Ori and the Blind Forest Review

Ori opens with a wordless prologue that does in four minutes what most games need an hour of cutscenes to attempt, and then spends the next eight hours making you earn the right to move the way that animation promised. The kit arrives one verb at a time, and Bash is the one that reframes everything: freeze in midair, aim, and launch yourself off a projectile or an enemy, converting hazards into transport. Once you have it the map reopens, and the backtracking that sinks so many games in this genre becomes the best part of this one.

Moon Studios built the whole thing on hand painted layers with real depth to the parallax, lit so that Nibel reads as a place with weather rather than a backdrop, and Gareth Coker's score carries the sentiment the sparse story cannot reach alone. The escape sequences, the flooded tree above all, are far harsher than the art warns you, and the original checkpoint system put the burden on you to place your own saves, which some players never forgave. It is a small studio's first game and it looks like nobody's first game.