The cartoony art style and anthropomorphised animal characters of Omensight might give you the impression that the game is for children. But it gets dark very quickly.

The opening animation smashes a cute aesthetic into a grim backstory of war and cold-blooded murder. It places you efficiently and entertainingly into the heart of a dark mystery that you have to solve in order to save the fun fantasy world from total destruction.

You are the Harbinger. Your presence in the story is prophesied to prevent the apocalypse and restore peace to a destroyed world.You achieve this by travelling back through time with different figures from the cataclysmic climax of the war. As you follow each of their stories, you learn more about how the catastrophe came about and what you must change in order to stop it. You collect their memories, touching their souls as they die and communicating with their final day to learn more about the tragedy you need to prevent.

Omensight

The fantastical world is comprised of a lot of familiar elements – for instance, a tree of life, levelling up through meditation, humanoid animal warriors – but they fit together in such a way that the whole feels quite original.

The setting and story are definitely fun to explore. It takes place across a number of specific locations, including a prison set in a grand tower armed by magical soldiers. It’s very nicely designed in terms of its fantasy aesthetic, with a lot of pretty details woven into the design.

You’re given a fair amount of freedom to explore at your own pace. Whatever companion you’re following will carry on with the journey if you stop for a while to smash some fruit out of pottery, but they might tease you about taking so long.

Omensight

Having to replay the same day over and over again from different perspectives, or from a single perspective again once you’ve found new information, gives Omensight an interesting structure. You have to pay attention to the details each time you play it through, around magical battles against soldiers and bosses from every side of the conflict.

You can go back and look at the stories and clues you’ve collected each time to figure out where you need to look next.

Omensight drops you immediately into the heart of a vicious war, in a game that is in equal parts cute and macabre. You have a lot of freedom to play the game however best suits you, including adjusting the difficulty settings of both the fighting and the investigation. It is decently challenging and has some lovely scenery to explore.