Ori and the Blind Forest
The first thing you'll notice about this game is it looks absolutely gorgeous! The hand painted art style and lighting effects make this a joy to traverse the whole game through. Great music too. The next thing you'll notice is this game is hard! It's the kind of game where you'll die several times and have to retry a segment a little better the next time but this is rarely tedious due to the liberal checkpoint system where you can setup your own checkpoints almost anywhere. They cost energy though, which is used for several things like opening gates and shooting bursts of light so the first half of the game becomes very resource management oriented. The game's troll-y too. A large portion of my 264 deaths felt outright unfair to the point of Mario Maker level territory. There is literally a dark level where a rock slab crushes you out of nowhere. The levels are complex and require a slew of abilities that you'll gradually pick up in a metroidvania fusion. Sometimes I felt the platforming was overly precise but the checkpoint system helped it not feel frustrating- for the most part. There were a few chase sections that went on far too long and there was one part with gravity gimmicks that had terrible controls and made the game feel tedious. I played mostly on normal but changed it to easy for a few sequences to add checkpoints. I actually recommend playing on easy your first time through. Also when backtracking you can't warp unless you're on a specific warp point so going back for a collectable then backtracking back to a warp was more tedious than it should have been. With those complaints out of the way, the quality is top notch. Everything about this game is fantastic. The game took about 9 hours.
9.5/10
The first thing you'll notice about this game is it looks absolutely gorgeous! The hand painted art style and lighting effects make this a joy to traverse the whole game through. Great music too. The next thing you'll notice is this game is hard! It's the kind of game where you'll die several times and have to retry a segment a little better the next time but this is rarely tedious due to the liberal checkpoint system where you can setup your own checkpoints almost anywhere. They cost energy though, which is used for several things like opening gates and shooting bursts of light so the first half of the game becomes very resource management oriented. The game's troll-y too. A large portion of my 264 deaths felt outright unfair to the point of Mario Maker level territory. There is literally a dark level where a rock slab crushes you out of nowhere. The levels are complex and require a slew of abilities that you'll gradually pick up in a metroidvania fusion. Sometimes I felt the platforming was overly precise but the checkpoint system helped it not feel frustrating- for the most part. There were a few chase sections that went on far too long and there was one part with gravity gimmicks that had terrible controls and made the game feel tedious. I played mostly on normal but changed it to easy for a few sequences to add checkpoints. I actually recommend playing on easy your first time through. Also when backtracking you can't warp unless you're on a specific warp point so going back for a collectable then backtracking back to a warp was more tedious than it should have been. With those complaints out of the way, the quality is top notch. Everything about this game is fantastic. The game took about 9 hours.
9.5/10
