Omikron: The Nomad Soul

aka: The Nomad Soul
Moby ID: 1431
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

The futuristic city of Omikron on the planet Phaenon is sprawling beneath a huge crystal dome. It was erected to protect the city against the ice age which descended upon the planet after its sun ceased to exist. At the beginning of the game, the player is contacted by an Omikronian police officer named Kay'l 669, who begs him to leave his dimension, possess Kay'l's body, and enter Omikron to investigate a series of strange murders. The player then takes the role of Kay'l, but his investigation is foiled by a sinister force that the police are unable - and perhaps unwilling - to stop. As the plot unfolds, the player realizes that in order to solve the mystery his soul must establish contact with many inhabitants of Omikron, and ultimately save it from extinction.

Omikron: The Nomad Soul is primarily a free-roaming third-person 3D adventure game. Much of the player's activity in the game consists of exploring the large city, which is separated into five districts. The player is generally free to roam the city regardless of the plot development. Certain buildings can be entered and explored. Automatic taxi-like vehicles called "sliders" can be hailed to shorten walking distances and deliver the protagonist straight to the goal. In order to advance the story, information must be gathered by communicating with characters and solving puzzles of various kinds, inventory- as well as logic-based. The emphasis of the gameplay, however, is on exploration and interaction rather than on puzzle-solving.

Throughout the course of the game, the player may take on the role of up to 41 different characters through the use of the soul transfer ability. In many situations, a soul transfer is required to solve a puzzle and advance the plot, e.g. accessing a restricted area with a specific character who is able to enter it without arousing suspicion.

Besides the adventure mode, the game also contains first-person shooter and fighting gameplay. These two modes are restricted to specific areas and are for the most part triggered by plot advancement. Once an FPS sequence has been initiated, the player must complete it in order to be able to return to the main adventure mode. Weapons and items for this mode can be found throughout the stages themselves, as well as bought in shops during exploration.

The fighting sequences are also usually dictated by the plot. They take place on side-scrolling screens and consist of traditional exchanges of punches and kicks, with the goal of depleting the opponent's health bar. Each character has different initial fighting statistics. These can be increased by taking the characters to a training facility and practicing to increase their parameters and subsequent combat performance.

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Credits (Windows version)

167 People (128 developers, 39 thanks) · View all

Product Development Lead
Product Manager
Public Relations
Localisation
Translation
German Quality Assurance
Audio Direction
Recorded at
  • Hastings Hamburg
Pro-Tools Giants
Voice Talents
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 78% (based on 53 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.7 out of 5 (based on 91 ratings with 6 reviews)

Biggest disappointment in my gamer's life

The Good
Some years after noticing this game in a magazine, and finding it interesting, I found the demo and played it. The demo was very exciting and revealed what could be one of my favourite games.

When the game begins Kay'l, the first body you put your soul in, jump out of the screen and tells you (yes, you) that his world is in great peril and that the only one who can save it is you throw this videogame, putting your soul in his body (!?!?). Once you do this you enter Omikron, gets beaten up by a demon and being told by a robot cop to rehydrate yourself, you watch the city in it whole. Cars, people apartments, shops bars, and a lot of cool sci-fi details. I just stop playing the demo and start searching for the game.

I was hopping for a great sci-fi adventure, I read a bit about it and found quotes like "in Omikron you can't reload every time you do something wrong, you must answer for every action you make". That's the only thing you must tell to convince me to play a game. And the story was really cool, inter dimensional saving hero for a "big brother"-esque city invaded with demons, what more can you ask for?

The game also has the participation of David Bowie. I actually don't hear his music, but I know that if David Bowie participate in something, it will be, at least, "different".

Aside from the good expectation I putted in this game, I also found some interesting things while playing. Apart for an awesome original story, you found too, a world not fully realistic, but with a lot of things to do, like reading books, going to sex shops, watching TV, going to bars, shopping music CDs and hearing them, going to some Bowie concerts and even playing FPS and fighting sections of the game. The story goes getting more twisted and rare (not always to better) and you keep knowing more of some side stories. In addition, every new body has his/her own short story, a bit of rol playing (well...) and usually his/her own apartment.

The Bad
All this sounds very promising, isn't it? That's what I thought.

For starters, this game is completely linear, and there are no such thing like "different actions, different paths", you only have ways of spend your time, like said before, and a linear main story. Well, there is a choice, you can say NO to Kay'l at the beginning and don't play the game. Even more, when you lose your first body, you lose the 50% of the motivation of the game, as the rest of the bodies are just that, bodies. They have some RPG-like features and a short resume of their story, but you wont even know new NPCs with them, neither the game will change a bit depending on what body you are in. And the stats are just trivial, the only important one is how good they fight and their hit points. That means, that when you find a good body in those stats you better maintain it. In addition, you win a new apartment with each new body, which means, a new save point.

And the save system is too a bad point. You can, of course, save whenever you want, but you need save point and a ring to save, and are limited (well, you can buy all you want). So, you must look for an apartment every time you want to save, so you better reincarnate a lot to have them all, and, if you have no money, the only way to get it, apart for selling what you have, is by fighting, nothing more, and, at the end, it gets very repetitive.

As for the FPS and fighting zones, you can't expect too much from them, because a game can't be good in three genres at a time. In fact, only the fighting one is fun. The FPS is the worst of the three, awkward and totally scripted, the movements are slow and is very difficult to aim; they are totally worthless.You couldn't even walk sidewards. And I remember having problems with the different weapons, in fact, I couldn't change weapons, and played all the game with the base pistol, that didn't help making better the game. The fighting section was actually very fun, but sadly it was too short and repetitive.

The adventure by itself, was just average: talk with NPCs, take some object to the right character, solve some silly puzzle and if you get lost, read some walkthrough as there is no point on wasting your time with an average adventure game.

Probably, if you start playing it, you will only go on with it because of the bizarre story and ambience, what was my perdition. And that took me to the biggest disappointment of them all. SPOILER: After leaving the city and going through the final part of the game, which gets more and more uninteresting, you eventually face the big boss, which I think is Lucifer itself. And to kill this guy, the only weak spot of his body is his back!!, you must run around him as fast as you can and shoot at him. Yes, that means you are in FPS mode, which remember that was really annoying, and remember that aiming was a total pain in the ass. So you must go for his back, which is very, very difficult (remember that you can't walk sidewards), aim at it faster as he turns and shoot. And do it like 10 times. Meanwhile he shoots at you with an attack that kills you in 3-4 shots. After 20-30 tries my average was 1 hit per try, I couldn't finish the fucking game.

The Bottom Line
This game is technically very bad, it has poor gameplay, is an average adventure game and a bad genre crossing attempt, and the only good thing of it is it's story and ambience, which are very good indeed.

Despite all that and all I have said, I think this is a game for the history of videogames. This game is bad, but it is "different". You can easily see that the developers are people with good ideas and with a real interest in improving videogames, what is very praiseworthy nowadays. So this is a game for videogame lovers, those who can do the sacrifice to play it just to play something original in the videogame world. And I will play Omikron 2 for sure, and other games developed by those guys, because, at least, I know that their games will be something "different".

Windows · by MichaelPalin (1414) · 2006

A highly involved and mysterious story with engaging gameplay and surreal world keeps the player on the edge of his seat.

The Good
I loved the the surrealistic game world. When the game was released, it was one of the first with large level real estate for the player to explore. The levels were also designed to work like a real city with realistic layouts, entrances and exits. One can easily get lost just exploring the world. The game-play also allows the player to change his character as he wishes which adds another layer to explore. The background score, the music and the SFX all add to the surrealism as well as the cool fonts. The mixed style of game-play and engaging puzzles keeps the player's attention and the player on the edge of his seat.

The Bad
The art quality is what carries the game. Even though the game was one of the first to create a mixed style of game play, a First Person Shooter, hand to hand combat, adventure and mystery, etc., it fails to blend them properly. The game-play is fairly complex for a normal player. The game did not allow mouse input. This is a problem as players need to get adjusted to the camera angles. This can get nauseating.

The Bottom Line
A game that allows you to live a day in an alien universe. A bizarre murder, ancient alien history, magic and ancient runes and puzzles coupled with surrealistic music.

Windows · by DS___ (7) · 2010

Great story supported by fantastic music.

The Good
The story is what makes this game great. It's very involving and pretty original. Even though the main story line is linear, there is a lot of freedom. You can go about in the site, explore some of the small site plots. Apart from that there are a number of persons you can incarnate and which give their own little touch to the game.

Both graphics and sound support the story perfectly. David Bowie worked on the music scores, and it shows. At several points in the game there are some music interuption: when you enter a bar, there is a live performance by a band. This really adds to the overall atmosphere of the game, it really feels like a real living world.

To complete this the 3d worlds are very well modelled and they change radically when you move from one part of the city to another. You can really see that you start out in the poor part and move up to the richer parts. On top of that there is a lot of traffic and crowd moving, which again add to the reality of the world (you can turn the movement on the street of if your machine is not fast enough but I really advice against it, because it's a big part of the game)

The Bad
Some of the action sequences are annoying. They reminded me of the annoying action puzzles in some of the old Sierra adventures.

Sometimes the game is terribly slow, even on newer machines (I used a P3 750 with TNT2 Ultra). This is in part caused by the very detailled 3D world.

The Bottom Line
If you want an involving story in a very beautifull gameworld, this is a must have.

Windows · by Baxter (37) · 2001

[ View all 6 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Wrong screenshots Mobygamesisreanimated (11069) Nov 29, 2009

Trivia

Barcode

The German cover of the game (both for the Windows and Dreamcast editions) shows a wide-open eye with a barcode over iris and pupil. That EAN 9780140072389 actually refers to the Spanish language edition of a crime/espionage story named LaBrava.

Cancelled PlayStation version

Omikron: The Nomad Soul was originally supposed to get a PlayStation release. However, Eidos didn't believe that the PlayStation version would even sell and they urged Quantic Dream to move it to the Dreamcast as Eidos thought the Dreamcast would be a worthy successor to the current generation console then. However, things didn't go the way as Eidos expected as the Dreamcast wasn't a hit. David Cage, the writer and director for Omikron, claimed that the biggest regret was to not release it on the PlayStation.

David Bowie

The game features David Bowie as Boz, the Virtual Being. For the role of Boz, David Bowie contributed his voice and allowed a graphic fantasy rendition to be made of himself for the role. In addition, his wife, supermodel Iman Abdulmajid, acts as the model for one of the characters (Iman 631) in the game that players can take control of as part of the "virtual reincarnation" process. In memory of his passing, Square Enix offered a free download of this game from 1/15/2015 to 1/22/2015.

Font

The game makes extensive use of a special typography. The font can be downloaded for free from the developers at http://www.quanticdream.com/download/Omikron.ttf

Soundtrack

David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels wrote the entire soundtrack exclusively for the game, consisting of eight songs; "Thursday's Child", "Something in the Air", "Survive", "Seven", "We All Go Through", The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell", "Omikron (New Angels of Promise)" and "The Dreamers"... seven of which appeared later on David Bowie's album, Hours...(Limited Compilation) album

The album "Hours..." contain several tracks like '(Omikron-The Nomad Soul Version)' naming, but if you listen carefully those tracks are the same as original ones. It seems like sound engineer made a mistake placing the same tracks on the album by different ('Omikron') names.

Title

Omikron is one of the letters of the Greek alphabet, corresponding to the Latin O.

Awards

Information also contributed by Isdaron, Karthik KANE, partykiller, Unicorn Lynx and WildKard

Analytics

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Related Sites +

  • Omikron Game
    Fan-site about Quantic Dream projects. Omikron the Nomad Soul the first game project by Quantic Dream.
  • Omikron: The Nomad Soul Help File
    These hints include all of the tips and tricks to help you with Omikron. All of the reincarnate locations and attributes, maps and strategies for the missions.
  • The Nomad Soul : Mayerem
    French fan-site.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 1431
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Derrick 'Knight' Steele.

Dreamcast added by Adam Baratz.

Additional contributors: -Chris, Jeanne, Scott Monster, UL, Patrick Bregger, tMH.

Game added May 13, 2000. Last modified March 17, 2024.