Recent reviews by Bizzle02

I'll place my disclaimer here: I've marked this review as negative not because I dislike this game, not because I wouldn't recommend it. I've made my review negative in order to bring the average down a bit, because this game has some significant flaws that I feel have been generally overlooked.

I'll first state that Ori is a work of art. The game's art is beautiful, the soundtrack is great, the story is emotional. As a short film, it would be excellent. Unfortunately, it's not a short film, it's a game, and that's where the shortcomings lie.
The artwork makes the game visually astounding, but severely harms visual clarity. I've taken an unacceptable amount of damage from hazards that were obscured by foreground objects or flashing lights in combat, or hazards that were indistinguishable from the terrain. Ori's graphics are all form with no function.

The controls are clunky. Ori as a character is far too floaty for the level of precision the game demands. A momentum-based character and precise platforming don't work well together. The character's jumps vary significantly with your ground movement at the time of jumping, so much that one jump might go perfectly and another might find you falling halfway short of your destination and landing on spikes.

Combat is a bit lacking, but passable. Your basic attack is auto-targeted within a short range of the character, with a damage output that's largely fixed by the attack rate, which makes fighting much more dependent on movement than damage. That is a good thing, combat would be very demanding if you had to manage aiming at the same time as movement, but the result is a bit bland overall.

I've seen a lot of other reviews that praise Ori's level design, but I must disagree, particularly in the escape sequences. There are a lot of areas that can't be solved on the first run, since certain obstacles have little to no telegraph and can't be avoided without knowing they're coming. Escaping a dungeon after completing one of the game's main objectives is supposed to be an exciting moment: The music swells, there's danger everywhere, you have only seconds to escape with your life. The problem is, these segments are too cinematic. There's a very particular sequence of actions that will get you through, and the trial and error required to find these solutions makes the sequence become tiring and frustrating, rather than epic.

For the most part, when playing a game, one would expect the game's aesthetic and atmosphere to improve gameplay. In Ori's case, it's the gameplay that drags the art and story down. Ori isn't a bad game by any means, but it could have been better as a more casual experience without the frustrating game design. I invite discourse in the comments.
Overall verdict: 6.5/10, Ori is fine, but Hollow Knight is better.

Art: beautiful
Animation: smooth
Soundtrack: fantastic
Combat: epic
Platforming: intuitive
Story: compelling
Lore: deep

Game is good. Do it a play.

I'm really not sure what it is about this game that has people praising it so. In nearly five hours, I played through a few early levels with each class and found more things annoying than entertaining. Here's a list:
There is no strategy: Facetank while holding right click. Use potion when health low. Hope the enemy hit points go to zero before yours.
There is little progression: You can boost your health so you can facetank more effectively, or boost your mana so you can use more cards to kill enemies faster. Cards can be upgraded to a point, but your basic attack will always do one damage with a small miss rate.
Controls are clunky and annoying: you click to walk forwards, your character stops when you reach a crossroads or an enemy. You click to attack more quickly than your slow autoattack. You can right click with ranged classes to free-fire. I found myself shooting at the place I wanted to run away to and running towards the monsters I wanted to shoot at more often than not. You can use WASD to move, but since you have an isometric perspective on the map, corridors are always diagonal from your character, so orthogonal controls are awkward. Since attacking an enemy is a matter of putting your mouse on them and holding a click, it's hard to pick a target in a big crowd.
Voice lines are annoying: This one speaks for itself.
Gargoyles: You see a statue that is very clearly a gargoyle. You shoot at it. It takes no damage. In order to trigger the gargoyle to 'appear', you walk near it. It appears, you take damage. Well played, game, you really fooled me with that one.
Ranged enemies: Since your only movement is along the pathways and is clunky as previously mentioned, there is rarely a chance to dodge ranged attacks. This goes back to the facetanking: The ranged attacks are going to hit you and you're going to take damage, unless the RNG decides otherwise.
Doors: This is the event that prompted me to close the game and come write a review: I've nearly finished a level, all that's left is a room on the other side of the door. I go through the door and am faced with a large crowd of tanky shielded enemies, death bursting enemies, and a few spawners that make more. I panic fireball them all until my health is low, and go to the other side of the door to heal. The spawner starts throwing his ads through the wall into my room, but since he's on the other side of the door I can't interact with him to interrupt his spawns. I jump back in, kill one or two enemies, cross back over to heal, rinse, repeat. In a game that focuses so much on killing enemies before they get close enough to hurt you, throwing yourself into the middle of a crowd of enemies is suicide. You can't pass the level until you kill all the enemies. This means, in my situation, I couldn't progress past this point without throwing myself into a situation that was very likely to kill me. Guess what: it did.
Level ending: Speaking of which, you also can't pass the level until you've interacted with everything. Yes, that means if you left a couple gold coins on the floor somewhere, you have to go back and find them in order to progress. This is an unnecessary and frustrating mechanic.
Boss mechanics: Bosses have multiple 'phases', which are really just health bars. You drop a boss to zero, and it spends a few seconds invulnerable before fully healing. This happens a few times. There are certain bosses that are invulnerable until you kill all their ads, which respawn with each phase. There are certain bosses that are invulnerable until you spend enough time within a close distance of them. In other words, the 'challenge' to the boss fights is derived mostly from artificial difficulty mechanics.
Now of course, the game isn't all bad, and what kind of anonymous internet denizen doesn't explore the full extent of both arguments? Here's the good that I can say about book of demons.
The art style is attractive enough.
The flexiscope mechanic is innovative and I quite like it. When generating a dungeon, the game asks you how much time you'd like to spend in it, and builds the dungeon around that.
The deckbuilder-lite elements are an interesting angle to take, and although they could use greater variety of cards I won't complain about it.
The footprints indicating your level completion are handy (although I consider this a necessary mechanic considering the arbitrary level progression requirements, so it's less of a compliment and more of a not-criticism).
Here's my disclaimer: I got this game for 8 dollars with a coupon. It didn't make me hate it within the first two hours to refund it, and I suppose the price I paid is reasonable enough not to be too disappointed. At the time of writing this, I haven't passed the early game with any class, so none of this review is based off gameplay later on.