Last week, the final episode of a Sonic the Hedgehog fan game called Sonic Omens was released on Game Jolt. On its surface, it seemed an edgy but serviceable fan game. I even played it for a bit and, other than the airplane segments, had a decent time with it. But over the weekend, new information about fan studio Ouroboros Studio and the development process behind Sonic Omens was published online that has put the game in a different light.
The entire saga was compiled in a Google Doc posted to a Twitter account named @SonicOmens, which has since been repurposed to share stories about Ouroboros Studio and the Sonic Omens project. The Google Doc was compiled by a user calling themself Farkle, and outlines specific accusations against the Ouroboros team, including: harassment of people who had negative feedback about the game, pay walling Sonic Omens previews behind its Patreon and Boosty (a Russian Patreon equivalent), stealing music from the Cars 2 video game, and also hiding an explicit texture in one of its boss characters that sexualizes Maria, a 12-year-old girl.
Sonic Omens has been part of controversy during its development for putting beta behind a Patreon paywall before, which has been stigmatized by the Sonic fan game community and could result in more scrutiny from Sega about how fans use the IP, which the company has historically been pretty chill with. Especially compared to companies like Nintendo. Despite past criticism outlined in the Google Doc, between Patreon and Boosty, Farkle claims Ouroboros Studio has hidden Sonic Omens content behind paywalls and advertised it alongside original games when asking for donations. The team ran ads for the game on Game Jolt, where the game is downloadable for free, but all of the above has been more or less framed as a workaround Sega’s rules about using the IP for profit by not actively selling the game.
More Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Sonic Fangames Are Much More Than a Comparison Point for Sonic Frontiers
- YouTube Keeps Labeling Sonic Videos ‘For Kids,’ and Creators Suffer for It
- Why Twitter Artists Keep Drawing Sonic Characters Walking into Stores
The document goes on to detail several examples of online harassment and between the team and people who expressed negative feedback on the game on Twitter and Discord, showcase how a song from the game is a rearrangement of a song from the Cars 2 video game, and lastly claims to have found a texture in Sonic Omens’ files for Maria Robotnik, a 12-year-old human child, that include underwear with the text “Bad Girl” written on them. The texture is not visible in the game when the character appears, so Farkle says they assume whoever made it and included it in the final game put it in there “for fun.”
We’ve reached out to Ouroboros Studio for comment and will update this story should we hear back.
