One of the last Metroidvanias on Game Pass I hadn't beaten yet, I stayed away from Ori until now because I tried it on PC last year and bounced off of it hard. I decided to give it another chance, in a year of several second chances in my games beaten list, and I'm kinda glad I did. A lot of the problems that turned me away from Ori when I first tried it are absolutely still there, but I was able to push past them and find a sorta happy medium. I 100%'d the game on normal mode and it took me about 7 hours.
Ori and the Blind Forest is about a small sprite named Ori. He gets separated from his home in the great tree in a storm, and the tree tries to emit a massive surge of mystical light to find him, but is fatally wounded in the process. A creature called Naru finds Ori and raises him as a friend up until the decay caused by the great tree's death reaches their grove. Ori mourns the loss of his adopted mother and then sets out on a quest to find what destroyed the great tree and if anything can be done to fix it. The story is very simple but sweet, but it isn't trying to be anything more than that. The real focus of this game is its presentation, and it absolutely nails its look.
A soooorta 2.5D look (although more often 2D-looking), Ori and the Blind Forest is an absolutely beautiful game packed with color, detailed animations, and painting-like environments. Ori seems like a game that was made specifically to seem like a work of art come to life, and it absolutely achieves that. No loading screens means everything flows together visually as well as in pacing as you explore. Lots of ballad-y music brings the sort of somber yet hopeful tone of the visuals to life in a way that works well (although it certainly isn't my kind of music).
Unfortunatley, Ori's biggest strength is also one of its biggest flaws. The environments are SO detailed in the foreground, background, and everything in between, and packed with so much color that it can often be hard to tell what you can actually interact with. There were many times that I was super cautious when I didn't need to be because I thought something in the background was in a plane that I could interact with, and just as many times where I was suddenly killed or heavily damaged out of nowhere because something I thought was in the background was in fact something I could interact with. The game's visual design is very loud, too loud, and that really brings down the game's platforming often enough to be a consistant nuisance.
The other biggest design bugbear about that is that there are a ton of one-hit deaths and quite tricky jumps in the game, so not being confident in what you can even interact with can get you killed a LOT. The game's main saving grace in this respect is its save system, which is almost save-anywhere. Hold B and you make a save point where you're at where you can also assign skillpoints from. It makes what could be an infuriating time a much more forgiving one (but also kinda hilarious given that the game DOES have a hardcore "only one life" mode).
Ori's gameplay is a Metroidvania, but one that takes things a little bit differently from most others I've played. The closest thing I can think of would be Yoku's Island Express, as not only is Ori also about a small creature trying to save a beautiful, colorful wooded world, but the main mechanic is movement. Combat is handled almost entirely by mashing X to launch homing projectiles at nearby enemies. There is almost no aiming other than an optional, not that great grenade projectiles, that's more for hitting switches than fighting. The main mechanic of Ori is its platforming and world exploration, and it doesn't exactly come off on the best foot there either.
A lot of early game stuff is weirdly hard, and I'd say many of the game's hardest platforming is in its first hour or two before you get things like the wall jump or double-jump. Later platforming is hard by virtue of lots of instant-death traps, but early platforming has a lot of jumps very easy to miss if you aren't really trying (heck one of the first jumps in the game is one of those). The maps feel like they were designed with Ori's mid-game or end-game moveset in mind instead of the moveset you'd have when you first reach that area, and as a result the game's best content and flow is after the first hour or two.
The game has a skill point system that you can use after you've killed enough enemies to level up or found an instant level up item hidden in the world. There's an achievement for beating the game with no skill points used, so these level ups are entirely for making the game easier to play for the player. That on top of some optional yet very useful unlockable traversal skills (like the dash and aforementioned grenade) go towards making the game more or less as tricky as the player wants it to be (to a point). Much more powerful homing projectiles, the ability to see hidden walls far easier, and even a second double jump lie in wait if you just get enough skill points. This is a really neat idea as a way to allow the player to grind to make the game easier despite the lack of a combat focus, and is definitely one of the more ingenious elements of Ori's design.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Part of my lower recommendation for this is certainly due to me preferring different Metroidvanias. The focus on platforming rather than combat isn't quite my cup of tea. But the bigger part of it is how the game stumbles so significantly on the one thing it's supposed to be the best at mechanically. A cluttered visual design hindering the platforming was the recurring mistake that kept me irritated with the game over and over, just as I had started to enjoy it again. Between that and the weirdly omnipresent yet indirect combat, the game struggles with an identity crisis from start to finish that isn't deal breaking but is also quite hard to ignore. That probably won't be a problem for a lot of people, but if your time for Metroidvanias is limited, I think a lot of people can find games (especially on Game Pass) that will better suit their time than Ori.
Ori and the Blind Forest is about a small sprite named Ori. He gets separated from his home in the great tree in a storm, and the tree tries to emit a massive surge of mystical light to find him, but is fatally wounded in the process. A creature called Naru finds Ori and raises him as a friend up until the decay caused by the great tree's death reaches their grove. Ori mourns the loss of his adopted mother and then sets out on a quest to find what destroyed the great tree and if anything can be done to fix it. The story is very simple but sweet, but it isn't trying to be anything more than that. The real focus of this game is its presentation, and it absolutely nails its look.
A soooorta 2.5D look (although more often 2D-looking), Ori and the Blind Forest is an absolutely beautiful game packed with color, detailed animations, and painting-like environments. Ori seems like a game that was made specifically to seem like a work of art come to life, and it absolutely achieves that. No loading screens means everything flows together visually as well as in pacing as you explore. Lots of ballad-y music brings the sort of somber yet hopeful tone of the visuals to life in a way that works well (although it certainly isn't my kind of music).
Unfortunatley, Ori's biggest strength is also one of its biggest flaws. The environments are SO detailed in the foreground, background, and everything in between, and packed with so much color that it can often be hard to tell what you can actually interact with. There were many times that I was super cautious when I didn't need to be because I thought something in the background was in a plane that I could interact with, and just as many times where I was suddenly killed or heavily damaged out of nowhere because something I thought was in the background was in fact something I could interact with. The game's visual design is very loud, too loud, and that really brings down the game's platforming often enough to be a consistant nuisance.
The other biggest design bugbear about that is that there are a ton of one-hit deaths and quite tricky jumps in the game, so not being confident in what you can even interact with can get you killed a LOT. The game's main saving grace in this respect is its save system, which is almost save-anywhere. Hold B and you make a save point where you're at where you can also assign skillpoints from. It makes what could be an infuriating time a much more forgiving one (but also kinda hilarious given that the game DOES have a hardcore "only one life" mode).
Ori's gameplay is a Metroidvania, but one that takes things a little bit differently from most others I've played. The closest thing I can think of would be Yoku's Island Express, as not only is Ori also about a small creature trying to save a beautiful, colorful wooded world, but the main mechanic is movement. Combat is handled almost entirely by mashing X to launch homing projectiles at nearby enemies. There is almost no aiming other than an optional, not that great grenade projectiles, that's more for hitting switches than fighting. The main mechanic of Ori is its platforming and world exploration, and it doesn't exactly come off on the best foot there either.
A lot of early game stuff is weirdly hard, and I'd say many of the game's hardest platforming is in its first hour or two before you get things like the wall jump or double-jump. Later platforming is hard by virtue of lots of instant-death traps, but early platforming has a lot of jumps very easy to miss if you aren't really trying (heck one of the first jumps in the game is one of those). The maps feel like they were designed with Ori's mid-game or end-game moveset in mind instead of the moveset you'd have when you first reach that area, and as a result the game's best content and flow is after the first hour or two.
The game has a skill point system that you can use after you've killed enough enemies to level up or found an instant level up item hidden in the world. There's an achievement for beating the game with no skill points used, so these level ups are entirely for making the game easier to play for the player. That on top of some optional yet very useful unlockable traversal skills (like the dash and aforementioned grenade) go towards making the game more or less as tricky as the player wants it to be (to a point). Much more powerful homing projectiles, the ability to see hidden walls far easier, and even a second double jump lie in wait if you just get enough skill points. This is a really neat idea as a way to allow the player to grind to make the game easier despite the lack of a combat focus, and is definitely one of the more ingenious elements of Ori's design.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Part of my lower recommendation for this is certainly due to me preferring different Metroidvanias. The focus on platforming rather than combat isn't quite my cup of tea. But the bigger part of it is how the game stumbles so significantly on the one thing it's supposed to be the best at mechanically. A cluttered visual design hindering the platforming was the recurring mistake that kept me irritated with the game over and over, just as I had started to enjoy it again. Between that and the weirdly omnipresent yet indirect combat, the game struggles with an identity crisis from start to finish that isn't deal breaking but is also quite hard to ignore. That probably won't be a problem for a lot of people, but if your time for Metroidvanias is limited, I think a lot of people can find games (especially on Game Pass) that will better suit their time than Ori.