Ori and the Blind Forest, an Xbox One console exclusive from developer Moon Studios that is also available on Steam, is here.
Long story short: it's incredibly hard.
Really hard. So hard, in fact, that the game keeps track of your hundreds upon hundreds of deaths. My death count at the end of an eight hour playthrough -- 472.
You would never guess Ori And the Blind Forest's surprising difficulty from glancing at the game's whimsical aesthetic. The game looks like it was taken straight out the pages of a forgotten children's tale, taking place in a magical forest corrupted by evil and brought to life with what looks like hand-painted artwork.
As the orphaned light spirit Ori, players must embark on a Legend of Zelda-like quest to gather various elemental relics in order to restore light to a forest that has become plagued by darkness. Along the way Ori is joined by Sein, a glowing orb that aids Ori in combat and serves as the Navi to Ori's Link.
Ori and the Blind Forest wears its inspirations on its sleeve. The game plays like a classic 2D Metroid title with more than a hint of Zelda splashed in, as players explore environments, acquire power ups and learn new abilities in order to access new areas of the map before diving into Ori and the Blind Forest's own version of a dungeon.
While it doesn't shy away from imitating "Metroidvania" style games, Ori and the Blind Forest doesn't let itself be controlled by those inspirations either. The game's visuals, story and sweeping score gives the game an identity all its own. From the game's opening moments, Moon Studios sets a somber and surprisingly emotional tone, helped by an orchestral soundtrack that is both epic in scope and profoundly touching when it needs to be. Even with little actual dialogue to move the story along, you care about Ori and the game's cast of beautifully animated characters. You will never have a problem understanding what Moon Studios is attempting to convey in this tale of hope, love and sacrifice.
That emotional attachment makes it all the harder to watch Ori die over and over again thanks to your lack of skill. You are your own worst enemy in Ori, in more ways than one. While Ori and the Blind Forest is filled with bad guys, the true antagonist of the game is your feeble hands, as they struggle to keep up with the game's often times brutal platforming puzzles.
As much as Ori and the Blind Forest is inspired by 2D sidescrollers, it might have even more in common with a game of an entirely different sort -- Dark Souls.
Yes, I'm comparing Ori and the Blind Forest to From Software's notoriously difficult Dark Souls series, which makes a point of never holding the player's hand and demanding perfection in every movement. It sounds absurd at first, to compare this E-rated adventure with the bloody, M-Rated Gothic fantasy of Dark Souls, but once you begin playing you will understand. Orio and the Blind Forest wants you to die. And die you will. Puzzles and platforming segments are ingeniously designed to push you to the breaking point, demanding not just an understanding of all of Ori's many abilities but a PhD in their practical use.
Like Dark Souls, you will learn by doing in Ori and the Blind Forest. The game forces you to play segments over and over again until you have areas, with their many enemies, hazards and platforms, memorized. Jump to this platform. Glide. Wall climb. Air dash. Jump back to the wall. Double jump. Glide. The game quickly becomes a complex algorithm of trigger holds and button presses as you weave together all of Ori's various abilities to overcome platforming puzzles that are difficult to pull off in the first, second or even third try.
This is even more true for each dungeon's climactic chase sequence, which requires players to outrun environmental hazards while performing feats of extreme precision. One wrong move and it's back to square one. You will have each sequence down to an exact science by the time you complete it.
You will die over and over again before you get it right. It's an idea that isn't only found in the game's toughest moments -- it's everywhere, all the time, thanks to a design choice that makes sense on paper but in practice results in frustration.
You see, Ori and the Blind Forest uses a manual save system. Saving (and spending experience points to learn new abilities) requires players to use "energy" and create a save point. Energy is occasionally dropped from enemies or found in the game world.
The idea is that you can create your own save points when and where you need them. It's always nice to see a developer put more control in the hands of the player, but in the case of Ori and the Blind Forest, where even the smallest misstep can mean an untimely demise, it feels like a mistake.
You will overcome numerous challenges that will cause you to cheer with triumph over the course of Ori and the Blind Forest's roughly 7-10 hours of gameplay. It is from that sense of accomplishing the impossible that the game's fun is derived. It's a shame then that far too often that moment of victory is cut short moments later when Ori lands on a previously unseen briar patch and dies. Only then do you realize you forgot to manually save your game and are forced to achieve the impossible a second time. And a third time. Maybe even a fourth time, if your frustration starts to get the better of you.
Those moments are irritating enough, but worse still are the moments when Ori is out of energy and can't save at all, even if you desperately want to. This is especially prevalent early on in the game before players acquire more energy upgrades. The game's first ability, the Charge Flame, requires energy to use and is your first method for unlocking new areas. It can also be used to deliver devastating damage to nearby enemies. Because the ability uses energy, players often have to choose between saving their progress or opening up the next door.
Saving your progress early on in the title often means having to backtrack and kill enemies multiple times in order to acquire the needed energy to progress, whereas pressing forward without saving is likely to get you killed and require you to replay the last 10 minutes over again. While running out of energy happens far less often after the first hour or two of the game when you acquire more energy upgrades, the flaws of this well-meaning system will rear its head multiple times before the game is through, turning what should be a challenging platformer into an exercise in anger management. It's a baffling design choice that holds Ori and the Blind Forest back from reaching something close to 2D platforming perfection.
Despite all this, it's hard to get mad at Ori and the Blind Forest. The game is just so charming, so visually striking and so blissfully hard that you can't help but fall in love with it, even as it grinds you into the dirt. Though you are likely to invent several new swear words by the end of it, Ori and the Blind Forest never feels unfair, thanks to the game's precise control scheme.
You aren't mad at the game's many challenges. You see what needs to be done and know what to do: sometimes it's just really hard to actually do it. But it is striving for that perfection, and knowing you can do it if you just try one more time, that makes the game's steep difficulty worthwhile in the end.
Story:
★★★★☆
Design:
★★★☆☆
Gameplay:
★★★★☆
Presentation:
★★★★☆
Overall:
★★★★☆
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