Ori and the Blind Forest has lovely visuals, a simple and heartwarming story, and some really inspired ideas for platformer exploration, but artificial difficulty and hiccups in the interactions between movement options and the environment can make it more of a chore to play through than it should be.
There are a few ingredients for a guaranteed indie smash these days: Metroidvania layout, difficult platforming sections, and a somber and largely wordless story. I don’t mean to be too cynical here, but it’s the combination of these elements that brought smash success, in particular, to Hollow Knight and Ori and the Blind Forest. Eventually, I’ll try to unpack what disappoints me with the former game, but having just finished a playthrough of the latter and having recently played a fantastic Castlevania game not too long ago (Circle of the Moon), I have some fresh thoughts on why these trendier indies have a hard time appealing to me.
Let’s start with the basics: there is some inherent tension in the different design elements at play here. Metroidvanias reward, at their best, expansive exploration. Getting lost in a world isn’t necessarily the point, as many of the best in the genre guide you along almost invisibly, but coming up to doors you can’t open or ledges you can’t reach and circling back later is part and parcel of the experience.
This can be strongly at odds with incorporating difficult platforming into the formula, as it becomes unclear at times when you’re failing to execute a complex task vs. when you’re just not supposed to go somewhere right at the moment. Ori falls into this trap most often in the opening sections of the game, where you have limited movement options. Sometimes, a wrong turn will land you in a bed of spikes, and you’re given very little time to react and reflect on what just happened before you’re respawned. It can be extremely confusing when you’re just missing where they want you to land from a long drop or when you’re being told to back off. Ori’s solution to this problem is inelegant: the map (along the main story path, which is mostly what I stuck to in my own playthrough) has very few turns to it, so you basically go and check off everywhere else and then heave a sigh and get ready to die a few times to map out where you’re supposed to go.
And you might as well get used to that feeling of hitting spikes and not understanding why, as the game will mercilessly throw them in your path as often as possible. Following the critical pathway down after a difficult section? You better fucking have resources on hand to pop a save because there’s no telling what’s down that pit. The camera moves somewhat cinematically to follow you, and it can have a hard time catching up with the floor before you do. Later on, are you trying to see what you can reach with a charged jump? You’re almost definitely going to smash your head on spikes. I became so conditioned to this that in the second dungeon, I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out a puzzle (a puzzle that’s basically supposed to introduce you to the gimmick of the dungeon) because the blades of grass sitting on a random platform looked too much like spikes to me to trust that I could land on it and use it as a sounding area for what I was supposed to do.
This gets even worse when you’re not solving a puzzle and in fact know what you’re supposed to do. Later on, you’ll have to boost jump off of wall surfaces, and this sometimes requires you to go at an upward diagonal angle. Because you know being off by a centimeter will smash you into spikes, you try some precision aiming and… Ori has slid himself up the wall and into some spikes that are just there for the fuck of it. Like the Metroidvania elements, the spikes that litter this game feel like window dressing, adding an artificial challenge where decent game design would have worked just as well. I get it, the forest is hostile, but there really has to be some other way to separate out narrow landing areas that resets your position with the platforming challenge that doesn’t kill you for being slightly off.
This is annoying in regular play, but the game’s obsession with cinematic platforming sections means you’ll be going up against this as the game expects you to basically learn flawless execution for some really difficult platforming sections. This kind of thing is fun in Rayman’s racing levels, partially because those are optional and partially because you’re well aware before you jump in what’s going to be in store. You also know that Ubisoft has honed those levels to mechanical perfection, so once you learn a piece, you’ve learned it forever. The weird physics of Ori are far from perfect, despite what you’ll bafflingly see on this page and other reviews. I did the second and third “escape the area” sections over and over, and I can tell you that exact, identical execution sometimes randomly landed Ori just a hair short of where he was supposed to be or ran him out of rhythm with the elements around him, resulting in damage or death. The very final gameplay section has an all new visual element that you have to compute perfectly the second you hit it or else repeat about two minutes of technical gameplay all at once. And, I can confirm, that element is not mechanically wound. There’s RNG involved in the spacing of the stuff, which means you can kill yourself through no fault of your own besides keeping pace.
It’s worth going into that element a bit more. I’m surprised I don’t see more complaints about the Bash mechanic. Jesus Christ, Bash. Okay, so when you first get Bash, it’s the coolest fucking thing ever. It feels really fresh to me. Maybe I’m missing what game they stole it from. You basically can grab a projectile or (some) enemies in a sort of stasis field and redirect their momentum around Ori. This has two uses. The first is movement, where you’ll utilize an enemy or their projectile to shoot yourself, say, upward, to reach heights you couldn’t normally. The second is for breaking stuff, where you’ll either redirect projectiles or enemies into vulnerable surfaces or other enemies to progress. It’s a really, really fun mechanic. On paper.
The trouble sets in when you reach some of the more technical situations later on. Some pathways require chaining of multiple enemies’ projectiles to reach where you need to go, and these enemies’ lock-on is really unpredictable. So you’ll be in the air with minimal room or time to adjust, and if a projectile shoots too low for you to catch it, say hello to your old friends the spikes. At least that can feel like your fault. Try enemies that just randomly stop deciding to shoot at you, leaving you to slowly fall to a lower level or (let’s be real here, it’s Ori’s favorite thing to do to you) your death on fucking spikes. These sections are miserable and take one of the best mechanics in the game and ruin them. I went from extremely excited to Bash everything in sight to feeling extreme relief when the mechanic was set aside.
And a lot of that relief came from the fact that when you’re not being put in scripted chases or set up for platforming failure for the fuck of it, moving Ori around feels really nice. The lack of precision allows you to focus instead on momentum, and chaining together movement techniques to just get around is really fun. It feels like blasphemy to compare these two, but it really does feel like the movement in a Mario game when it works. The issue is that Mario is in some of the best games ever and gets to utilize that movement in enjoyable levels, and Ori is usually stuck coming to a complete stop or an early demise before a flow state can be reached.
It feels almost like bullying to add this in, but the combat in this game is just wretched. There’s five enemies: jumpers, splitters, moving projectile spitters, stationary projectile spitters, dive bombers, and chargers. The same boss is used in all three dungeons with a palette swap and does not even vary tactics in each one. Please do yourself a favor and upgrade your attack, as without the upgrades, the combat will take even longer, and no one deserves to deal with this combat longer than absolutely necessary. Enemies are haphazardly placed to basically cut your momentum, forcing you to stand in one place and spam the attack button until they’re done wigging out and you can go back to playing the game. At worst, they will keep themselves on a ledge or narrow platform you have to land on and basically force you to tank damage to proceed. Not fun.
This obsession with artificial difficulty and sloppiness in level and combat design is a real shame, because there is a lot to love about Ori. The visuals are very pleasant, and I didn’t have an issue with saminess of environments, as I think they played around within the forest theme pretty wonderfully. The story is genuinely very touching for as simple as it is. And it’s fun to have a narrowly honed, somewhat linear game beneath the Metroidvania pretense. I wonder if there were just built-in checkpoints and the team got to just make a platformer if the strengths around movement and abilities could have been honed a bit better to less maddening effect.
Unfortunately, this was one of those games I left more relieved it was over than glad I had engaged it. I had plans to go on to Will of the Wisps, but I think I’m going to pass for now and revisit the series at some point if I get word that they’ve improved on my complaints, which seems unlikely given that everyone seems to have nothing but effusive praise for the games. Oh well.
There are a few ingredients for a guaranteed indie smash these days: Metroidvania layout, difficult platforming sections, and a somber and largely wordless story. I don’t mean to be too cynical here, but it’s the combination of these elements that brought smash success, in particular, to Hollow Knight and Ori and the Blind Forest. Eventually, I’ll try to unpack what disappoints me with the former game, but having just finished a playthrough of the latter and having recently played a fantastic Castlevania game not too long ago (Circle of the Moon), I have some fresh thoughts on why these trendier indies have a hard time appealing to me.
Let’s start with the basics: there is some inherent tension in the different design elements at play here. Metroidvanias reward, at their best, expansive exploration. Getting lost in a world isn’t necessarily the point, as many of the best in the genre guide you along almost invisibly, but coming up to doors you can’t open or ledges you can’t reach and circling back later is part and parcel of the experience.
This can be strongly at odds with incorporating difficult platforming into the formula, as it becomes unclear at times when you’re failing to execute a complex task vs. when you’re just not supposed to go somewhere right at the moment. Ori falls into this trap most often in the opening sections of the game, where you have limited movement options. Sometimes, a wrong turn will land you in a bed of spikes, and you’re given very little time to react and reflect on what just happened before you’re respawned. It can be extremely confusing when you’re just missing where they want you to land from a long drop or when you’re being told to back off. Ori’s solution to this problem is inelegant: the map (along the main story path, which is mostly what I stuck to in my own playthrough) has very few turns to it, so you basically go and check off everywhere else and then heave a sigh and get ready to die a few times to map out where you’re supposed to go.
And you might as well get used to that feeling of hitting spikes and not understanding why, as the game will mercilessly throw them in your path as often as possible. Following the critical pathway down after a difficult section? You better fucking have resources on hand to pop a save because there’s no telling what’s down that pit. The camera moves somewhat cinematically to follow you, and it can have a hard time catching up with the floor before you do. Later on, are you trying to see what you can reach with a charged jump? You’re almost definitely going to smash your head on spikes. I became so conditioned to this that in the second dungeon, I spent about ten minutes trying to figure out a puzzle (a puzzle that’s basically supposed to introduce you to the gimmick of the dungeon) because the blades of grass sitting on a random platform looked too much like spikes to me to trust that I could land on it and use it as a sounding area for what I was supposed to do.
This gets even worse when you’re not solving a puzzle and in fact know what you’re supposed to do. Later on, you’ll have to boost jump off of wall surfaces, and this sometimes requires you to go at an upward diagonal angle. Because you know being off by a centimeter will smash you into spikes, you try some precision aiming and… Ori has slid himself up the wall and into some spikes that are just there for the fuck of it. Like the Metroidvania elements, the spikes that litter this game feel like window dressing, adding an artificial challenge where decent game design would have worked just as well. I get it, the forest is hostile, but there really has to be some other way to separate out narrow landing areas that resets your position with the platforming challenge that doesn’t kill you for being slightly off.
This is annoying in regular play, but the game’s obsession with cinematic platforming sections means you’ll be going up against this as the game expects you to basically learn flawless execution for some really difficult platforming sections. This kind of thing is fun in Rayman’s racing levels, partially because those are optional and partially because you’re well aware before you jump in what’s going to be in store. You also know that Ubisoft has honed those levels to mechanical perfection, so once you learn a piece, you’ve learned it forever. The weird physics of Ori are far from perfect, despite what you’ll bafflingly see on this page and other reviews. I did the second and third “escape the area” sections over and over, and I can tell you that exact, identical execution sometimes randomly landed Ori just a hair short of where he was supposed to be or ran him out of rhythm with the elements around him, resulting in damage or death. The very final gameplay section has an all new visual element that you have to compute perfectly the second you hit it or else repeat about two minutes of technical gameplay all at once. And, I can confirm, that element is not mechanically wound. There’s RNG involved in the spacing of the stuff, which means you can kill yourself through no fault of your own besides keeping pace.
It’s worth going into that element a bit more. I’m surprised I don’t see more complaints about the Bash mechanic. Jesus Christ, Bash. Okay, so when you first get Bash, it’s the coolest fucking thing ever. It feels really fresh to me. Maybe I’m missing what game they stole it from. You basically can grab a projectile or (some) enemies in a sort of stasis field and redirect their momentum around Ori. This has two uses. The first is movement, where you’ll utilize an enemy or their projectile to shoot yourself, say, upward, to reach heights you couldn’t normally. The second is for breaking stuff, where you’ll either redirect projectiles or enemies into vulnerable surfaces or other enemies to progress. It’s a really, really fun mechanic. On paper.
The trouble sets in when you reach some of the more technical situations later on. Some pathways require chaining of multiple enemies’ projectiles to reach where you need to go, and these enemies’ lock-on is really unpredictable. So you’ll be in the air with minimal room or time to adjust, and if a projectile shoots too low for you to catch it, say hello to your old friends the spikes. At least that can feel like your fault. Try enemies that just randomly stop deciding to shoot at you, leaving you to slowly fall to a lower level or (let’s be real here, it’s Ori’s favorite thing to do to you) your death on fucking spikes. These sections are miserable and take one of the best mechanics in the game and ruin them. I went from extremely excited to Bash everything in sight to feeling extreme relief when the mechanic was set aside.
And a lot of that relief came from the fact that when you’re not being put in scripted chases or set up for platforming failure for the fuck of it, moving Ori around feels really nice. The lack of precision allows you to focus instead on momentum, and chaining together movement techniques to just get around is really fun. It feels like blasphemy to compare these two, but it really does feel like the movement in a Mario game when it works. The issue is that Mario is in some of the best games ever and gets to utilize that movement in enjoyable levels, and Ori is usually stuck coming to a complete stop or an early demise before a flow state can be reached.
It feels almost like bullying to add this in, but the combat in this game is just wretched. There’s five enemies: jumpers, splitters, moving projectile spitters, stationary projectile spitters, dive bombers, and chargers. The same boss is used in all three dungeons with a palette swap and does not even vary tactics in each one. Please do yourself a favor and upgrade your attack, as without the upgrades, the combat will take even longer, and no one deserves to deal with this combat longer than absolutely necessary. Enemies are haphazardly placed to basically cut your momentum, forcing you to stand in one place and spam the attack button until they’re done wigging out and you can go back to playing the game. At worst, they will keep themselves on a ledge or narrow platform you have to land on and basically force you to tank damage to proceed. Not fun.
This obsession with artificial difficulty and sloppiness in level and combat design is a real shame, because there is a lot to love about Ori. The visuals are very pleasant, and I didn’t have an issue with saminess of environments, as I think they played around within the forest theme pretty wonderfully. The story is genuinely very touching for as simple as it is. And it’s fun to have a narrowly honed, somewhat linear game beneath the Metroidvania pretense. I wonder if there were just built-in checkpoints and the team got to just make a platformer if the strengths around movement and abilities could have been honed a bit better to less maddening effect.
Unfortunately, this was one of those games I left more relieved it was over than glad I had engaged it. I had plans to go on to Will of the Wisps, but I think I’m going to pass for now and revisit the series at some point if I get word that they’ve improved on my complaints, which seems unlikely given that everyone seems to have nothing but effusive praise for the games. Oh well.