Ori and the Will of the Wisps Review

The first game was a beautiful platformer with a mediocre attack, and the sequel treats that as the problem to solve. Ori now swings a spirit blade, fires a bow, hurls a hammer, and a shard slotting system lets you build around whichever of those you like, so encounters become something you engage with rather than survive. The traversal remains extraordinary, with grapple, dash, burrow and bash chaining into movement that stops registering as separate inputs once it clicks, and the escape sequences are staged with more confidence than anything in the genre.

Visually it is the high water mark for two dimensional art in games, with parallax depth that makes a flat plane look like a diorama, and Gareth Coker's score does the emotional heavy lifting the sparse story leans on. The launch was rough, with frame pacing problems and crashes on older Xbox hardware that took months to settle. The story also reaches for the same sacrificial note as the first game and gets slightly less out of it.