This game is nothing short of a MASTERPIECE! Very challenging yet rewarding gameplay, fun mechanics, awesome soundtrack, and a cute little story to boot. It delivers everywhere, seriously. Super cheap too so no excuse to not play it. 10/10! <3

beautiful

So, I was recommended this game by Hiyu Marten of the VRChat Spirit community and although I was very heasitant, I decided to give a platformer a try after 30+ years (my last platformer I played was Supar Mario Bros on NES console). It was a good decision.

Ori and the Blind Forest.. is not a game. It is a work of art. The visuals are stunning, the soundtrack so touching it made me cry even from a main menu track, the story is beautiful (though sad at times), and the gameplay is not that bad for me as a newbie to platformers, though new players will find the first tough situation (you will know it when you get there) a serious challenge.

So, yeah. I did it, I finished the game, which is something I did not expect. Now onto the sequel.

This isn't a good game, which is a shame. Based on the reviews I thought that this was some amazing metroidvenia/platformer with some amazing story and aesthetics.
While we can safely say the art style, graphics and music are ethereal on the surface, they have a huge problem. Everything is dialed up to eleven without consideration to its necessity.

Everything is vividly colored, nicely textured there are nice effects of explosions and foreground/background elements. It just looks amazing, but it is horrible to play. Half the time some element of the scene obscures the enemy, obscures their projectiles or the player just flat out can't see what is next.
Ori dies in a couple of hits from the enemies, and in one or two from traps. Health pickups are rare so the player will often will be running around at the brink of death anyways
This compared with the atrocious floaty controls, the "mash the x button and pray, while trying to dodge the bullet hell" combat makes the game infuriating.

This isn't a platformer or a story rich game. This is essentially a long gauntlet of traps and obstacles that are designed to kill you. Right from the start you have to make pixel perfect jumps, dodge enemy bullets and traverse long sections of what can only be described as trickshots to get to the next story point. Meanwhile, everything, and I mean everything is trying to kill you. Every section of the map is filled with brambles, laser beans, respawning monsters or some other nasty trap.
The brash mechanic sounds nice, looks cool, but they rely on it too much. Oh my, why do you have to put in long sections where the only way of traversal is to basically catch every projectile with brash, double jump, pray that the next projectile comes in time, time another brash... It is just bad.

In Hollow Knight you have such sections, but most of them are completely optional or there is more than one way to solve them. You have such high skill actions like brash, the pogo, but that is optional. Here it is mandatory.

There are some good ideas here, but the execution is terrible. I often felt that the game is hard, because otherwise it would have been too short, there isn't really much substance here. So the game was made hard, but then they realized it was too hard so they added the self save feature. Now the game could have become too easy, so they don't give you energy. Now you can't really use your energy for anything else, but saving otherwise you can (but will anyways), get into situations where you just somehow have to make an impossible sequence happen, because there is no other option.

Given the problems with the controls, the ruthlessness of traps and enemies, contrasted with the beautiful music and art style, the game is exceptionally dissonant. Angelic music plays while Ori gets destroyed by everything. My mind wants to relax to be tensed up by the gameplay, resulting in a very frustrating experience overall.

Celeste is better for platforming, Dead Cells is better for combat and Hollow Knight is just flat out better overall.

## Score
Some people will love this game but I am not one of those people and as such I cannot recommend it. To start off this game is hard, like really hard. At the end I had over 600 deaths and while many of those can be attributed to me not playing many platformers most were just bc this game requires your movement to be precise and most things are one shots.

### Gameplay
I don't like the gameplay of this game. I had so many bugs and glitches that it made it less fun to play. Many of the talent tree options just didn't work and I felt like I wasted hard earned points. In addition to that I had many bugs where inputs would not register which would cause me to die. The combat felt like a worse version of Hollow Knight were it was basic and did not feel fluid.

### Story
meh

### Art
This game is beautiful. All of the background art is hand drawn which can cause problems gameplay wise. But artistically it is gorgeous, navigating the environment with a hand drawn image behind you. The music score also brings so much life to the game especially during the escape sequences.

This game saved my life.

I am 27.

My ex-wife and I have a daughter together, and adopted our son together. They are now both 4 years old.

When we were going through our separation, I found myself lost and miserable. I was self destructive. I got so mad one day from everything spiraling out of my control that I punched some concrete in a moment of overwhelming emotion. That caused me to break my 5th metacarpal in my right hand... my working hand... my games hand.. the hand that I held and carried my children to bed with.. The hand I desperately needed to make sure I could continue to provide.

After learning of the severity of my self-inflicted damage, I was borderline suicidal. Keep in mind that just a few months before this, I was the happiest man with no history of depression or anxiety. I have never had fits of rage, or been one to break down and cry, but I was in a low spot that just really buried me from being able to see the light on the other side.

Having nothing better to do, I searched for a game I could play, ONE HANDED while I recovered. I somehow stumbled upon this game and read some of the reviews. I decided that it had to be worth a shot... I must admit, I didn't beat the game, or play nearly as long as some of you. In fact, I may have only played this game a day or two.. With that being said, after doing so, I had a new found joy and hope for life. I was able to put behind me the pain and suffering that had been cast over me. I was able to experience other peoples joy and happiness. I was able to see the fruits of my "labor". I relaxed for 5 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ minutes to this music long enough to realize that I was going to be okay.

After coming to that realization, I turned the game off, and I went back to work. It hurt my hand like hell but I was motivated. I stopped feeling so damn sorry for myself, and I became the father I needed to be in that moment, not the weak boy I was behaving as.

Today, I am close friend with my kids mother. We don't fight, or argue, or say hurtful things to each other. We are parents, and friends.

I now have 3 kids. My third child is, wait for it, ALSO 4 YEARS OLD. The woman I am with was going through a very similar situation at the time of my own separation, and we just stumbled in to each others life unexpectedly. We have been in a relationship for a year now, and are very happy together.

Moral of the story, you never know what life holds in store for you, and if I would have given up when all the odds were stacked against me, I wouldn't be where I am today. This silly little game helped me realize that.

CEO of Moon Studios GmbH support russians, that killing Ukrainian people

I hate platformers, I keep trying to like the game anyway because I like the art style.

But it turns out I still hate platformers, no matter how they are disguised.

The game is beutiful, but the gameplay it self can be frustrating/

The game certainly has beautiful graphics, it looks great even 8 years after its release, but there is more to games than good graphics. I cannot say that the story kept me enticed and wanting to learn more, or exploring all the areas and finding their every secret. The game to me looked like a strewn-together hours of anxiety-inducing acrobatic exercises and running away from bosses or things like lava or water, with screen shaking all the time and sounds/music trying to ratchet up the tension.

While there are certainly players who enjoy this kind of play style, if you don't want to get an early Alzheimer's diagnosis or some mental disease, I would not purchase or devote much time to this game.