Omanah

Back in 2020, I played a game called Cutish which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was an ‘empty landscape’ exploration game with puzzles. So, I was excited to see a new title from Dubus Alain and got started playing. You begin the game by arriving on an unpopulated island and finding a map and journal. With these items in hand, you explore the island and discover its secrets. Of course, you must go forth to new locations to find the ultimate answers you seek. The game has 3 physical locations and 6 more that are accessed through a portal. The outdoor scenery is beautiful and the soundtrack is very nice. Indoor locations tended to lack variety due to the reuse of objects. The island you start on is very large and you must traverse it to find power cells and other clues discussed in the journal. To find everything (and earn all achievements in the area), you need to travel on almost all roads. This distance, coupled with ongoing lag, took me quite a few hours. Luckily, the map shows your current position. You then move on to two other locations which are not mapped. One requires you to visit every room in a city in search of power cells. This was tedious and time consuming. NPCs were a…

Omanah is the 2nd passion project of a solo dev, and the scope of the game is truly impressive! While the game is labeled as a Myst-like, I would describe Omanah more as a walking-sim/exploration game with HOG elements. Most of the gameplay consists of walking around while trying to find objects hidden in the environment. Puzzles are few and players will spend the majority of their time exploring the different islands in the game in search of the items or clues needed to progress. If you love walking-sims and exploration games, you should definitely give this game a try. In Omanah, you'll do a lot of walking, and there are lots of secrets to discover along the way! There are still some optimization issues and some lag in certain areas, but hopefully the dev will address those soon. [i]I received a key from the dev after participating in the playtesting of this project.[/i]

I enjoyed playing this game and exploring different places. You can take a nice walk around the islands and just enjoy the scenery. The puzzles are interesting and not too hard. There are a lot of achievements to gain and its fun to find them. I would only ask that once you have found the map it was interactive as there is a lot of walking to do.