This review contains spoilers
A wonderful Metroidvania style game. This game really nails, in my opinion, the most important part of a Metroidvania: the movement. By design, you're going to be trekking back and forth across the entire map multiple times, so making the movement feel good is super important.
The movement in this game is fantastic, especially once you have your full moveset. Your jumps are just the right amount of floaty and the mid-air control smooth enough to give an extremely smooth flow to getting around the world and exploring in general.
Both the art and the music for this game are stunning, doing a good job of making the world feel both ethereal and epic. The game does a great job of giving everything a sense of scale, making you feel tiny in a huge world.
The game is not without it's flaws. The combat is a bit uninspired, mostly involving mashing the attack button when you're near enemies, since there's no aiming to speak of. You do get an upgrade about a third of the way into the game that gives a few more options for combat, which helps, but doesn't salvage the system as a whole. The game doesn't put a big focus on combat, to be fair, offering zero boss encounters and relatively few enemies that must be killed. Early in the game you also have a bottleneck with regards to the game's energy system, which wouldn't be a big problem if you didn't also use that to save. That said, by the end of the game, you'll have enough energy to drop saves after even the smallest amount of progress.
The highlights of the game are the escape sequences, one after each of the three temples. These fast-paced sections really test your mastery of the game's movement options, which again, is the best part of the game. They're challenging enough to feel really satisfying when you complete them, but not so hard that it breaks your spirit, and respawn times are low so the punishment for death is minimal.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition, and I'm definitely interested in checking out the sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. 4/5 stars.
The movement in this game is fantastic, especially once you have your full moveset. Your jumps are just the right amount of floaty and the mid-air control smooth enough to give an extremely smooth flow to getting around the world and exploring in general.
Both the art and the music for this game are stunning, doing a good job of making the world feel both ethereal and epic. The game does a great job of giving everything a sense of scale, making you feel tiny in a huge world.
The game is not without it's flaws. The combat is a bit uninspired, mostly involving mashing the attack button when you're near enemies, since there's no aiming to speak of. You do get an upgrade about a third of the way into the game that gives a few more options for combat, which helps, but doesn't salvage the system as a whole. The game doesn't put a big focus on combat, to be fair, offering zero boss encounters and relatively few enemies that must be killed. Early in the game you also have a bottleneck with regards to the game's energy system, which wouldn't be a big problem if you didn't also use that to save. That said, by the end of the game, you'll have enough energy to drop saves after even the smallest amount of progress.
The highlights of the game are the escape sequences, one after each of the three temples. These fast-paced sections really test your mastery of the game's movement options, which again, is the best part of the game. They're challenging enough to feel really satisfying when you complete them, but not so hard that it breaks your spirit, and respawn times are low so the punishment for death is minimal.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition, and I'm definitely interested in checking out the sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. 4/5 stars.