+ 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.
