In this game you play as Ori, a spirit of the forest. In the first game you saved your world, so this time around you follow your friend (the owl) to another world that needs saving. It has been corrupted and you need to free the wisps in order to uncorrupt it? I don’t really understand the premise, and that’s okay. It’s not what I’m here for anyway.
Ori is a metroidvania where you fight monsters and you gradually unlock abilities which will help you explore more of the world. In contrary to other metroidvanias the enemies aren’t the true obstacles. They are sometimes there to help you traverse, because the platforming is the main enemy of this game. It’s not seldom you need to complete a series of very challenging jumps in order to get where you want to go, and you use enemies to complete those jumps.
The game is gorgeous. It is the best looking metroidvania I have ever played. There is nothing that really compares to it. The backgrounds really pops out, and there are so many photo moments that you risk filling up your storage space with endless of sunrises. The game can be dark and gritty when it needs to, and I particularly enjoyed the swamp areas.
This is also my main criticism, and I think this was true also for Ori and the Blind Forest. The team has focused so much on making the game look fantastic, that they do not communicate clearly to the player what to do. I had to keep a YouTube video beside me while playing the game to avoid getting stuck, because I couldn’t distinguish the actionable items from the scenery.
- I don’t know how to open this door. Oh, there is a lever there. Didn’t see it.
- How do I progress from here? Oh you can attack that piece of moss. How am I supposed to know that?
I couldn’t kill the last boss because I couldn’t figure out if I was doing what the game intended me to. The game is throughout bad at communicating what it wants from its player.
Just as I critiqued the first Ori game for being way to technical in its platforming sections, this game is no better. The game is not as precise as Celeste or Hollow Knight, so I find myself fighting the controller time to time. Some of the platforming elements are also very weirdly designed, where you need to press L1 to jump to a lamp, but you must press R1 to jump to a bolder, which is the exact same move but different objects.
I particularly hate the long platforming sections where you’re being chased, and if you fail by the end you need to do it all again. It makes for some really frustrating and irritating gameplay that does not bring any joy.
I played the game on Nintendo Switch. The port is not very well made. In order to keep all the fancy graphics they have reduced the resolution to a minimum so everything gets very blurry. This is not enough as the game staggers and struggles when there is much happening on the screen at once. It breaks immersion and is a real problem in such a technical platforming game. I also had game crashes during my play through, but I didn’t loose my save and not much progress so it was okay.
I rate this game as GOOD.
Replay 