[Click here to start from the first progress log]

After several hours of experimenting with choices, I’m pretty comfortable with which parts of Omen Exitio: Plague can be changed with different choices and which lead to the same outcomes no matter what you do. There’s still more content to be found if the 5 achievements I’m missing are any indication, but the abundant commonalities between each of my playthroughs suggest that whatever else is hidden away in the game requires an incredibly specific chain of decisions that would be laborious to suss out. Especially since the game’s autosave locks you into decisions, making save/loading much less of a possibility. Ultimately, the little content I’ve yet to see is rare enough that it doesn’t reflect an average experience, so I feel like I’m able to speak to the quality of the game as a whole without it.

What it’s like to actually play Omen Exitio

I was so wrapped up in the writing yesterday that it totally slipped my mind to explain how the game plays. At its core, Omen Exitio is basically a book where every so often you have to make a choice between 1-4 things. These can be dialogue choices, fight-or-flight decisions, or an attempt to use one of Jake’s several skills.

Progressing through the story, being inquisitive, and successfully using skills earns you experience to further upgrade your skills. These are 5 of these skills: fighting, observation, medicine, agility, and speechcraft. Their uses are self-explanatory, and the beginning of the game is a training area where your choices give you initial points in several of those categories. That way, you can succeed at early skill checks and gain more experience to further branch out or specialize. Your skill has to be at a certain (increasingly higher) level to succeed at skill checks as you play, so you’re constantly upgrading skills to avoid failing when you try to do something elaborate.

Decisions don’t merely affect the short-term results of whatever you’re doing, though. Sometimes succeeding at them can mean coming out of a situation with additional information, a new item, or an ally you can call on later in a moment of desperation. You’ll meet many characters as Jake is bounced from one crazy situation to another, and you can always go back and check their bios if you forget which character a name is referring to. You can also check the items Jake currently has, which is helpful since you’ll sometimes lose items between parts of the story. Having certain items can open up new possibilities in certain situations, allowing you to shoot someone who’d otherwise remain unscathed or attempt to take a hostage.

You’re going in one direction, though

Though there are multiple endings, all decisions lead to the same basic outcomes for most of the game. Failing over and over again may lock you out of several achievements and cause a small handful of minor characters to die (though you never see them again, so it rarely matters), but you’ll always hit the same story beats: military service, research, kidnapping, and so on. Even the moments where a decision appears to matter may simply allow you to succeed at something that can’t be failed in a slightly more satisfying way. The biggest indicator of this comes in the form of Meyer, a suspicious German who pops up throughout the game. On my first playthrough, I had an opportunity to shoot him but declined out of an abundance of caution. When I went back and followed through, however, he was merely wounded in our next meeting. Later, a shirtless man wearing a mask appeared and Jake wondered if it could possibly be Meyer, but at no point does it dawn on him to look for the bullet hole. Little things like that can be incredibly frustrating.

There are a few choices that echo softly throughout the game, however. Learning the specific plant required to create a supposed cure for the plague allows you to recognize it much later on, though I haven’t found an actual purpose for this that allows you to do anything you couldn’t do otherwise. There are also a few references to characters you saved or failed to save. Lastly, you’re occasionally sent to the map to decide where to go next, though this really only matters toward the very end since you’ll usually visit all possible areas anyway. Even that near-end choice doesn’t make much of a difference, as choosing the “wrong” place leads to you getting kidnapped and taken to the same area anyway. Going to the “right” place right off the bat (and there are hints you can find to lead you there) lets you meet a small handful of interesting characters first, though. Choices matter here, but not all that much.

[Click here to go to Omen Exitio: Plague log #1]

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