My thoughts about this fantastic Metroidvania that managed to surprise me a lot despite my initial experience with it.
Today I finished Ori and The Blind Forest and it was a fantastic experience!
The game is about Ori, quite a weird fellow that falls from the sky and lands on a beautiful forest, under the care of Nabu, another creature that lived there. However, a terrible fate fell upon the Nibel Forest, when its light was stolen by a mysteryous Owl. Because of this, Ori has to find the Elements of Light to give life back to the Spirit Tree, and restore the Forest to its former glory.
Ori and The Blind Forest
As I mentioned, the gameplay itself is a Metroidvania with a focus on platforming and exploration. You start out rather weak and little by little, gather more life and energy that helps you get stronger, as well as a great set of abilities that allow you to traverse the map in different ways, and get to more and more areas of it.
Personally, other than Hollow Knight and Aria of Sorrow—which I’ve played for 8 or so hours combined and I am yet to complete either—my experience in this genre consists of just the 2D Metroid series. I have to admit the movement and physics featured in this game are very different to those games, but they still feel really, really good and rather satisfying. I found the game design to be really good, there some great platforming sections that represented a interesting challenge. Thankfully saving progress was extremely quick and a necessary mechanic that was available at almost any point of the adventure, so progress wasn’t lost for significant amounts—unless you actively avoided doing so.
The Elements of Light are found in different parts of the map, each of them featuring different abilities and traversal styles that really test your platforming skills, they are huge puzzles that are quite complicated at first, but once you get it, you go through everything like a knife cutting butter—and you look great while doing so.
The animations of both the enemies, environment and the player itself are simply fantastic. The game looks simply stunning, and it runs incredibly well on the Nintendo Switch, where I played both in handheld and docked mode, without any trouble.
I really can’t emphazise enough how great the abilities in this game are, but the best one no doubt, is the bash, basically, this is everything in one. A dash, an attack, a parry, a time freeze. This ability is so insane you will keep using it during the whole game once you unlock it. Maybe the only caveat is that after you get it there is an escape sequence that ups the difficulty of the game to new levels, and you will die, a lot.
What else can I say? the art is great, the music is absolutely superb, the story and the characters develop quite while, and with just a few words, I just really loved this game. If you can handle the early combat and the difficulty curve after the first dungeon, you are in for one of the best Metroidvania adventures I’ve ever played.
