A Critique of Ori and the Blind Forest

um [Music] what's up listen up here we go ori in the house is one hell of a show don't you know a critically acclaimed masterpiece so they said and with ori rested from the spirit tree by the great storm now thriving under the motherhood of naaru i'd like to test that theory i'm sure you're making judgments with your eyes already the visual style is remarkably miyazaki not that i know what that means i do know it's wonderful and that it's impressive coming from a team that originally didn't know how to draw but four years later every frame a painting this game is what alexa recommends when you ask her to define that term i hardly know how to describe it strong colors ridiculous levels of detail you see this tree in the background and this mushroom in this rock that's the one and only place you'll ever see those assets there's no tiling whatsoever but don't take my word for it i'm only quoting the director second to none is an unfair praise ori isn't even in the same weight class figuratively of course because literally she's rather light ari is the new kid moving in getting it done she's officially the candidate for having some fun so they picked this cute little muppet to base her off apparently just because it's true doesn't make it right i suppose you're going to tell me kuro is based off a squirrel next but it wouldn't be hard to convince the same gaming community who thinks trico was a dog despite having the ears of a cat the muscles of a cat the movement of a cat the mannerisms of a cat and the social behavior of a cat yeah i mean it has a dog's nose and it stands on four legs so clearly it's a dog in the same way ori is a scrawny mouse because she i don't know she's bipedal no you're all wrong she's a white-like cat they're a rare breed being a literal white light certainly comes with its advantages i'd know her stark color clearly defines her position against the hyper detailed zoomed out background despite being closer and designed to mario ori will feel right at home to fans of zelda with such beautiful music beings that speak an ancient tongue one of which a great tree another your own fairy and the rule of three fire water and where zelda would say life ori says wind how fitting a great adventure set off on a note of sadness all the magic and wonder emotion and enchantment of a disney movie is crammed into the space of a remarkably engaging introduction primarily through repeated cycles of despair as withering and hope as the nourishment of love be it naaru's or the tree the final repetition begins when kuro steals the dragon ball because one cannot have [ __ ] in detroit with the forest blinded ori can't help her mother she's alone lost hopeless there's something i must confess since new super mario brothers on the nintendo ds back when i thought joseph anderson was one of the twelve disciples this is my first 2d platformer azori traveled through the world unfamiliar and threatened so did i discovering a genre i hardly understood it was an adventure and that's how i'm gonna frame it in this video we're not just gonna find out if arya lives up to the hype we're gonna open it up and find out what makes it tick i started like ari with a jump there's a reason she was given spring jointed legs and there are two reasons microsoft signed ori in 2012. this is the first something almost everyone can agree on is that ahri feels great but in matters of control critics generally have no vocabulary beyond responsive and clunky the secrets of what is literally termed game feel are reserved for the industry magicians but guys like nathan gs quest james benson and steve swink have made their tomes available to the public we've got somewhere to start as ori jumps notice the way she contracts and expands to reflect impact and levity the hyperbolic squash and stretch makes her behave almost like a spring you'll be connected to it being able to adjust height according to the length of a jump input is nothing new for platformers but it's repeated for good reason it's simple depth and it ties you just a little closer to the character you feel as if you're struggling to get that little bit higher as you hold the button as hard as you can equally true for mashing jump to scale a wall before you get the smooth climb ability the jump is imbued with an additional sense of momentum by transferring unused energy into a climb if ori collides with a wall before the peak of its arc if you jump off it you'll be greeted with a spin notice the way her tail actually expands when she does like with the triple jump in the baked blur the tail's lag and spread informs a distinct portrayal of her motion acceleration exists to simulate the sensation of momentum the change from walk to jog to run too low and you end up conflicting with our intuitive sense of physics you do have to run before attempting a long jump but too high and you end up severely troubled in matters of precision ori finds a comfortable balance with a relatively quick acceleration but directional changes that reset it down to zero for the sake of a more natural feel unlike reality you can quite easily adjust your trajectory in mid-air which means you don't have to see where you're landing before you make the jump or in other terms which means you can make decisions on the fly it isn't enough what you can't do is adjust as quickly as you can on the ground and so to compensate the double jump allows a quick elegant reset to all relevant values it's your course correction creating some depth in the choice of when to use it and allowing a denser level design to work the zoomed out camera angle creates the impression of a relatively slow fall that gives ori a certain graceful lightness to her much of this sounds open to interpretation but there's a good reason critics find themselves unable to articulate their thoughts game feel fundamentally relies on the complexities of human psychology i'm no expert would you like to hear from someone who is steve swink i quote driving a car you have a very strong sense of the position of that car the feel of steering and controlling it of mastery this is the ability that every person who's ever learned to drive a car has the ability to extend precise control over something outside your body there is a great amount of pleasure in the learning and eventual mastery of such a motion translation very abstractly when you remap your neural pathways you are feeding your brain and it rewards you with pleasure many people also find this pleasure in video games where it is both distilled to its essence and free of the constraints and dangers of more physical activities what's wink talking about maybe the better question is this what are these games doing games are microcosms of the human experience rendered in such a way to optimally exploit the brain's reward mechanism for learning you could call fun the feeling of attaining a successful outcome in an uncertain system where the outcome of the system is uncertain enough to make failure adequately likely successes require failures to give them meaning this is why games have a difficulty curve because the instant you aren't learning games are no longer fun in practice you'll be presented with a goal attaining which is a successful outcome an obstacle that must be overcome creating a system where the outcome is uncertain and mechanics that require skills to be mastered to achieve that success the goal of combat is usually to deal damage without having damage dealt to you enemies present a system with an uncertain outcome and mechanics require timing patience intelligence muscle memory and positioning to master puzzles that's the easiest to visualize you can see in simple terms a system that is both some of the mechanics and the uncertainty because its complex nature requires intelligence to understand then formulate a plan and button skill to execute exploration any ideas it's intrinsically tied with level design it's the least obvious of them all and the answer i felt compelled to find for the first time in ori the best place to start is with something we're probably all familiar with there's a path it's blocked and to progress you must find some way to clear it it could happen with levers ability checks but most frequently ori employs spirit gates when you try to think about these in terms of game design it's very easy to become confused they're satisfying but why technically the level designers could have put all the branches where the keys lie in an ordered sequence with the door at the end technically if they did that there'd be no need for a door or for a key yet they do it all the same surely it can't be pointless almost everyone listening to me now has played zelda darksiders or some metroidvania title so let me ask you this without the key do you think exploration would be as fun no exploration is an exploitation far more abstracted than puzzles or combat when i say games are about learning you need only remember two things one learning is universal it applies to understanding an object system or places nature as much as it does to mastering a skill two for our not exact neuroscience purposes the brain rewards learning by succeeding in a system where failure is likely remember that and you'll never be confused again so let's keep looking exploration in games often means being tempted to traverse every route available by the uncertain hope of significant reward but what is the benefit of not just placing every encounter in a set order so everyone ends up with the same upgrades abilities or cosmetics by the end well don't forget the obvious when ori's level designers show you the prize and how to get it it is merely encouraging a return trip exploration can't be fun if there's nothing to learn so the next best thing is to place a meaningful challenge in front of it where ori falls into the trap of employing the simplest obstacle possible that miller requires the simplest use of an ability to clear a greater advantage of explorative structure is a return trip not to an area but to the game as a whole ensuring every player on every run has a somewhat different experience is desirable having an upgrade or not having one can change the way you approach an encounter you may not judge that combat is worthwhile this time due to varied health or damage stats you may not be able to jump as far confidently with the system that organically varies these judgments you create new incitements or opportunities for mastery every run there's a reason we want meaningful replay value in our games but it's not the only reason we want exploration in them too all a level designer has to do is create something to learn reorganize a sequence of encounters in a sense that a door is the question the key is the answer and getting it is a challenge keep the rewards just in the player's eye shot but shroud the entrance in dark present multiple ways to go maybe there's something good there maybe not failure doesn't have to be death failure can simply be not success this game is magical in the disney way to look at and in the performers way to play the level designers have produced for us a master class in what to show the player and just as importantly what not to you can see now why metroidvania structure has stood the test of time the level design itself creates another layer of fun both directly through learning and indirectly through replay value isn't that why we love the world design of dark souls no no it's not there's one last thing another piece of the puzzle that exists to some degree in nearly every game like it the immersive quality to understand that we have to go back in time games 30 to 40 years ago weren't much different combat puzzles movement it's all there but not exploration why because all of a sudden technology allowed video games to be set in worlds believable worlds can't be initially certain the very context our learning reward mechanism evolved for exploring the unfamiliar space becomes a world-based context for typical challenges of intelligence or button skill if a game seeks to exploit exploration all it has to do is routinely ask questions with attempts to find any answer being sometimes successful and sometimes not so sound familiar not only can metroidvania design create more fun it also makes a world feel more like a world the world isn't linear it's layered and interconnected why do you think immersive sims whose level design focuses entirely on granting a small space dimension often by layering and interconnecting are called immersive sims hollow knight dark souls these games are known and loved for creating a decision-making process from wild scale pathfinding interconnectivity is a prerequisite you need roots to make choices between and that requires meticulous linking as you make these choices and are rewarded or punished for them the sense of wild settles into your mind dynamically as you consider its layout to find the best way forward it's immersive as it is fun ori well look at the map what do you think the scorecard is glaring green but looks can be deceiving ori takes you through its world in a fairly sequential manner the level design does a remarkable job of looping you around to where you need to be but that applies within an area and without so large scale backtracking is only ever encouraged or required a number of times of those times the place to be is usually at the end of an entirely disconnected sequence of locations like the misty woods into the fall on ruins and so only a fraction of those number of times in a map that isn't overly interconnected at all could ever play host to this depth one of ori's neatest tricks is merely hinting at the correct route rather than having it exactly pinpointed which achieves a perfect balance between the two extremes of absolute understanding and just being lost it is a compromise of uncertainty you see how this links back but the places to be never incite a journey that makes deep use of its world the dungeons aren't interconnected at all and so this metroidvania feels almost linear that's uncomfortable ori abandons its potential and the developers did too when a year later the definitive edition put it out of its misery with fast travel this ain't hollow knight this is more dark souls post lord vessel and so we know what comes next no need to consider a root when a root is the press of a button so close so close to greatness and in the same stroke ori brings us this imagine if you could place your own bonfire link if there's a particular part you're stuck on you can focus on mastering only that rather than banging your head off the parts you've already learned to dance past every single time you die this is balanced by the scarcity of energy and so not only do you have a decision-making process you have the power to mitigate your own frustration on paper this is how auri defends its surprising difficulty by making it a part of the game dark souls said summons ori says soul link i feel compelled to call it genius but i hesitate to call it perfect respawning at whatever health level you had when you made the link can often trap you in exceptionally tough situations that you never could have predicted you can't know if the next encounter is a boss when you're on a single life cell and there are no pickups nearby which can easily result in colossal dynamic player created difficulty spikes that upset the pre-established curve the game wonderfully manages otherwise if a soul link respawn healed two health every time you died with a three-minute cooldown to stop players exploiting it i think they could have made an excellent mechanic perfect it's no surprise that such a radical change would have its side effects and in this case that would be the value it places on energy the last thing you want is to run dry in a tough spot which is everywhere late game thankfully life and energy cells are hidden throughout nibble acting as rare significant and permanent upgrades to ori's maximum capacity that takes care of our worries then but you may not be so excited for health wildly the damage taken from platforming mistakes increases as fast or faster than you're likely to accumulate life cells i felt proud when i found one only to realize the thorns in the next area somehow deal three points of damage the unintended victim of devaluing a collectible is exploration itself it goes without saying that if successful outcomes aren't worth the while then the whole system kind of falls apart successes are worth it lifestyles aren't worthless this is a mild dampener far from a killer much like the third cell skill points i originally planned to omit the skill tree from this video entirely stat boost tend to be a sigh and move on situation but what changed my mind is when i considered how this affected exploration there are two factors to consider order and uncertainty you'll accumulate experience passively but i know exactly what's next on the tree and if it's boring that may discourage me from actively pursuing ability points what if i didn't know and what if there wasn't even an order because instead upgrades were hidden within the map uncertainty and discovery are literally the fun of exploration the contrast is stuck between abject genius and such puzzling mediocrities orion the blind forest is a love letter to metroidvania i say that because it's true but a genre defining classic i'm not so sure well design weak level design masterful beyond its function in exploration it also provides great sight lines it isn't so restrictive that extremely skilled players can't find new strategies or so unrestrictive that the layman has no reason to interact with the encounter as intended the world becomes organic with wild verticality very few zero degree flat surfaces and rough notched terrain from great rocks or fallen trees that's right not a single space in ori is square but one man's genius is another man's heresy if the spirit tree networked online with squarespace's website builder perhaps it wouldn't have taken the big wooden plum sack 10 years in serial manslaughter to find ore in the first place it's not like you have to pay before you're satisfied with your design and that won't take long with design tools so accessible and robust spiritree.org could be whipped up in minutes.org get it because it's a tree it's literally a collective too and if it could summon up a spirit keyboard it would easily be able to register that domain name with squarespace on the platform itself maybe if the spaces were square we'd be playing ori and the entirely informed up-to-date and organized forest did you ever think about that this guy didn't if you'd like to help an orion need go to squarespace.com light for fifteen percent off your first purchase of a website or domain instead ori stuck entering the domain of webs oh yes to imbue personality variation or depth many of the locations you'll visit in nibble have distinct core themes and mechanics sorrow's pass is defined by spikes creating a need to thread the needle with kuro's feather the misty words is defined by ori's first experience on hard drugs as the level itself changes geometry when you aren't looking the ginzo tree is networked by portals a convenient place to look then water's up first which means we need to climb it you excited maybe not maybe you haven't played this game before and that's okay because now we're going to find out why the ginzo tree is widely considered a masterpiece there are five types of gameplay in ori and the blind forest we've talked exploration but each of the remaining four is at its literal and figurative height here the first is obvious platforming but it would be misguided to consider it discreetly in truth platforming lies on a spectrum with puzzling where on one extreme only button skill is rewarded and on the other only intelligence is like in the first encounter ori almost always challenges both a simple routine in practice you arrive at an encounter find an unfamiliar system puzzle out what combination of abilities and mechanics you'll have to use then execute not a remarkable process for games but it's a balance far more weighted to puzzles than most as we'll discover next a plant shoots a projectile and an object you soon learn can redirect it if it goes through the portals perhaps it could break the barriers and so it can but we need to redirect it one last time how well there's another object up top but if you push it down it's no use unless unless we push the object through the portal while avoiding the projectile whose trajectory we created to put the last piece in place that wasn't just a competent puzzle in trying to solve it you created the platforming element as ori climbs higher the music follows and so does the challenge of the mechanics ori is flung from portal to portal across wilder distances she must consider the thin space to thread and where she'll go in shorter and shorter times you want to promote new things to learn the ginso tree teaches how by changing the permutation and composition of features in an encounter significantly and consistently ori demands considerable learning each time generally this sits on a surprisingly steep difficulty curve for a game so outwardly child friendly core mechanics are a great way of feeding the machine but this being a metroidvania abilities take center stage bash it's a dash except it can only be performed in range of and into either a lantern a projectile or an enemy and for all the momentum you gain leaping off them they gain it in the opposite direction bash then like the double jump can be used as a course correction and like many jumps a faster way of getting around making it a part of your standard movement repertoire it is granted a power by the time pause before the quick release creating the illusion of an even greater change in velocity but the slo-mo is mainly there to give you a decision-making window you'll need it bash has you consider the position of the object for potential distance your trajectory and the trajectory of what you leave behind the sky is the limit and the ginso tree is going to test it in the same measured steep and effective way as the portals with the portals there are a sum total of no people who believe anything but bash is ori's best mechanic something has gone very right that something is depth if games are about learning then depth is one of the best ways to make a better game depth is essentially the sum of your relevant balanced options the fun comes from making a meaningful choice between them there's a reason sid meier said games are a string of meaningful decisions for every worthwhile choice you can succeed to various degrees and so fail to various degrees thus depth encourages learning and depth is fun using the simple metric the quality of orisability has become quite clear bash has a hell of a lot to learn it's a catalyst for every element of gameplay it connects one mechanic into another with the utmost elegance and grace you just wait until you're blasting around the place redirecting enemies into their own projectiles fun and satisfying in every sense incidental quirks of the encounter abilities old and new core mechanics a consistent novelty collectively compose the palette the painting is a brilliant marriage of puzzle and platforming pace to maximize fun in an almost surgical manner ori and the blind forest prints a recipe for a masterpiece it was half the reason microsoft signed the studio in the first place and the ginzo tree follows it to the letter i hope you've enjoyed seeing this sort of theory-focused approach so far everyone it's been an education mostly for myself props to chris wagar and ralph costa for getting me on the right track but more than anything i hope you've enjoyed listening to it you see you need a soul to be called a masterpiece not just pristine clockwork the ginso tree takes escalation very literally ori is climbing a beautiful tree and as she does the mechanics climb with her the visuals do too even the music comes along according to musician laura platt who the composer himself appraised that feeling is created by continuously ascending bass lines i don't know what that means but it's good the at peace flow-like state the music places you in with the gameplay reminded me of something very special indeed zelda close darksiders too where even in the abyss yes for kids works of genius locked step with death and made puzzling a graceful trance funny that because darkseider's latest composer is gareth coker none other than the man who made his name doing this yes coker's rise to fame was ori in the blind forest for which he won the player's choice golden joystick and a nomination for a bafta that was five years ago today koka has composed for valve ori's sequel ark and as we speak microsoft marty o'donnell may be gone but halo infinite is in safe hands all thanks to the career koka earned himself on ori's musically blessed ground reading from his website gareth's intent is excellent attention to detail an execution in the application of how music emotionally relates to the gamer as they are playing what that means in practice is that the music consistently sells your circumstance peaceful but emotional works for puzzling in a mystical location a building level of grace when you get a new ability and though working on zelda's rule of three ori isn't allowing itself to become predictable with the waters restored to the forest the flood the desperation is so wonderfully maintained by the relentlessly rising water level and the brief but dire periods of worry before the next challenge bursts into view and must be tackled without hesitation this is widely considered a rather harsh difficulty spike but it's also considered oris crowning achievement the novelty and the music explains the contrast it acts as an amplifier for the emotion and a dampener for the frustration the fight stays alive no matter how many times you die instant respawn the music keeps on looping without resetting solidifying failure as something to be expected this time at least following the tree becomes like the peak of a favorite disney movie except you're in control this is what video games can be [Music] coca manages to make literally every emotion from sorrow to contentment from peaceful to epic both potent and thematically coherent everything is expressed wonderfully but never in abandoning its orchestral fantasy soundscape for a comparison this is coker doing action in darksiders [Applause] since hard percussion and other worldly vocals against what you heard climbing the ginzo tree quite a contrast again this is coker doing awe in [Music] darksiders yeah all right gareth give it a rest and this is all in ore [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] cool [Music] uh [Music] [Music] ori is a disney movie but without the movie and without the disney it is an emotional tale presented grand and majestically it is an adventure where the world is uncertain wondrous nourishing or cruel with music and visuals so strongly tied you can't help but surrender yourself to it kuro's sympathetic villainy instantly grants dimension to her character and it appears to fit distinctly with the trend of humanity in everyone no matter their appearances or flaws like gumo who despite having antagonized ori for hours is rescued by her unfailing compassion with aryat kuro's mercy she's in the same spot and guma returns the favor what you might not know is that i've hardly truncated the story at all i've shown you pretty much everything and we're over halfway in ori's story is exceptionally thin it doesn't have the deep lore of hollow knight it's a simple story told simply basic and the negative connotations of that word aren't entirely absent despite being a title character naru is hardly in it yeah that's because she's dead fair enough but after gumo decides to be a real g he makes her not dead so there's no excuse and it certainly seemed the developers agree with me because a year later the definitive edition primarily seeks to rectify this very flaw the definitive content was free for all previous owners its most significant upgrade were two utterly wonderful new areas blackroot burrows and the light grove this is hollow knight level generosity from moon and you cannot miss it naru is given a people a family a tragedy and a distinct reason she may be so welcoming of a light spirit it's heartfelt unlike the rest of the story remarkably condensed you'll learn about naru for a good 60 seconds but you will learn and you'll never want to leave new music wondrous environments with a new core mechanic and two new abilities the dash and the light burst one seems pretty self-explanatory but they both raise serious questions the easiest answer is yes the light burst is pretty good you're asked to predict trajectory and use it as a launch point for bash it's not groundbreaking but it doesn't overstay its welcome and the definitive edition also incorporates it into puzzles outside these two areas the dash requires a harder answer it works just fine but think for a second about the implications the definitive edition hands you a vast speed boost that can be performed charged offensively and in mid air how do you think that affects the rest of the game it more than stands to reason that a get out of jail and then blow up the jail free card may undesirably affect balance and difficulty i'm left pleased knowing it's extremely likely you'll only give this place a proper go after your first blind playthrough and yet conflicted all the same not only because they over-corrected but because the entire point of giving naaru a story is presumably so the story doesn't have that gaping hole this isn't a game you're meant to have read the wiki before playing and not only did moon shove the black fruit burrows in a random crevice but they also had it draped in darkness which in a game where you're supposed to return to old areas once you have new abilities kinda implies you're meant to return there once you have a new ability you never get it there is no lantern like horror fields everything about this picture says go away come back later but it's so dim and at first glance unremarkable that later may never come dare i say the word rushed but that's certainly what it feels like when you consider that there are multiple upgrades for the new abilities all of which are completely useless without the base that you won't know you need that's what it feels like when you consider that the game will reveal the name of the next ability in a text box if you happen to go right in the light grove ruining the surprise when you consider that they don't bother telling you the way the spirit orb teleports towards you in the same game where the only other spirit orb had to be carried wherever you went the definitive content is a confused implementation it changes the game fundamentally and so you're best leaving it to the end for the balance but the story is far better experience tucked neatly in the middle of a playthrough some flaws might have been overlooked or too insignificant to spend precious time fixing other flaws are intentional features implemented without hitch it's their nature as intended that causes the problem they say it's a masterpiece is the definitive edition an outlier the answer begins in the forlorn ruins frozen in death but searing in the everlasting mechanical beasts crafted by gumo's people four gumo's people ori can only find her way round by carrying a spirit orb that attracts her to the nearest machine service or so it seems magnetism appears to be the logical answer here but it isn't it's gravity and not in the way we understand it in this instance i'm brought to the square on the right just fine but no matter how close i get never the one above and yet when i'm on the right square i can circle it even jump off nothing overcomes the pull of this square confusing data but there is a consistency the last way in which you were gravitationally pulled is the way you'll be pulled universally so the secret is jumping off entirely in the direction you'd like to go the game sets no precedent that mechanics could work illogically in a sense that doesn't make any sense relative to what it's contextualized as why does my place on a square affect gravity everywhere i'm more than willing to accept the possibility that i was dealing with a clinical case of muppetry but it also seems like being crap is the rule in this place where the portals of the ginzo tree only encourage swift grace this is a shackle slow sluggish and ultimately never used in a particularly interesting capacity there is no synergy with any of ori's other abilities when you've chained a ball to a character sold on their game feel you'd better hope the mechanical escalation is up to the task but it's as weak as the mechanic itself the ginso tree printed a recipe for a masterpiece the fall on ruins has simply decided not to use it let's think about this in terms of game design what did stephanie say would happen if you didn't do the cooking by the book the cake will end up crazy except this isn't just crazy it's fundamentally antithetical to ori's strengths no grace low depth and that's just a core mechanic we've been going for a while besides bash what else does ori have upper purely figurative sleeve how about the ability to launch into the stratosphere charge jump lets you jump higher very satisfying so what do you do when you come to a location that requires a real high jump you jump higher this mechanic boils down to holding w the peak of its complexity is being asked to hold w rather quickly and that's because the only thing the game asks or encourages you to master is the controls satisfying but very low depth kuro's feather initially seems comparable being marketed as merely a way to cross larger gaps but when wind comes into play things become far more interesting balancing gravity with updraft while trying to thread your way through the thorns literally made out of my ex-girlfriend's small dick tweets is an entirely fresh setup to master it's important to judge mechanics according to their relative depth where advanced strategies do exist and may be useful for speedrunners most of these are not so and are exceptionally unlikely to be discovered for and by the overwhelming majority of people who play this game to beat it take for example charge flame's ability to redirect enemy projectiles you can actually hit an enemy with the explosion and their own shot simultaneously but for the average player the energy cost doesn't create a meaningful decision within exploration because if you don't spend the point you can't progress no the price tag is only there to stop you from abusing it in combat where you still shouldn't use it because the value of a potential extra save is far greater than quickly completing easily exploitable and easily avoidable combat for exploration it is essentially the equivalent of a key card for combat it isn't even worth the bother and that's a shame because we're playing a game where your primary attack doesn't even need to be targeted as long as you're in range the rest is taken care of but hey at least the boredom is offset by the complete absence of feedback the only difference between this and waving your twirly cursor over the enemies is that one reduces their health bar that is of course until you get rid of it at which point they [ __ ] off back to kansas with the help of spacex technology presumably this de-emphasized aiming was intended to embolden focus on movement in the same way enemies do they're particularly aggressive with very little delay between attacks and every attack requires movement of some kind bash for example or stop as useful for quick descents as it is for pounding enemies into the earth but in a world where they were enough to keep the player engaged for the five hours they'll actually have them ori would still have to deal with a mind-numbing early game so devoid of mechanical fun it's hard to believe and a completely uninteresting roster of slime variants thereafter relative depth is what matters and with enemies like this the bash is less a combat tool and more are very welcome skip the combat tool for a game with such a consistently steep difficulty curve it's almost inconceivable that ori would take so long to expand or raise the stakes of among the simplest combat systems the world has ever seen combat and puzzles bad comparison they test entirely different skills but timing and positioning is the core of both combat and platforming that's not adding up this game's relationship with difficulty cannot be overlooked it's marketed like a cute furry light-hearted disney game but any man who plays it is immediately rendered infertile after their balls are crushed under the weight of a collapsed sun oh man i wonder what this puzzle has in store for me oh any woman ends up with disintegrated ovaries but i can't tell if that's just because all of the ones i've asked had met me you want another example well then let's turn our eye to the end of the fall on ruins where the escape from the waters of the forest was a fresh unpredictable twist on gaming's rule of three ori has now decided to be completely predictable by placing another escape with a marginally altered soundtrack after the exact same type of event the scripted nature of the cave-ins requiring ori to get nice and snug is a continual immersion breaker after the first run and there will be many more where the flood tested mechanics that were taught in the preceding level the collapse introduces an entirely new combination of lasers and uplifting wind adapting to which will almost guarantee a number of deaths if games are about learning why complain well i'm certainly not alone besides how much arse the combat sucks the most common issue raised with this game is that you require psychic powers to escape the escapes first time nobody cared and i want to be the guy dark souls actively advertises the fact that you're going to die it's not the mechanics it's the context nothing could conflict worse with the tension of an escape than being expected to die 250 times to actually pull it off there's a reason uncharted never crossed over with super meat boy and that leads me to the conclusion that if only these sequences weren't sold as escapes nobody would have cared it's a conflict of context with difficulty if only that were the extent of it context doesn't matter when the difficulty is fundamentally wrong our next dungeon is mount horu the last of the three its core mechanic is simply being distributed uniquely you know where every encounter is and you visit them according to their symbols after each preceding puzzle shuts off the lava flow blocking the next one it's a fantastic sequence of puzzles almost perfect where not for the troublesome art orange against more orange against a little more orange reminds me of a [ __ ] politics post in this challenge room you're tasked with escaping a deadly laser but in the literal heat of the moment the background rocks that you can't land on look far too similar to the ones that you can land on at least there isn't any lava below us if we make a mistake at one point i even found spike plants as background art in a place where it's completely safe to land it's madness that this made it past testing ori contrasts genius with mediocrity we've seen it twice before and now we're gonna see it again oh hi our destiny is within reach [ __ ] i swear to god don't ah [ __ ] no no no i'm gonna find you i'm gonna fly your ass into a kfc slaughterhouse and turn you into a bargain bucket come on man hey guys it's me moon studios auteur of orion the kind florist you know how you've got five seconds before being killed we do it's really funny that's why we put a lava shooter above the swamp but we framed it so you can't quite see the roof implying that there might be something up there like there usually is not this time sucker you may be bigger than shammy but you'll never have more subscribers just listen to this happy customer remember how only a few hours ago green water killed anything it touched well you'd better not hesitate upon seeing it again this green water isn't acidic at all because we're just that based good luck figuring out which rocks are going to fall without knowledge beyond the grave but you want to know what's really poggers look at just how distinct the difference is between the end of the wind effect and the background five seconds to react to it [ __ ] oh and your screen is on fire that's just so pog champ i'm gonna eat your kid in a fried egg sandwich you massive avian finally i managed to get away nope i'm gonna be an eagle i'm done mount horo was the last of the three elements water wind and now fire it ended like the rest too but it wasn't just the last of them it was the last of the game abrupt i felt this is a game whose key art is almost entirely of ori and naru but they are reunited minutes before the credits roll with the spirit tree in grave danger and kuro's heart conflicted i assume this would lead into the final hour where ori and naru cooperate in some sense or you have to go rescue the child i just threatened to turn into a fried egg sandwich instead this [Music] [Applause] [Music] this [Music] oh [Music] kuro ended up being a more whole and compelling character than ori naru sein gumo and the tree combined with five minutes of screen time i found that as disappointing as it was impressive this story is about accepting the grey nature of light and dark and using that understanding to be good to one another messages usually need to reflect humanity to be applicable to humanity but ori herself presents a problem she is a light spirit and so by nature an inherently virtuous being the spawn of the dark though more than capable of good are not inherently virtuous thomas males said they used fantastical characters to send a human message but kuro can come across a little less misunderstood and a little more inherently corrupt when the arbiter and wellspring of virtue is literal poison to her entire race ori preaches love and kindness all the same it's a lovely idea but not quite as strong when it doesn't reflect our world however i would also add that ori isn't death stranding it isn't meant to be big genius co-jumbo art with 15 layers of meaning and symbols etched into the crevices of norman reedus ass it's meant to be experienced as any like story taken at face and at heart's value the feeling of love and kindness is emotionally impactful it doesn't expect or encourage any level of intellectual examination you can be forgiving when you know the intention and the likely effect people won't analyze this game nobody cares they're too busy crying and so they say it's a masterpiece this is the missing link it's not enough to have pristine clockwork you need to have a beautiful soul they say it's a masterpiece i don't but i love it all the same thank you for watching special thanks go out to alex mage benjamin carter bishop nelson blake noland dominic jaworski nathaniel haskins ezio lee fabian flack gurneel kang hutch puppy i know lucky joey 9451 john lemley caleb doss l hudson lex williams linus newman marty mr t with some tea newts warthole austin novosel corbin davies effectfully abbey alcis world andrei baltuta ballistic rainbow binyamin bossian 2-2 brandon harris brendan brendan mcdonald cameron bowen chance tucker christopher richardson combat wombat dan walker devonte williams drop z flip slip me dick hamish hey i'm tim holy shift jason vickery joshua w shriner juris purins justin keshev rangan leon kuttendal mark mataphobia nathan nines nitai noah b satelly norm ambrose psy quarter gamer wreckin hock sean oddy separatu shade the last great opium den yuriyara heap yea lord attila hypocrite and that's for the birds [Music] you

Channel: Whitelight

Views: 154,437

Keywords: ori, ori and the blind forest, ori and the blind forest music, ori and the blind forest gameplay, ori and the blind forest review, ori and the blind forest analysis, whitelight, ori whitelight, ori and the blind forest 5 years later, metroidvania, exploration game, metroidvania game design, kuro, ori and the blind forest definitive edition, ori xbox, ori and the blind forest ost, ori review, ori switch, ori analysis, ori critique, ori and the blind forest critique

Id: 2d3FBvfOLbY

Length: 46min 54sec (2814 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020