Ossuary

One of a kind.

Clever light puzzles, superb atmosphere and lots of good dialogues, almost text-based; overall, most of the game is "optional" but I've found myself wanting to uncover more and more. The setting and objectives are pretty straightforward and almost the whole map is open since the start, so it's more of a morbid curiosity about the strange ideas and the hypocrisy that populate this tiny world, other than progressing a plot. It's about the journey.

If you're willing to play something different and make use of sins as a game mechanic: 100% recommended.

Very enjoyable, tickles my pineal gland in all the right ways.

Why did the chaotic magician decide to work at the ossuary?
Because he had a knack for raising a real "skeleton crew"!

This joke was brought to you by GPT-4

Clearly recommended. Quite a fun little game. I really like the ideas of these devs and I'd like to see more from them. They make weird conceptual games, don't read too much about it, just try it.

a strange walk-and-talk rpg game about discordianism. did i fully understand the game? nope. did i enjoy the experience? yeah!

Ossuary is a short but interesting little game that, while the gameplay is rather simple and text-based overall, manages to convey a fascinating world with thought-provoking concepts to keep players engaged.

I will say that I was introduced to this game by someone who thought it'd be fun to speedrun, and so far it is, as categories for it are pretty short if you don't want to dedicate time to trying to do a full run of the game.

In essence, if you want to try out an interesting little "horror" experience, I'd recommend giving Ossuary a try.

Developed by Melissa & Gregory Avery-Weir, Ossuary is not much of a game, don't expect too much gameplay from it. It’s more like an interactive dive into the depths of Discordianism, a weird and interesting experience mixing philosophy and religion with some fun lines ! A bit expensive though.

A real gem. Unsettling, ironic, funny and interesting, I adored the quests, conversations and themes here.

Ossuary is now one of my favourite games ever made. A philosophical journey, something in between RPG and text adventure. The artwork perfectly suits the objective; the graphics are simplistic yet crafted with much attention to detail. The avatar you take control of resembles a marble navigating a labyrinth. The ossuary's museum is secretly a mizmaze.
Built on the principles of discordianism, the game takes place in the lower hell, purgatorial ossuary, a place of bones. This is a place where no progress can be made, no ideas can flourish. What the wanderer must realize is that this place is the lowest point: any deeper hell exists merely within fear itself. Those who live in fear are trapped in a desolate labyrinth and remain in the dark. Once the wanderer realizes this, the unbinding begins. FNORD

+ Fantastic writing
+ Atmospheric
+ Philosophical without taking itself too seriously
+ Learn lots of weird, morbid trivia!

- None of the endings are all that satisfying

* No music, just ambient noises
* Due to stylistic preference or limited resources, character avatars repeat

Have you ever wanted to discuss mellification with a soldier? Walk into a furnace and absorb the power of the heretical books that were burned there? Trick cabbages into revealing they aren't people, and give them a good kick for pretending?

If your answer is "No, but now I'm intrigued," then Ossuary might be the game for you.

Ossuary is mostly about talking to people, which is good, because the things they say are actually interesting for once. You'll spend most of your time collecting sins that you can then use on NPCs to change their mood. Many of the puzzles involve figuring out which sin you need to use where, such as applying "sloth" to a sleepy guard so you can sneak by them, or "lust" to a grad student who needs to renew their passion for aquarium algae so they can finish their thesis. The puzzles are fairly straightforward, and given that every single character has a unique bit of dialogue in response to every single sin, you won't go through any of the usual boredom when using trial-and-error to figure out what to do next. Another nice quality of life feature is that characters you need to speak to in order to progress glow gold, but half the fun is going through every possible dialogue option before you move on.

The writing itself is beautiful and odd, if occasionally on the nose. Sometimes the people you speak to will talk about themselves, sometimes they'll share philosophical musings, sometimes they'll tell you stories. Speak to a random guard who in any other game would just say "This area is off limits!", and instead he'll tell you that they used to dispose of old razor blades by pushing them through a slot in bathroom walls. "A million knives lie in wait in the walls of a thousand homes," he muses. One soldier from a lineup of 15 other completley identical soldiers will share the stories of various famous last words, while another will dwell on Fermat's Last Theorem. Despite their visual similarities, every NPC is wonderfully distinct.

My only real complaint is that the endings don't give much in the way of emotional closure. They're all nearly identical, with the screen fading out and a single quote shown to you before you're returned to the main menu. The true ending, or what feels like the true ending, is the best of them, so I'd recommend putting in the effort to reach it. In any case, this game is more about the journey than the destination, so it's not that big of a detriment to the overall experience.

TL;DR: If you're the kind of person who'll happily sink time into exploring weird game settings and don't mind reading a lot, Ossuary's macabre underworld is well worth a visit.

This game is hard to get into.

The start of the game is dull and nothing really prompts you to continue playing, besides a few minor dialogue options. Though the game doesn't really change from this formula, I started to enjoy it more and more as I played through.

With over 1,300 lines of dialogue, every character's personality is detailed enough that you'll want to explore all their possible responses.

Direction wise, this game does not hold your hand.
This is a game where you have to play it in one sitting, which is about a 3-5 hour playthrough.
If you start playing it for a couple of hours and then come back to it weeks later, like what I initially did, you will have a hard time remembering what quests you were on and will most likely have to create a new save.

The majority of the game is spent hunting for some important information amongst lots of insignificant choices making it hard to reinforce why what you're doing is valuable.

On the other hand, the massive amounts of dialogue gives you lots of resources that you can use to piece together the game's backstory & gives you enough information to keep the game interesting though your journey.

The interactions you have between characters give the game plenty of personality, and doesn't hold back mockery on how society builds off of outdated structures without questioning why they were made in the first place. (Like how the QWERTY keyboard layout survived unchanged from typewriters into the digital age.)

Most puzzles are very simple to complete, but some of the optional ones require a bit of cross referencing to figure out.

It you're still unsure if you should play this game or not, the demo does a good job introducing you to the mechanics.

Ossuary's description and video make it seem like a surreal/creepy horror game, but the gameplay heavily detracts from that feeling. You play as a person-like entity who wanders around and talks to other person-like entities. The unsettling vibe is undercut by game-y, boring 'quests' where you talk to Person A, who tells you to talk to Person B on the other side of the map, who then tells you to talk to Person C, then back to Person A. Then you are rewarded with an item that lets you talk to Person D, and so on.

The sole mechanic in the game is using your Sins on different people to get the reaction you need to advance a quest. This is interesting thematically but is actually just dressing for a very old adventure game mechanic. Corrupting a soul with the sin of wrath is not fundamentally different from "USE [object] ON [subject]". Just as it does in adventure games, this boils down to a trial-and-error system where you end up mindlessly using every sin on every character, as the puzzle's logic is skewed and often only makes sense in retrospect.

Ossuary's story is its strongest asset. It has a good theme, coherent design, and well-executed characters. As a satire of 1st world society it is a decent framework; unfortunately, the writing is weak. Much of it leans heavily on Discordian texts and similar 60's counterculture pseudophilosophies. This is what initially drew me to the game, being a fan of that sort of thing. But the writing here is largely referential in nature and brings neither the wit nor the insight of the source material. It reads like a creepypasta Principia Discordia fanfic.

All in all, the biggest flaw in Ossuary is the tedious gameplay. The store page sells this game entirely on the ambience and aesthetic, but you'll spend less time going "wtf that's messed up!!" and more time going "uuuuuuugghhhhh why do I have to walk BACK to that guy". I give it a 2/5 fnord.

This is from the creator of "Looming"?! Looming was one of the first games I played that felt emotionally powerful, yet subtle and thematically complex. By comparison, Ossuary is a total joke of a game full of one-dimensional moralistic tales. Is the extreme shallowness somehow ironic? Am I not getting it?

don't bother playing this unless you (like me) have fallen into a state of mental ruin so intense that you're able to understand the most absurd and meaningless things


Seriously, this is a really effing good game, but it's surreal and confusing from start to finish. That's what makes it so enjoyable to me. I'm a philosophy buff and pretty into the occult so it was right up my alley; it's not for everyone.


I do wish, somewhat, that it was a little longer, but I imagine if it were any longer it'd get old quickly. The concept is better suited for a shorter game.

I would liken this more to an interactive novel than a game. The dialog was interesting, but overall I didn't think it was worth the time I put into it.

Short review for a short game:

Honestly, this game was...boring. Interesting environment, chilling ambience, and a slew of strange concepts that don't seem so strange once you keep poking in. So much care went into the dialogue and there's so much of it. I applaud the developers for their puzzles and interesting art. It's obvious they had some fun with it. That said, the game is fairly straight-forward. No risk for failure, no branching paths, just a lot of walking and exhausting your options. That said it's not bad. Certainly not worth $10 but still, not bad. I enjoyed it and completed it within an hour or so. If you like short games with a macabre-like setting, with a few mind-tickling puzzles, grab it. Preferrably on sale.

Ossuary might be the most fun religious game I've ever played since the Shin Megami Tensei series. Ossuary is basically Bible Adventures but for Discordianism - and actually fun to play.

But what's Discordianism, you ask? Well, in the late 1960s, a small group of american counterculture theorists, magicians and writers decided to sketch out a parody of all religion - which turned out to be a completely valid religion in its own right. This religion has as its "main" texts several editions of The Principia Discordia. These editions laid out the contradictory, absurd, non-foundation for a religion that has somehow stuck in culture.

Discordianism, the world's first open source religion, is basically a collage of Zen Buddhism, western philosophy, parodies of ceremonial magic and a healthy dose of drugs. And you're one of its Popes.

Ossuary is a clever way to express the views of the Principia Discordia in game form. The world of Ossuary is an allegory of what is called the Aneristic Delusion and the Curse of Grayface: the current "fallen" state of humanity. It's a world where people take themselves too seriously with ridiculous results. What the Principia presents as metaphorical, Ossuary represents as literal. All of the factions in Ossuary come from the Principia Discordia. Your quest in this game is to collect Sins and share that corruption with others, hopefully helping them chill out a bit.

Ossuary is only very slightly a "game", it has minimal interaction. But it's an excellent way to immerse yourself in Discordianist thought. It's a way to interact with the tenets of a religion.

If you care for useless philosophical navel-gazing, enjoy paradoxes or are in any way attracted to any occult tradition, I strongly recommend Ossuary. If you're a serious person who wants serious action-packed games, you might want to skip this. Or better yet, open your pineal gland and try something outside your comfort zone.

It is short.
The gameplay is text-based puzzle solving.
It is confusing, and in the end seems to ask more questions than it answers.

If you are still undeterred, I highly recommend you buy this brilliant game. Its writing manages to evoke a unique and often unsettling lore and setting, and it poses questions with an intelligence I have scarcely seen in videogames as a whole. It is creepy, atmospheric, often surreal, and yet made me laugh multiple times. Do yourself a favour and pick this one up. Maybe don't even play it immediately. Forget about it, leave it for yourself to stumble across later on. You wont regret it.

People are complaining that this is a short game, but it's really just a game that you need to take your time on and enjoy the aspects of. It is text-rich and quite beautiful, I do not regret purchasing this game. Quite an enjoyable time. At first I found it odd that there was only one soundtrack in game, but as I played on, I found it more fitting, as if the music were also stuck with the monotony of the world you are exploring in Ossuary. Do take breaks in between, though, it can be hard on some people's eyes after a while.

I am a sucker for a good story. I am intrigued by Ossuary's spin on philosophy. One of Ossuary's best qualities, is that it seems to cover every angle and every side. Five Sides preferably (Including the roof). I really appreciate the amount of time it must have taken to compile all of the character dialogue. It is in depth and interesting (thought provoking). As I continue playing I will update my opinion. I am convinced my opinion will be the same however.

Ossuary?

Awesome, Very!

~kingofhearts2540~

Buyer beware: Treat this game as if it were a visual novel with very little to no gameplay. It's more of an interactive venture into philosophy and whatnot. A "Talk N' Walk" if you will. Gameplay amounts to talking to NPC's over and over and collect a variety of four particular "core aspects" each of the 4 main NPC's will require of you. In doing so, you get an "ending" which is a summary quote of the ideologies behind that particular NPC's beliefs. There is very little to play here. A very loose definition of what a game is.

You really need to understand this BEFORE you spend $8 on it. To re-emphasize my point: it is not so much a game, as it is more a visual novel. I impulse bought and I will admit I was a bit annoyed. Especially since I got all 6 endings in under 2 hours. The disappointment subsided however due to the amount of text that is included and the atmosphere the game gave. So, when you see it as more of a sprawled out book while you keep your hands busy doing other things, then it becomes a bit more tolerable.

Also, tagging it horror is a bit poor taste. it isn't really "horror." The aesthetic gives it a "horror" look but it isn't really. It's all atmosphere. The cool thing is when you get 6 endings, the developer opens up to you via a notes page so it is always nice to have that kind of transparency. There is also 26 achievements with the bulk being secret ones, so I imagine that will be where most of the "replayability" will come from. Finding all those. There is also a couple other things I couldn't figure out post game, so I imagine there is even more hidden stuff or whatever if that is your bag.

The developer was kind enough to release a demo. Play THAT first. In doing so, it's basically playing the actual game for free. The gameplay does not change, and what you get in the demo is what you get in the real game.

Have a good day.

*Review in progress*

This is just an odd game. I'm still confused of what's going on, but I'm just talking to the NPCs, and figuring out what everything means.

The game is interesting so far. I would advise anyone who wants to purchase this game to play the demo first. Right now I'm enjoying the experience of the game. It's nothing to be excited about, but it might make some players want to keep on playing to figure out the curse of grayface and everything else that the game has to offer.

Buy this game if you like riddles and mysteries.


8/10
(rating and thoughts may change as I progress in the game)