First Impressions:
OMEA

By Chris Picone, 28 July, 2026

Omea is a collection of visual novels - or roleplaying games, depending on how you want to look at it - driven by generative AI storytelling. I approached this with an open and curious mind; while I think the creative human component should never be removed, I do think the future of these genres must lie with AI assistance - but I also don't think current generation technology is ready for it yet. 

Incredibly AImmersive built Omea on their own Large Language Model and trained it using more than 150,000 novels and other literary works.  The goal is that Omea acts as a story-teller or game master by presenting the player with a scenario which they must respond to.  In theory, there are no limits.  The player can respond in any manner, and the AI will then respond accordingly, even remembering previous interactions.  Impressively, Omea it's also all voiced - also powered by AI, and surprisingly high quality.  Omea had an answer for everything I threw at it.  It let me construct a funeral pyre and offer a prayer to the dead, build a lean-to and improvised camp, follow game trails, check berries for poison, lay traps, set up an ambush, and talk my way into an alliance.  I wanted to test the system out so I alternated between taking the game very seriously, and deliberately trying to mess with it. In the first instance, I mooned a talking raven and then took a dump; the game acknowledged my actions and then the bird made fun of me.  In another instance, I thought I'd really throw the system by having my character masturbate for warmth.  Again, the game wrote my actions into the story, adding narrative depth and then having the bird praise my creative processes and efficiency.  Omea never dropped out of character and was always well-written, although it could become somewhat repetitive when describing a familiar scene over and over as days passed. And there were other foibles; the system seemed to have difficulty tracking the passage of time and was forever confused about my armament, having me holding a seax (knife) one moment and then resting my hand on an axe handle in the next breath.  The was only one occasion where the AI misinterpreted my prompt, but it was a doozy.  I was following a blood trail and paused for a rest. Or that was the plan - the AI had me suddenly drop tools and walk all the way back to the beach, returning to the camp I'd dismantled and abandoned, freezing all the way. Have to say though, I was impressed that after a brief argument with the AI, it actually reset its mistake and put me back on the trail, rested, and continued the story like it had never happened.  The next major AI flop moment was when the blood trail I was following - which belonged to an injured wolf - led me directly into a bandit's camp and suddenly the blood belonged to an injured man inside, the wolf seemingly forgotten.  All-in-all though, Omea did a pretty good job of crafting my story.

 The verdict?  Omea isn't perfect by any means, but what it's already achieving is pretty impressive and it points toward a very encouraging future.  As this is a pre-release review, only the Viking story is available at the moment, and presumably the team are still upgrading the engine, bug-fixing, etc. As a story, the blow-by-blow nature of the delivery means the pace is rather slow and it can get a touch grindy at times. As a roleplaying game, honestly it's pretty good, although I wonder how much of that stems from player ability.  I'm a professional writer and relatively knowledgeable about so I can only imagine the prompts I'm feeding Omea must be drastically different to the layman. I wonder if they're likely to enjoy the same experience. 

Links: 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4275550/OMEA/