Ori and the Blind Forest imparts a beautiful and intricate framework of the platforming and progression that came to define latter day Castlevania and Metroid titles, but it can’t muster the same technical and design prowess to fuel its own ideas. This leaves Ori as an adequate model of its revered genre, just short of the execution and innovation that could have made it exemplary.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid helped create a set of rules that defined their (then) hybrid genre. Character progression was tied to an escalating series of fresh mechanics, and those same mechanics made different parts of the labyrinthine game world freely accessible. The concept of linearity was still vaguely active – games had a beginning and an end along with intermittent events in-between – but a seemingly player-authored sense of direction and discovery was their illustrious underpinning. Shadow Complex and Cave Story brought the genre back in vogue, with Guacemelee and Dust: An Elysian Tail enriching it with their own distinctive pallets.
Ori and the Blind Forest aches to be a part of the conversation. It has a massive platforming-friendly world composed of visually and mechanically diverse levels. It offers a suite of abilities to find and employ. It has a ton of secrets and upgrades tucked into tiny obscured areas for only the most thorough players to find. It has a myriad of enemies to test its mechanics, along with a significant number of “boss level” challenges available in-between. It’s not so much a matter of what Ori doesn’t have, but rather what desires to build on top of it all. A foundation is a resolve for further action rather than an end-point. Ori understands this, and tries like hell to assemble its might behind its own contributions.
This starts with Ori’s approach to combat. It lacks any sort of traditional projectile or direct melee encounter, opening instead for a thin series of proximity-based homing lasers. Ori can dispense an upgradeable number of them near an enemy, and, when combined with alternative jumping and retreating, can slowly wear down their health to zero. This makes for a different, if not slightly detached, take on battling, one that’s no doubt aided by later upgrades in the form of a traditional ground stomp, an area-of-effect attack, and a couple of movement-based options.
Combat and movement play dueling roles in Ori, and it’s through the game’s signature Bash mechanic where the two come together. Nearly every projectile and enemy in the game is subject to Ori’s Bash move, itself a veritable suplex maneuver. Ori will grab onto the enemy or object in question and fire it off in a 360-degree range of precision. This simultaneously launches Ori in the opposing direction, making it as much about mid-air navigation as an offensive weapon.
The degree to which Ori pushes its Bash move is both frustrating and admirable. Certain instances that involve pushing around bits of the environment are good for minor puzzle solving, but high-stakes jumping is where it’s most frequently employed. It’s fine when there are a bunch of birds in the air, leaving the player with the task of improvising a way up and through them. It’s frustrating when it’s a fireball-spewing orb enemy, not necessarily because of the inherent challenge, but rather that it’s incredibly difficult to visually make any sense of it. Experience points are absorbed from defeated enemies in glowing orange bursts. This looks remarkably similar to the aforementioned fireballs, and when you’re killing enemies while simultaneously trying to jump around other enemies all with an orange background it’s nearly impossible to parse. In this instance success was the result of dumb luck rather than any applied skill.
The same complaint can be filed with Ori’s penchant for desperate escape sequences. The game delights in invoking cataclysms, which presents a fundamental test of Ori’s abilities. Either you’re rushing upward from an encroaching tidal wave, sideways from violent wind, or in every direction under the duress of its signature antagonist, Kuro. More often than not, the fine details of the environment make it unfairly difficult to figure out what in the exact hell you’re supposed to be doing. This is further complicated by the significant amount of work it may have taken to reach the point where you’re stuck, as failure resets the entire sequence. These three instances are some of the most frustrating parts of the game, and (at least in my case) all three could have been easily mitigated with a better sign posting in key areas. I can’t trial-and-error my way out of a problem if I don’t know what problem I’m trying to solve.
It’s ironic that Ori goofs up save points only when they’re mandatory. The rest of the game allows for improvised saving, provided you have the energy (also used for opening optional doors and using the AOE attack) to make one. You wouldn’t think making your own save points to be that big of a deal, but as much as they can be used to essentially save-state your way through challenges, they’re also present an inherent amount of risk. Not only is there the lingering threat of running out of energy, but you can also really put yourself in a compromising position with a poorly chosen save point. There’s an achievement for beating the entire game without dying, so not taking damage anywhere is certainly doable, but saving anywhere with minimal health is far from desirable.
Ori kind of hums along for most of its runtime, with levels ready to test freshly acquired mechanics. Outside of Bash, there really isn’t much new here. Ground and wall based jumps are effective at breaking down walls, but not equipped with the combat durability as they were in Guacamelee. Similarly, Ori’s attack-and-dodge brand of combat isn’t as engaging or effective as its genre peers. Outside of the sequences mentioned above, Ori plays fine, it just operates at pace barely above safe and effective. You run, fight, and explore to a great degree – and the experience-based progression and accompanying skill trees lighten the load – but not that differently or better than similar games.
Peak Ori is only achieved in its final, for lack of a better word, level, which essentially breaks off into a hub-based series of challenge rooms. It tasks the player with operating all of Ori’s abilities in fashionably quick succession and leaves zero room for mistakes. The floor, of all places, is even lethal, with constant jumping and movement required to safely navigate it. It’s the best and most effective part of the game, but it also exposes a contradiction in its genre’s orders. At a certain point the lure of power-up acquisition vanishes and all that’s left is to try and test them. It’s ephemeral in nature, as any other application would be a tacit disagreement with the game’s pacing.
Ori’s vanity, despite its occasional reluctance to create effective signposting, is its strongest asset. The game’s ethereal visuals and sweeping soundtrack work in tandem to create grand overtures of light and sound that are a total compliment to its medium. Dust might be a distant contemporary, but nothing out there matches the variety and depth of the artwork powering all of Ori’s environments. Lush biomes, violet and spooky caves, and fiery hells are within arm’s reach and run through the every available color with impressive style and grace. It’s all marked with Gareth Coker’s surreal soundtrack, creating endearing and familiar themes along the way. Ori’s constant call for interactivity won’t allow it to compete against more emotive peers like Ico or Journey, but it’s pushed to a comfortable pace by its soundtrack.
Narrative is where Ori seems to leave the most on its the table. The beginning and ending of the game are punctuated with touching sequences of loss, life, and regret but the eight hours in-between lack the same resonant touch to the soul. Ori certainly tries, the thundering disembodied voice speaking a virtuous story in a made-up language strains to be evocative, but there’s not much there without an onscreen presence. It’s through his mother-figure Naru, perceived pest Gumo, and the imposing antagonist Kuro where Ori’s most heartfelt moments arrive. Ori chooses to be a game more often than it tries to be a story (if Moon Studios had to pick between the two, they chose correctly), but in doing so sacrifices one of its more unique assets. Its environments are beautiful, but rarely do they assist in telling effective tale.
With that in mind I couldn’t not feel enraptured by the narrative bits the bookend Ori. They’re short and sweet, but beautifully animated and succeed in evoking an emotional response from the player. Combined with Ori’s inventive Bash mechanic and gorgeous presentation, Ori has the capacity to soar above the requirements of its declared genre. Too often, however, it merely obliges those challenges. It’s not the next great progression-based platformer, but rather the next in line.
