Please note: very vague, mild plot spoilers.

Nothing like spending six-plus hours getting two-thirds of the way through a game you're enjoying only for your new video game console to spazz out on the warp screen, crash, and delete your save file. Fortunately, Ori was compelling enough to put on a brave face and start a new save file.

Initially, Ori's prologue did not sit very with me. It was sentimental in a way that felt like Disney at its most indulgent (orphans, pet-like protagonist). I can kinda tolerate that as a movie watcher, but as an active participant in the story, I'm too cynical to appreciate something so maudlin. As the game progressed, however, the sugar rush wasn't so saccharine, and it was genuinely nice to see a game where a climax was focused on compassion and not vengeance--even if it was a little nonsensical (or maybe I missed something in a cut scene while rolling my eyes and jamming the a button). Fortunately, stories don't matter (to me) in video games!

Ori's gameplay pretty seamlessly combines some of the best elements of the recent slew precision splatformers and Metroid-likes. The soul-link save system is an excellent compromise, eliminating the dread of missing or straying to far from a save state (a feeling I couldn't shake in Hollow Knight), especially for a game whose main challenges are platforming sections, not combat. Forced replaying of prolonged challenges would have been a real drag, but the the infrastructure of the game allows you to add as much challenge as you're willing to tolerate, and it's great. For the three climactic escape sequences, where you can't save, stripping that function successfully makes those segments feel special.

The world is exceptionally well designed. It felt alive and was a genuine pleasure to explore. While most of the secret solutions felt kind of pedestrian in the moment, I probably missed more than I could comprehend, and I only noticed that once I unlocked the 50% secrets achievement in the last level (for context, I didn't agonize over finding everything marked on the map). I imagine there's plenty of exploration out there for the most indulgent players, which is a great way to scale the game.

The greatest challenge of the game, however, stemmed from the controls. I played on normal (always the default settings first), and, while there were truly difficult sections, with long stretches of required memorization of obstacles, the majority of my death count (194) just came from repeatedly hitting the same spikes because I never got used to the jump or glide or moving from climbing the side of a cliff to the top. I prefer playing platformers with a d-pad (and I don't love the Xbox's), but sections (successive projectile bashing) felt much better with a joystick, so I'm clumsily switching back and forth.

I really enjoyed the game's move set and utilizing newly-acquired abilities is a real gameplay highlight. The most enjoyable stretch of a Metroid-like is when you get to backtrack and just wreck havoc on early enemies; too much of it would be obnoxiously easy, but it's a genuine pleasure to just run through long sections of the game obliterating everything. In Ori, it felt even better because routine enemy encounters are kinda tedious.

Because it straddles two worlds, without committing to either, it doesn't reach the heights of pure genre highlights (Celeste or Zero Mission), but it's about as good of a hybrid as I could imagine.

- Second attempt (the first evaporated after a crash) took about 6h25 with 194 deaths on Normal difficulty. Near fine: ★★★★☆