Ori and the Blind Forest - Maxi-Geek Review

This is something that needs to be said straight out of the gate, Ori and the Blind Forest is a beautiful game and it is a shame that the controls and overall difficulty hold it back.

Ori and the Blind Forest tells the tale of Ori, a child of a tree, raised by the kind hearted Naru, when a giant storm sweeps across the forest of Nibel, it causes devastation and the forest starts to decay as a result. It is not long after these events that Ori meets Sein a light spirit who helps Ori restore balance to the forest. Ori is not alone though, with a large black bird chasing down Ori at every turn. Through the games story you will learn what caused the forest to die and you will feel something emotional, the game has done an excellent job of portraying love and loss, without any of the characters actually speaking.

Ori is pretty weak at the start of the game, a simple jump and soon after a basic attack, but as you progress through, you will unlock new abilities, very similar to how you would in Metroid. The game itself takes a lot of inspiration from that series, but also adds a light RPG element as well, meaning your powers and experience will change, depending on the route you take. As you defeat enemies you will earn experience points, orange orbs that float around, when you have collected enough you can upgrade your skills, from one of three trees. You can also find large orbs hidden throughout the world and smaller ones as well. It is this system of upgrading the marks the biggest change from any other Metroidvania inspired game. At any point, assuming you have spirit power, you can create a Spirit Flame, this flame allows you to save the game and access the level up system.

It is in this system that the player is given their first real sense that things here are different from the normal, with the player being entirely responsible for saving. There are save points located around the world, but they number in the single digits, should you fail to save often, you can find yourself back a fair ways and forced to repeat your recent actions. There were times, I would complete a really difficult section and then move onto the next and forget to save, die and then have to do it again. The frustrating part is I knew, that I could have avoided it, but of course you need spirit energy to do it, so there is a balance to the system as well.

Moving Ori around is pretty straight forward, attacks and skills are mapped to the face buttons and no complex button combinations are needed. The problem with the controls is that they are not quite as refined as they need to be, there are sections of the game where you need precision, but with how loose the controls can be, this causes problems. After you restore the first of three areas back to normal, you are sent scurrying up and out of a giant tree, using your new abilities to do so, but with some control elements not working as tightly as they need to, death is a constant result. The main issue there is that you start back at the beginning of that entire sequence again.

For the most part, the movement and controls work really well, it is just in things faster paced sections that the game struggles to keep things moving as needed, which is a shame. Combat in the game is pretty straight forward, with the main attack acting as a homing one, hurting nearby enemies when you are close enough. You can even use some other abilities to bash enemies into environmental hazards, something that can save some time.

As I stated at the top, this game is beautiful, with the entire game world coming from hand painted work, layered together with the result being a living painting. Ori, being a spirit of light casts a small glow around the world, Sein as well and it is in those moments, with all the art coming together that I could see giant tv screens in art galleries showing this off. Each of the few characters that inhabit the world, feel alive, the expressions they can show reflect their emotions really well and with some cutscenes proving that you don’t need words sometimes to make people feel sad.

In fact the only time you get any real specifics about the story is from the giant tree itself, through words that appear on screen and fade away. When these words do appear, you get a sort of alien language talking about them, which in turn sounds like a real nirvana type, Jabba the Hutt. Outside of that speaking, there is very little in terms of vocal effects at all, Sein makes noises when she talks, but that is about it, however the music more than makes up for it. The entire game has been scored with a beautiful soundtrack and even the games title screen has a piece I could spend hours listening to on repeat. The music is so tied into the game that playing with the sound off results in half of the experience.

If you are looking for a game that will tug on your heart strings and maybe convince you to look in an art gallery, Ori is for you. It is just a shame that loose controls and uneven difficulty spoil what should be a masterpiece.

Thanks to Xbox Australia for providing the game for review