(MASSIVE spoilers for both Celeste and OMORI)

Celeste and OMORI are both games about a protagonist who deals with mental illness; Celeste stars Madeline, a young adult woman seeking to find purpose in her life by climbing a mountain, and Sunny, a teenage boy who stays in his house and retreats into a dream world. The two share depression and anxiety that they tackle as they go through their journeys, and both dealing with manifestations of their inner demons.

Madeline's appears as a copy of herself called "Part of You," officially nicknamed "Badeline." Badeline is a literal manifestation of Madeline's anxiety bent on making her get off the mountain. Madeline refuses to listen due to wanting her anxiety to stop taking over her life, so Badeline gets aggressive. Badeline chases down her main self, antagonizes someone Madeline herself is too nice to say no to and drives that person over the edge enough to get him to attack Madeline, and tries to stop a rail car Madeline is in from reaching its destination all at the risk of Madeline being harmed.

On the OMORI side, Sunny's manifests as SOMETHING, a monster that takes on numerous forms to prey on Sunny's phobias: stairs, spiders, drowning, and a mysterious singular eye that continuously taunts Sunny in his dreams, taking away his friend Basil, and even in reality with the real life Basil also suffering from SOMETHING. SOMETHING attacks Sunny at multiple points with one case attacking while Sunny is trying to rescue someone drowning in a pond which nearly causes Sunny himself to drown from how Afraid his fears make him.

Both Madeline and Sunny learn a way of combating their fears: calming down and breathing deeply. Madeline learns a trick of trying to make a feather float with her breath, while Sunny remembers the advice of his sister Mari as he's facing down SOMETHING on the stairs. For Madeline, she uses this to get over a panic attack she is struck with while on the car previously mentioned, and pushes past Badeline's attack upon her. On Sunny's end, he also learns how to focus and persevere to combat his fears. He uses what he's learned to get over his fears of stairs, spiders, and drowning and fending off the SOMETHING that attacks him at every corner.

However, this isn't infallible. Late into their journeys, both Madeline and Sunny put their techniques into action. And they don't work.

Madeline tries to use the feather technique and her mental feather is swiftly cut in half by Badeline who drags Madeline all the way to the base of the mountain, nulling all her progress thus far and leaving Madeline in shambles. Sunny meanwhile is in a fight against his friend Basil who is overcome by SOMETHING. Sunny tries to calm down, focus, and persist but nothing works. Sunny goes beyond being Afraid and becomes Stressed Out with the confrontation eventually winding up with Sunny's eye being damaged and possibly gouged out by the garden shears Basil was going to use to kill himself. Both the boys end up hospitalized.

I love how these stories accurately portray that trying to just alleviate your mental illness won't get you very far. It's useful, sure, but it isn't the end all be all solution.

The true first step for both characters is acceptance. Accepting that they aren't well. Accepting the issues they're straddled with and tackling them head on.

Madeline does it by making amends with Badeline, promising to not ignore her and work together with her since Madeline avoids her sorrows by drinking (a lot) and generally trying to avoid her inner problems which led her to Mount Celeste. Badeline promising to not be so terrible on her end. It's only a start for the both of them, but it's a start they're making together. They both put their abilities together and climb the mountain as Badeline's doubts about the effort fade away. When they reach the summit, they're both elated and their promise to one another to work together is cemented.

In OMORI, by now we have learned that SOMETHING isn't quite a manifestation of Sunny's depression and anxiety: SOMETHING is Sunny's guilt of his accidental murder of his sister Mari. His retreat from his crushing guilt, his crippling depression, his overwhelming anxiety from the incident created the dream world most of OMORI takes place in as well as Sunny's alter ego Omori who protects Sunny from his repressed memories of Mari's death.
This SOMETHING is upon Basil as well because he helped Sunny frame Mari's death as a suicide, and SOMETHING's sole eye was Mari's dead body glaring at the two through her hair. Basil is a sheer nervous wreck and by the time he's confronted by Sunny, he's two seconds away from suicide because he can't deal with the pain of his life anymore. Thankfully, he's saved in the best ending but most endings leave him dead.

Within Sunny's mind, he faces off against Omori who is now a true manifestation of Sunny's suicidal depression and guilt over Mari. Omori tears into Sunny during the fight, latching onto EVERYTHING much like depression does to try and tear down Sunny. Sunny can't even win the fight against Omori initially, Omori defeats Sunny while telling him to die.
You can let yourself fall here and be overtaken by Omori which winds up with Omori hurtling himself off the hospital balcony.

Sunny, however, embraces the memories he repressed and combats Omori on the winning end. The fight ends with Sunny embracing Omori with Omori dropping his knife, signifying that everything Sunny has kept from himself being embraced, both good and bad. It's after this that Sunny shows his first emotion other than being afraid: he awakens crying. He then goes to the hospital room Basil is staying in to confess about what happened with Mari's death.

While Celeste and OMORI have radically different plots and different reasons of why their main characters deal with mental illness, the approach to the main characters' mental issues is mutual. While remedies like deep breathing are useful, they aren't going to get rid of the problem. The way you start beating it back is accepting you have issues and being proactive about them. In real life, you aren't going to be fighting some dramatic battle inside yourself. You're going to be seeking therapy and bettering yourself and whatnot. However, I love that these games approach this topic in a very intelligent way and genuinely have helped people with their own journeys with mental illness.

Gosh, I teared up writing this. I love these games to bits.