often have side activities that lock powerful weapons behind them, too, so there’s simply a lot to see and do.
And that’s without getting into the extra modes, which have you either racking up high scores or simply surviving waves of enemies in different areas. There are likely dozens of hours of playtime here, making the game’s low price very appealing overall. I do wish the optimisation was better, though. With the framerate uncapped, Onirism made my 3090 GPU sound like it was trying to take off. You can limit the framerate, but only from 20 to 70 and no higher. Why the devs didn’t stretch this to higher rather than lower is, again, baffling. However, a recent update broke the fps cap for me, anyway. The update even broke the fast travel. I also had issues with the UI’s size randomly changing to not fit on the screen.
As for the combat, it’s pretty decent. The guns don’t feel all that impactful, and they run out of ammo incredibly quickly without finding ammo expansions (good luck without a guide, though.) The platforming mostly feels good on a controller, but feels off on mouse and keyboard. Naturally, the shooting feels worse on the controller, so I found myself swapping between the two. Unfortunately, the camera sensitivity shares a slider for both, and by default on controllers, it’s way too high. It’s just issue after issue with this game, isn’t it?
Despite the vast amount of problems, again, there’s a good game here. But it needs a ton of polish that I’m not sure it’ll ever get. There are a lot of hours of fun to be had, but you’ll need to subject yourself to an almost shocking amount of jank and years of seemingly wilful negligence to get to it. If you’re a fan of Ratchet and want something that scratches the same itch, this game can definitely provide it, as well as lots of exploration and great ideas. Just be prepared to work for it.
Onirism: There's a damn good game here, but the number of issues that need to be tolerated to get to it can be a big ask. – Andrew Farrell
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