Ori and the Blind Forest (

2015

) ½

This is a difficult game to evaluate because it's rare that you see a game eclipsed in quality so completely by anything other than a direct sequel. Normally other games in the same genre do something a little better here, something a little worse there, and introduce a few different mechanics or ideas throughout. However, everything good about Ori and the Blind Forest was done better in Hollow Knight [2017] save perhaps Ori's music. Where Ori has a tiny map (by metroidvania standards anyway) filled with samey areas, Hollow Knight has a gargantuan one with loads of diverse environments. Where Ori is a brief 10-hour play, Hollow Knight will take at least twice that to complete, and up to 40 hours if you dig into all the hidden nooks and attempt all the optional challenges. Where Ori is limited to a very small number of enemy types, Hollow Knight has a vast array of monster, it boasts more bosses than Ori has standard enemies. Where Ori's combat is brainless (just get close and mash the attack button), Hollow Knight's combat is deceptively complicated and always challenging. Ori holds the player's hand through the banal story-line, while Hollow Knight prefers to drop you into the exotic locales and let the player determine their own level of engagement with the engrossing, and often ambiguous story-line. Hell, Hollow Knight is even cheaper by a couple of bucks. So consider this intro paragraph as a TL;DR: Buy Hollow Knight [2017] instead.

However, it's not exactly Ori's fault that it was so completely eclipsed by a game that came out two years later, so from here on out, I'm not going to mention the name Hollow Knight [2017] again. Every game deserves to be evaluated based on its own merits, and when Ori steps out of the shadow of its more impressive descendant, it is still pretty mediocre. A sub-par metroidvania with a couple of interesting mechanics, but certainly far from the genre's best exemplars of old (IE Castlevania: Symphony of the Night [1997] and Super Metroid [1994]) and not up to the standards of the latest innovations either.

Well, let's start with the positives: It sure is a pretty game. Lots of nice colors, and a main character who drifts across the screen with graceful, flowing animation. It also has one hell of an opening sequence, where the strange glowing fox/rabbit Ori is adopted and raised by a cross between a bear and an extremely hairy man called Naru. It's relatively idyllic at first, but within short order, the forest begins to wither and decay. Or now, the reasons for this blight will remain obscure, though they will become important to the plot later on. Food becomes scarce, and Naru starves to death just as Ori tries to bring him the last scrap of food he can find. The heartstring-tugging is a bit cliché, and more than a bit clumsy, but it is nonetheless effective. Hell, I'd say that Ori and the Blind Forest does a better job than most arty, 2-D, small child in a hostile world, platformers do of explaining how the innocent protagonist became lost in the harsh and unforgiving wilds.

However, the part where you are a helpless babe in the woods, at the mercy of every creature that crosses your path is a brief one. Before long you find a glowing fairy creature called Sein. Who gives you the exposition dump that passes for a story. The forest has withered and decayed because the spirit tree's power has been usurped by Kuro, a gigantic owl. Now it's up to Ori to restore the three elements (shouldn't that be four? What was there a budget cut or something?) and bring life back to the forest.

The main draw here is going to be the platforming challenge, which at times can be quite impressive. Particularly in the moments after you restore one of the four three elements and have to rush out of the temple as it explodes/falls apart/floods. The problem is that most of the platforming challenges become trivialized as you unlock abilities, which are almost all geared towards making your character more maneuverable. Getting the triple jump and air dash, in particular, make a lot of the game's “difficult” sections laughably easy. There's also an over-reliance on using enemy attacks to propel your character forward/up, which isn't a problem in and of itself but the enemies are apparently a bit shy and will sometimes pop back into the ground if you get too close. Not the sort of thing you want to happen when you have a wave of lava nipping at your heels. The controls are tight and fluid, though they suffer a bit from having a few too many options (should I air dash, glide, bounce off this enemy's attack or triple jump and vault off of the wall? I ask myself but by the time I finish the thought I'm already impaled on some spikes). It mostly works well, and it is remarkably satisfying to rapidly make your way through the game's various environments.

The thing about those environments is that they all fell pretty much the same. You are never not in a forest, sometimes it's sunny, sometimes its dark, and sometimes it's snowy but it's always a forest. I know, I know the title is Ori in the Blind Forest, but that title doesn't work any better than Ori and the Blind Lands so why not ditch it and build in some actual level diversity not just a difference in colors. Sure, it is a very nice forest, with a lot of pretty colors and spectacular lighting, but by the end, I was longing for a grassland, or a desert, or really anything else.

If the environments are boring than Ori's enemies are downright narcotic. About 80% of them being variations on the theme “amorphous pile of snot.” They're so similar, that I have a couple of deaths that are just the result of mistaking one of the piles of snot that explodes for one of the piles of snot that shoots out other smaller piles of snot. When it's not snot balls its either spiders or birds (bird enemies? What the hell I'm not even playing a ninja). Fighting the enemies is just as tedious as looking at them. Your main means of attacking is to launch a barrage of shots from Sein, the little white ball that follows you around. These shots hit automatically, so in practice, all that you're required to do in combat is get spitting distance of an enemy and press the attack button until you win. You get a charged AOE attack later on in the game, but it is totally worthless because there is almost never more than one enemy on the screen with you at a time. There's also the ability to use enemy attacks to either reflect them back at the baddy or propel yourself further into the air. This technique is probably the most enjoyable bit of Ori and the Blind Forest, and the only satisfying way to approach combat, as at least it requires a sliver of skill to pull off the timing. The only problem is it means you're waiting on the enemy to attack, and almost all of them have an obnoxiously slow rate of fire.

The problem isn't just the combat though, on the whole, the game is way too easy. Seriously, I'm a pretty mediocre gamer, don't believe me just give me literally any NES game and watch as I'm reduced to tears in a matter of minutes. So it surprises me when RockPaperShotgun says “Ori is arguably the pinnacle of the cute-but-crazy-hard platforming genre thanks to its gorgeous world, meticulous platforming and formidable sense of challenge.” Well, at least it would surprise me if we hadn't learned in recent years the average level of ability possessed by professional game critics. For reference, I played through the game on hard difficulty (it's the lazy sort of hard difficulty mode where everything is the same except enemies hit harder and have more HP) and except for one or two special platforming sections, I didn't have much in the way of trouble with the game. The problem is you can create a save point almost anywhere with a bit of your magic. Indeed, there's no other point to magic save for charge attacks (which are useless) and opening up the occasional door (which always lead to optional areas) so you might as well setup a way-point right after every tricky bit. Towards the end of the game, I felt like I was playing on an emulator with save states. The only really challenging bits of the game was when it arbitrarily decided I couldn't use way-points and booted me back to the start of a five-minute long section after killing me with a falling rock I couldn't have possibly seen coming. Annoying, yes; difficult no.

Still, I was tolerably invested in the game until the story fell apart in the final chapter. Watching your adoptive parent die at the start of the game was an excellent tragic hook, that had me fully invested in the world and characters. All of the sudden my innocent little glowing rabbit was alone in a dark woods full of all manner of big bad wolves. When the game resurrects Naru for no reason at the end, I felt a bit cheated. Brazen tearjerkers are fine, but I will not abide brazen “cheerjerkers!” It gave the whole ending an overly saccharine feeling, which seemed out of place with how dark and miserable the world started off. An ending with Ori raising Koru's last surviving child would have been more effective than throwing Naru back into the mix. It shows us that the story we've gone through has been for something more than just the reestablishment of the status quo.

I don't hate Ori and the Blind Forest, I'm just disappointed with it. This game has everything I like, a sprawling metroidvania map, tight platforming challenges, and a world that was once great but has lapsed into decay and ruin. This should have been a home run, but unfortunately, it's a snore-fest with a plot that is so sickly sweet I swear it gave me a cavity.