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I bought, played, and beat Ori and the Blind Forest over the weekend.
I really enjoyed this, and any fan of the Metroidvania style games should check it out. It is a quite short for a game of this type, but a lot of that has to do with everything being easy to find. There are even abilities that reveal the locations of power ups on the map.
Ori controls beautifully, and there are bunch of abilities you learn along the way that make him(her?) even more of a blast. You get abilities through both story progression and through skill trees that you unlock through collecting spirit points. You get these from defeating enemies and stomping poor defenseless plants.
The most interesting is the save system. There are a few save spots throughout the world, but they are very sparse. The way you save your progress the majority of the time is creating your own save point. Like a save state on an emulator. However when you create a save point it takes a block of energy away from a meter you are given. The energy in this meter is also used to open doors, and for big charge attack. I should also note that it is only possible to access the skill tree at a created save point. This creates a great level of depth to the game, where you have to think carefully on how to best use your energy......until about a third of the way into the game, when you've collected enough meter extensions to where it;s not even an issue anymore. Seriously, this was a great idea, but it is completely underutilized, thanks to the abundance of power ups.
The game is freaking gorgeous. It is definitely one of those "indy game making a case for games as art" types. The soundtrack is hauntingly beautiful.
The difficulty isn't particularly challenging. I died plenty of times, don't get me wrong, but they were mostly dumb mistakes, and I never felt anything was truly challenging outside of the escape sections. Oh yeah, that's the other thing. In lieu of boss battles they have these escape sequences that finish off each section of the map. They're fun, and as I said, more challenging than the other parts of the game, but I think they should have thrown in a couple bosses too. This type of game just feels like something is missing without them.
That brings me to my rant. I know it's kind of a tired and cliched thing to say, but.....wow, today's gamers are pussies. I've been seeing this game get a lot of criticism. Why? The escape sequences are "TOO HARD". I'm not even that great of a platformer, and I was able to beat all of them in a handful of tries. Mean while, all these people are saying it's "cheap bullshit". No. It's not. Everything in these sections is fair. And in fact, I can see someone who is exceptionally good at platformers beating them on their first or second try. Anyone who says the challenges in this game are cheap, doesn't know the definition of the word. They should pick up an NES and find out. The problem isn't with the game. The problem is they suck.
Sorry. Had to get that off my chest. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaanyhoo, while it's short and has a few other minor flaws, it's still a lot of fun, and at $20 bucks, I don't think the brevity is even an issue.
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