Ori and the Blind Forest (2015)

Just finished last night with 100% completion in about 9 1/2 hours! Went in blind and finished it all myself without having to look anything up, pretty happy about that.

I enjoyed the heck out of this, I'd started it a few times but never made it very far, and now I get what the hype is all about. Since I bought the physical Ori Collection on Switch, I'm jumping straight into Will-o the Wisps because I want to keep this party going. Much shorter than my 30 hour Hollow Knight playthrough but I'm OK with that!

LOVING this game so far. It really comes together once you get some new moves, ie. the double jump and dash are really nice. And I dig the whole upgrade tree as well.

It's definitely sunk its claws into me in the same way that Hollow Knight did. At first, I wasn't a huge fan of Hollow Knight since I didn't know where the heck to go or what to do (plus I died about a thousand times) but once I learned the "system" it became obvious I loved it, and the same concept is at play here.

One thing with Ori making it hard to come from Hollow Knight is just how slippery it feels to control, while HK has very little (if any) movement velocity, Ori is very floaty and takes some time getting used to. But, it's finally agreeing with me and I love it.

I was a little frustrated by my experience with Ori. I really wanted to like it.

The game is cute and charming as hell. Ori himself is a walking plushy. All of the characters and enemies are big squishy blobs. The bad guy is a big owl. The environments are colorful and lively, with lots of glowing blues and reds and a wonderful musical score to boot.

The platforming is fun, most of the time. Ori is bouncy, and easily zips across the map as you pick up upgrades, launching off walls, reflecting off missiles, even playing with gravity. I even really liked the save mechanic, which lets Ori use one of his energy orbs to create a manual checkpoint anywhere Ori isn't in immediate danger.

However, I honestly found Ori to be challenging in ways that I did not enjoy. As you progress through the game, environments become more and more hostile, often 90% coated in 1-hit kill spikes/lava/etc. Enemies not only become more deadlier but also necessary to your traversal - the missile reflection mechanic becomes a necessary way to traverse an environment, but maybe you accidentally kill an enemy, and have to go back to the beginning of a room - or they just decide not to shoot at you when you need them to for a specific jump. Also, just as I was beginning to appreciate the checkpoint mechanic, the game began to take it away from me - many of the major sections of the game have an "escape" climax section, where you must perfectly execute a series of ~20ish jumps/dodges in a row to escape a deadly situation, with no additional checkpoints allowed until you complete that segment, and often a single mistake means death.

If you are a fan of challenging platforming games, Ori is a must play. If you find it on a good sale, I'd recommend trying it. But I found the game stressful in ways I was really disappointed by, I'm afraid.

It is very pretty but really frustrating. Frustrating not equals hard. Hollow Knight is hard, Celeste is hard, but when you fail is because of your own skill and it pushes you get better, this is not the case on Ori, Ori is more about trial and error

Ori is imprecise platforming with ambiguous physics, too many flashy things going on in the screen and makes it difficult to know what is an attack or might hurt you. The background/foreground gets in the way of the platforming and a lot of deaths feel cheap and "gotchas" by the developer.

There is probably a good game there if you have the mind to ignore these frustrations and push through, but I have limited time and I wasn't having fun with the cheap deaths.