I want to like this game. It has everything one could like visually, but the level design is beyond atrocious, and it seems to suffer from what I call Dark Souls "fanboyism". One may feel hard pressed to enjoy the game at all because the level design seems to work against the player at all times, fronting obstacles and situations that cannot possibly be anticipated. Proactively forcing players to lose in order to sustain an artificial difficulty is highly deplorable.

The single most overhyped metroidvania I've ever played. The gameplay is extremely bland, there's little to explore, and the story is just uninteresting. The game constantly throws names of things, people, and places at you and expects you to care because they're not there anymore or whatever. If you don't save right after a cutscene or dialogue, you have to watch it all over again for no good reason. Especially annoying because you get a limited number of saves through your mana bar. That same mana bar is used for some exploration abilities, actively discouraging you from exploring the game or trying interesting things without savescumming if it fails. You can also very easily get stuck in long sequences because the game decides not to offer you any mana crystals in that section. Combat is offensively bad, you get one button to spam (technically some mana-based abilities as well, but they suck balls) and then you just dodge enemy attack patterns. But the best strategy is to look for some sort of highground where enemies can't hit you and just spam your attack until they're dead. Then you save, and that's all the combat challenge gone from that section.

Just play hollow knight or la mulana if you want an interesting metroidvania to play.

After playing this game again to remind myself of the story before playing the sequel, I quickly remembered why I hate it. Yes, the art and music are fantastic and the movement feels fluid and satisfying, but this game is filled to the brim with ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Instant death traps come in all forms. Some spikes will instantly kill you even though they look identical to other spikes that only damage you. Some parts of the ceiling will drop a block on you before you can even register its movement, and are slightly shadowed so they're difficult to notice, especially since Ori himself draws so much attention with his bright color. Some walls have laser beams that fire periodically, while having a noticeable but very brief warning beforehand, and dodging them can sometimes be difficult due to some rather slippery controls.

There's also a few chase sections in which you must escape an approaching threat (that instantly kills you if touched) by using the skills you've obtained to navigate through a sort of obstacle course. These scenes almost always involve some level of trial and error, since additional obstacles will be thrown at you from offscreen leaving you with a fraction of a second to react. These sections are extremely difficult to complete without either foreknowledge or insanely fast reaction time. Combine this with platforming segments that give absolutely no room for even the slightest error, and you've got a recipe for frustration.

On top of all of this, death sends you back to your last save point. Designated save point shrines are scattered throughout the world, but they're sparse. The only way to save your progress outside of those is by expending a small amount of your energy resource to drop a "Soul Link." Now, energy refills aren't too uncommon and you can quickly increase your maximum capacity, but still - what if you're out of energy, or just forget to save for a while? Suddenly you get obliterated by something you couldn't see coming and several minutes of progress has just been erased in the blink of an eye. Now you have to go and grab all those collectibles all over again. That's nice and fair!

I could go over the metroidvania collection and exploration aspect, or the story presentation, or the sound design, or any other of the game's really good aspects, but for me they're almost entirely overshadowed by obnoxious hazards that require pixel-perfect execution to avoid and the near-constant annoyance of cheap deaths.