Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition

Ori and the Blind Forest manages in the first five minutes what other games fail even in 20 hours: It touches, conquers our hearts, remains in our minds. At least if you have a soft spot for cute, cuddly creatures. For Ori, for example.

The little animal falls as a falling star from the sky into an idyllic forest and looks like an alien cat with floppy ears. There it is looked after and raised by a no less funny bear creature. Together they go looking for food, build a tree house and cuddle together at night - until one day fate has a tragic twist in store.

Sad but beautiful

Before we know it, a monstrous bird monster destroys the fairytale atmosphere. When the beast appears, the light of the forest fades. Plants wither, lakes dry up. Due to the lack of food, the mother bear dies a short time later. Ori is left grieving and alone. With this, the developers at Moon Studios make it clear in the prologue of their adventure that they dare to approach an adult story. One that comes up with many dramatic moments and surprising twists.

What is remarkable: Although the common thread consists exclusively of small cutscenes in which not a single word is spoken, these scenes do not fail to have their effect. It's just heartwarming when Ori frees a funny spider troll from a supposedly hopeless situation - and this later pays us back.

By the way, our floppy-eared hero is not alone. We get company from a glowing forest fairy who hovers steadily above our head and gives us clues. As guardians of the light, we have to bring the essences of warmth, wind and water back into place in order to save the fairytale forest from dying.

To do this, we run, jump and puzzle our way from left to right through magical and extremely elaborately designed 2D backdrops. Everything is hand-drawn, every mushroom, every rock is unique. Together with the opulent particle and special effects as well as the loving animation, for example of blades of grass swaying in the wind, Ori and the Blind Forest is without a doubt the most beautiful game of its kind.

Time will tell

The scenes flow smoothly into one another, without any loading breaks we hop from the blooming grove into the musty thorn swamp or into the gloomy mist valley.

However, we cannot immediately make the game world unsafe at will. We can only reach new areas and secret passages with the right skills, which we typically get in the course of the adventure.

With the super jump, for example, which we unlock very late in the game, we finally hop onto the tower-high tree trunk, where we initially asked ourselves how the hell we should get up there. We are also gradually discovering new abbreviations. If we have to take a long detour at the beginning after falling into a hole in the ground, we can later simply crawl up the walls.

A big problem for most Metroidvania representatives is backtracking, i.e. going through already known areas again if you want to discover all the secrets and uncover all the extras.

Ori and the Blind Forest has an elegant solution for this: the so-called world events that permanently change the game world. For example, once we have restored the power of the water, the poisonous pools of the Thorn Swamp are cleaned so that we can dive through new sections.

Elsewhere we cause an earthquake and use the force of the wind to ascend to the upper forest spheres. As a result, even walking through an area several times is not boring, although a teleport function would have been even better. If you want to collect all of the countless hidden extras (health upgrades, energy crystals), you have to walk the entire way.

Harder than expected

Because Ori cannot attack herself, our fairy does it at the push of a button. The highlight: Thanks to the long-range attacks of the light bobble, we hit opponents even if we are hanging on a wall or have already run around the corner. We launch either three successive blows or a super-charged attack.

Killed enemies leave behind cells of life that restore our health, or skill points with which we use a three-part skill tree to increase our attack power or learn to breathe underwater. Despite such improvements, Ori and the Blind Forest is surprisingly challenging. As with the big Metroid model, we die regularly, often we have to memorize the course of the level and the opponents that appear to get to the goal.

The fact that, despite the numerous trial and error sections, the motivation does not go flat, is mainly due to the high-precision control, which works wonderfully with the controller as well as with the mouse and keyboard. Optionally, keyboard control is possible, although the keys cannot be freely assigned. Nevertheless, if the cuddly cat rushes into an abyss or hits a wall with a spike, it is almost always due to our failure. The fact that we are allowed to set our own save point before particularly tricky passages also keeps frustration within limits. However, we can only establish such a "soul connection" once and only if we currently have an energy crystal. Anyone who has already thrown the controller in the corner at Rayman: Origins out of frustration, will grit their teeth on Ori's journey.

Wonderfully varied

But perseverance and patience pay off, because the constantly new skills never lead to routine, especially since nicely made puzzle passages alternate wonderfully with sweaty action sequences. For example, we push teleport stones in the right place to redirect an enemy projectile and thus crumble a brittle wall. Or we flick Ori's tail like a catapult from opponent to opponent while we are chased by the evil giant crow that molested us right from the start.

Sometimes we have to demonstrate acrobatic skills, sometimes we have to use our brains. This mix motivates all the way through to the satisfying finale, which we reached after 335 screen deaths and almost seven hours of play. If you want to explore everything, you can add an hour to it. The fairy tale is not very extensive, but it makes the genre competition look pale in terms of play and optics.

Just over a year ago, Moon Studios surprised us with a successful game called Ori and the Blind Forest . This charming platformer with a white creature in the lead role can be considered a typical representative of the metroidvania species . The genre, which has returned to favor in the "turkey" offensive of recent years, but its roots should be sought in much earlier times, when the most popular equipment in the player's living room was the eight-bit Nintendo NES console and its modern competitors, and the imagination was ignited by subsequent parts of the Metroid series and Castlevania . As you can easily guess, the name of the genre comes from the combination of the titles of these two works. Our main task was to explore the vast world of interconnected corridors, which were successively accessed after unlocking the appropriate skills and items. Individual locations were usually guarded by more difficult opponents, i.e. bosses. From modern games created in this style, you can indicate the Dark Souls series, which draws from this genre to the fullest. Ori, however, is a more classic representative of it, a two-dimensional platformer that stands out from other similar titles with its beautiful graphics stylized on productions from the Japanese animated film company Ghibli. A year ago, I spent a dozen unforgettable hours with this item, and meanwhile the creators again urge me to visit the great forest in the so-called the definitive edition. Ori and the Blind Forest is a difficult, sometimes even frustrating game - so is it worth taking the trouble to play it again?

In the game, we take control of a cute creature that is something like a forest spirit. The forest that is slowly dying as a result of the evil bird Kuru, becoming the habitat of nasty monsters. So we start our journey to - by gaining the right amount of money on the way - restore balance and punish the nasty bird. The story turns out to be simple and infantile, but it is not the main burden of the game that rests on it. It is only an addition to other attractions, which are not lacking during the game. In addition, the authors managed to enrich this simple story with an appropriate narration devoid of any dialogues with a large dose of emotions. The more sensitive from the very beginning can count on a real tearjerker, which, however, is quickly replaced by the constant action, but thanks to the new scenes included in the Definitive Edition , showing the deepened relationships between the characters, there is no shortage of emotions and later, so it's better not to put the handkerchief away.

The game is beautiful. There is no point in discussing the quality of the visuals. Pictures do not reflect all the beauty, Ori must be seen in motion, and then I guarantee that you will fall in love with the work of Moon studio right away. But most importantly, behind the audiovisual splendor (by the way, I will mention that the accompanying soundtrack is absolutely brilliant and even after many hours of listening you have no right to get bored - great applause for the British composer Gareth Coker) is the well-thought-out and very pleasant gameplay mechanics. As the main character learns more and more crazy evolutions as he explores new locations, the responsiveness of controls is very important for players. There is probably nothing worse than the lack of precision when making jumps. In this respect, Ori belongs to the forefront of platform games. Provided, however, that you use the rain. Playing with a mouse and keyboard in the PC version borders on masochism.

Great controls go hand in hand with the development of the character's skills. The most important ones, thanks to which Ori gains new moves, are gained as the game progresses - usually before moving to a new location where arcade puzzles require you to use them. Without the possibility of performing a given maneuver, such places are blocked and cannot be visited. Double jump, jumping on a vertical wall, bouncing off projectiles are just some of the available tricks. The definitive edition added two new character traits: dash, i.e. the ability to move forward a few meters in the blink of an eye, and the ability to activate lanterns hanging in different places , which unlocks passages to the next part of the location. A great idea of the creators was to place secrets on previously known maps, which we gain access to only after learning these new movements.

Less important developments are unlocked thanks to the acquired skill points. They come to us as a result of defeating opponents and finding secrets that are not missing in the game. These are usually various "facilitators" of the game: an increasingly powerful attack, displaying characteristic points on the map or attracting orbs falling out of the attackers. Constant progress in expanding the character's capabilities means that we never feel bored. The gameplay is intense, but not chaotic. If we screwed up something, there is no point in blaming the game for it, because it usually turns out to be the fault of the rush. The Ori's precision of control encourages you to smoothly move through the entire fragments of the board, almost in one breath, which, however, often ends in a choking. And it should be remembered that the number of save points, which we can determine ourselves and almost anywhere, depends on the number of energy cells.

The definitive edition, apart from new character skills and the addition of difficulty levels, also introduces two additional locations: Black Root Burrows and The Light Burst - both very atmospheric and contrasting to each other. In the first one, at the beginning we move in almost total darkness, while the second one is very colorful and bathed in sunlight. Their unquestionable advantage is that they slightly extend the game, which was not the shortest before. You can spend ten to twelve hours with the game, maybe even a little more. In the new version, traveling to distant places has become easier thanks to the introduction of fountains, which are special points of transport between us. We not only move faster, but also avoid the previous (and not very popular) backtracking. DE also has behind-the-scenes materials and a gallery of concept sketches, previously absent.