A solid, somewhat linear platformer with really cool stuff. I really liked the environment, I think they did an extremely good job designing them and they look beautiful on top of being varied and interesting.

The game often plays around with gimmicks that make the platforming more interesting instead of sticking to core concepts. For example one area will have a changing layout, another one will have wind or some sort of jumping mushrooms… The game also has the unique ability of bashing which allows you to dash through objects and also to send them flying in a direction, it’s a very cool ability that offers a lot to the gameplay.

The game is linear but also story driven. The story is light but emotional and has beautiful moments. I really don’t have much more to say, it was a pleasant experience.

I have heard a ton of great things about the Ori games and since I needed a short game to fill some time in my backlog schedule and was recommended this one, I thought I'd give it a go. It's clear to me now that that was a mistake. While Ori and the Blind Forest was a short experience it was a very miserable and frustrating one.

Lets start out with the good, the game is drop-dead gorgeous to look at. The artstyle and world just look stunning, even with the blurrier graphics of the Switch the game just looks great. The music is also very good and matches the tone of the beautiful environments it plays in. And to give the gameplay a slight compliment, the basic metroidvania elements of getting new powers and exploring the interconnected world were fun and I never once got lost which is a huge plus for me here. And the story, though a bit lacking, is pretty sweet and has good themes.

Despite all these positives, Ori and the Blind Forest falters with its moment-to-moment gameplay and makes for an incredibly irritating experience rather than a fun one. A lot of the game's problems come from how Ori controls. Ori is incredibly light on her (at least I think it's a her) feet and moves around the world in a really loose and fluid way, the problem is the world is clearly not designed around this control style and it leads to much frustration. The game asks for precision in its platforming and that simply not something that's very easy to do with a character that's so floaty, at times it felt like I was playing Super Meat Boy only that I can tell that that's not what the developers intended it to feel like. On top of that the combat is just incredibly awful here. Because Ori is so light and fragile she can't really take a lot of hits from anything before dying, and unfortunately the enemies in this game are really good at hitting you. This wouldn't be a problem of course if you had substantial means to defend yourself, but of course, you don't. What you get is a little orb that can shoot out three light projectiles before having to take a second to recharge, meaning combat boils down to using these attacks and then dodging the attacks the enemies throw at you but since you control so lightly and there's no shield or dodge button you kinda just have to try and jump away from their attacks which I found most of the time just led to jumping straight into them instead. Now clearly combat is not supposed to be a focus here, as proven by a lack of boss fights or enemy gauntlets but at that point I just have to wonder, why make the game a metroidvania at all? Why not just refine the platforming elements (they clearly need it) and make a pretty good platformer? Was it really part of the developers' vision to make a metroidvania that has unfair and unsatisfying combat, or were they just doing it because its what all the cool games were doing? Anyways moving onto my final gripe with the gameplay, the save system is a mess. Instead of just having a button on the menu or a certain room to go to in order to save progress, Ori's way of saving progress comes from an in game ability that has it's whole meter and everything. By holding a button and using one point from the refillable energy meter, you're allowed to save your spot on any flat surface in the game (as long as it's stable and there's no enemies within eyesight that is) and if you die you will respawn back to this point. Because the game provides you with the materials to refill this energy meter often it becomes a main part of the gameplay, this allows you to save your spot before a particularly tricky set of enemy placements or platforming section to make the best of this, which in my eyes kinda confirms that they knew that both of these main aspects were not great and instead of fixing them they gave the player the equivalent of a save state button to try and remedy it. All these things add up to make a game that is truly frustrating to play and makes me forget about all the good aspects it has while I'm playing it.

I wanted to really like this game, its beautiful artstyle, spectacular music, and touching story cannot be understated, unfortunately though the same goes for its unproportionate and unfun gameplay. The problem with Ori and the Blind Forest is that I can tell there was passion behind it, it just wasn't placed into the right areas unfortunately.