Ori and the Many Platformer Deaths

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Ori and the Many Platformer Deaths

Postby Vryheid » March 12th, 2015, 9:26 pm

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Ori and the Blind Forest is a game about lasers, spike traps, monsters that look like they came straight out of a Miyazaki movie, and seeing your cute fluffy protagonist get mutilated in hundreds of different ways. Oh, and there's a plot about a giant evil raven and magical trees that need purification to save your forest, and of course little ol' you has got to be the one to do it. With a mixture of puzzle solving, intense platforming and Metroidvania-style exploration, there's a good mixture of a content here to keep things interesting, and the gorgeous music and visuals really help this game stand out. The complex level designs in Ori require mastery of the many abilities you'll be gaining over the adventure, the bash and the walljump being two of the biggest ones.

And did I mention this game is really frigging hard? It's alright though cause it's pretty fair about it and there seems to be a decent speedrunning element to the game, rewarding players who actually get good at the game with leaderboard scores and achievements.

Motta and I will be playing through this game and posting interesting bits as we find them. I'm hoping for a no death run eventually.
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Re: Ori and the Many Platformer Deaths

Postby Motta The Hutt » March 13th, 2015, 12:03 am

At its core Ori and the Blind Forest is basically another Metroidvania that doesn't exactly do a whole lot to shake up the established formula. It has everything you'd expect from the genre. Rotating spike hammers of doom, spiky death pits, the speedy rise from a sniveling weakling to a triple-jumping force-to-be-reckoned-with, and item acquisition messages complete with fanfare jingles. In all fairness, Ori branch out enough to feel fresh. The ability to save at most times (any "safe" region, so long as you have the mana). The addition of a skill tree is at least semi-unique, and getting hidden items is generally less about searching for invisible paths and more about puzzle solving or difficult, split second platforming. Both the platforming and enemies are at times (usually the same time) brutal, and you're likely to die a lot. Yet the numerous deaths I've encountered rarely feel unfair. One of the reasons for this is Ori's lack of horizontal momentum. The controls are tight, allowing you to zip left and right through the air with much needed precision.

Besides all of that, the Blind Forest is a gorgeous locale. The scenes are usually of a vivid blue or green persuasion, with a lot of attention to detail. Foliage in the fore and backgrounds sways with the wind, reacts when Ori stomps on the ground or unleashes a charged burst of energy. Contrasting all this complexity is a simple soundtrack. Most songs are a slow, almost melancholy lone piano, with some soft, indistinct vocals thrown over top. They result in a rather soothing ambiance, which is great when you're dying to the same section of spike-covered walls, ceilings, and floors for the tenth or so time.

The addition of an online leaderboard is pretty neat, especially considering Ori and the Blind Forest keeps track of the usual statistics you would expect. I personally don't find leaderboards all that motivating, and a no death run seems way too ambitious for my blood at this point. Maybe the eventual speedrun attempt. I'm still on my first playthrough, so I'm more worried about exploring every corner I can, ticking clock be damned.

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Re: Ori and the Many Platformer Deaths

Postby Vryheid » March 13th, 2015, 4:23 pm

2 trees down 1 to go. The game doesn't feel nearly as difficult as when I started, I don't know if that means I'm getting better or if the level design isn't escalating enough.

Focusing on the "plot" a bit, even with the vague narrative messages we keep getting it's hard for me to understand half of what's going on. (SPOILERS) Apparently this has a lot to do with the giant bird that keeps harassing us throughout the game, who clearly is responsible for all the destruction of the forest and the death of No-Face (err, "Naru"):

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Eventually it becomes clear that the spiritual orbs that the bird removed somehow were threatening her chicks, and the only way she could stop this was to shroud the land in darkness... I guess:

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That's where you come in, the spirit guardian Ori, here to restore the spirit orbs and fix the nasty water/dead winds/whatever else is wrong. If that's the case, why doesn't evilbird just knock them away again? Maybe she can't? Maybe something was already wrong with the trees to begin with? We could get some more answers later in the plot I suppose. One thing I nearly missed was this little picture hidden in an underground cavern:

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Hmm... looks like Ori isn't the only guardian, at least not in the past... :-P
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Re: Ori and the Many Platformer Deaths

Postby Kamek » March 15th, 2015, 10:29 am

Crazy that I was just about to make a thread about this game. I'm thinking of picking it up. I LOVE Metroidvania games, and games with this sort of "ambience". Guacamelee was one of the last game I had a lot of fun with, and the platforming was old-school at times. Is it as good as that game?
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Re: Ori and the Many Platformer Deaths

Postby Vryheid » March 15th, 2015, 5:11 pm

I've beaten Ori and the Blind Forest twice now, and I'm probably going to keep at it until I can finally finish that speedrunning challenge, so I feel like I'm experienced enough with the game to give an informed review. I've never played Guacamelee so I don't know how it directly compares, but I've played a lot of other platformers like Donkey Kong Country and Metroid that this game obviously takes inspiration from so I feel like I have some standard of how to judge what works.

Lets start with the good here. Anyone who seriously still believes that graphics can't make for a better gameplay experience has yet to touch this game. The watercolor visuals look great and work with the gentle but bittersweet soundtrack to create an atmosphere that feels mysterious and magical. Sometimes I feel like I'm wandering through one of those Miyazaki movies- like Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke- with its rows of gorgeously detailed, colorful trees and little details like fluttering leaves or lightly swinging vines that are sprinkled all over the background. Ori in particular is very well animated, and the cute factor of seeing him jumping around and struggling to overcome the incredible odds he's placed against make it a lot easier to care about his plight than most platformer characters. Even when you've seen him die hundreds of times, it's hard not to squirm a little inside when he gets smacked into the nearest spike pit or pool of lava.

Even moreso than the art style, the movement scheme is easily the defining trait of this game. Through tools like the bash, the wall jump and the feather you can “platform” your way across groups of enemies and dangerous obstacles while barely even touching the ground. It reminds me a bit of Dustforce in that with fast enough reactions and accurate jumps you can keep your momentum going in ways that make even the most difficult levels look positively effortless. Managing to beat a particularly difficult chunk of gameplay often requires executing a long sequence of these tricky jumps in quick succession in ways that force you to master each technique. The escape sequences- this game's closest equivalent to a boss fight- are particularly spectacular, and are given some of the most dramatic/memorable tracks in the game.

The movement system itself, while solid, can be difficult to adjust to if you're used to the much more “weighty” platformer like Mario or Donkey Kong. This mainly boils down to how the game handles conservation of momentum. At first I couldn't figure out why I was having such a difficult time landing on narrow platforms, but eventually I realized it was because I had trained myself to compensate for slightly overshooting jumps by hitting the opposite direction that my character was moving. This sort of tactic is easy to pull off in a game like Super Mario World or even Super Meat Boy because there's a tangible delay as your character slows down in midair and finally changes direction after jumping at high speed. No matter how fast Ori moves or whether or not he's in midair, he can pretty much turn on a dime if you try to change directions. This can leave you overshooting the ledge a second time, resulting in you launching yourself back up in the air with a walljump, and repeating the process back and forth as you awkwardly try to find some solid ground. This isn't necessarily a flaw with the game, and is significantly more manageable as you get used to it, but can be an initial source of frustration when you hit early platforming segments.

What is much less excusable is how the game handles the control scheme. I'm hardly a “PC master race” extremist, but I have played PC games all my life and am almost never willing to admit that a gamepad might be preferable over a traditional keyboard and mouse. Playing through Ori is one of those times. Primarily at fault is how the Bash move is handled, as it is very difficult to aim for a particular angle in midair in a limited amount of time when you are limited to the four cardinal direction keys. An analog stick would obviously make this easier, but it would also help if players could quickly tweak the angle like they can with the wall-boost. Even though there aren't all that many keys, they're all cramped on the left side of the keyboard in an awkward position, and switching between them can feel like playing Twister with your fingers. Finally, you're often going to be holding down Shift a lot to use glide and pressing Tab to open the map- but what happens when you both at the same time? The Steam Overlay pops up, interrupting the flow of gameplay. You think this sort of issue would be obvious during testing, but it's very clear that this game was built as a console title first with the PC as an afterthought. You can disable the Steam Overlay to prevent this from happening, but I could have easily solved both of the previous issues if the game let me remap the damn keys. PC gamers always complain about this **** not being an option in ports, so why the developers chose not to add it is beyond me.

My biggest complaint with Ori and the Blind Forest is that it comes off as a jack of all trades trying to appeal to too many niche groups of gamers. If this game was supposed to appeal to the Metroidvania community with its collectables and secret areas, why make the path to progress through the story so rigid and why give us map upgrades that reveal all the hidden powerups, turning the exploration elements into simply filling out a checklist? If the game was supposed to be a great speedrunning title- as the 3 hour speedrun achievement and leaderboards seem to imply- why do the enemies have such an obscene amount of health and use homing attacks seemingly designed for the sole purpose of slowing the player down, and why not give us the ability to easily speed through all those annoying dialogue sequences that add very little to the game? And if this supposed to appeal to players interested in “artsy” titles and immersing themselves the colorful, Disney-esque world depicted in the environments, why the hell does the game make itself nearly impossible to play casually thanks to a limited save system that feels like a bad relic of the 80s? This game is good at appealing to a lot of different players, but there's very little that its great at, and I can't see it being remembered fondly several years from now as one of those breakthrough indie titles the same way Braid or Cave Story was.

Overall, I don't regret the purchase, but I don't think it's some genre defining platformer like some of these early media reviews do. It might be that playing through a second time has taken some of the luster out of the presentation for me, but I do think it's important that if you're paying $20 for a game you at least know what you're getting into. I definitely recommend it, just don't hype yourself thinking it will be THE GREATEST GAME EVAR and you'll enjoy it just fine.
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