This game is so beautiful. There are a lot of great design concepts in it, and tremendous setpieces. I’ve never seen a game get so close to transcendantly good only to let its flaws drag it down to barely tolerable. Seriously, the level and challenge design in this is sometimes god-awful. Just bad bad bad.
Many great games are hard but fair. Ori is hard and unfair. Examples: You often can’t tell where walkable terrain ends and deadly spikes begin. Enemies are placed off-screen that can attack or drop on you out of nowhere. The controls are often unnecessarily unresponsive. Areas that are designed for certain special abilities are actually traversable earlier if you want to try them a billion times; and you do because you don’t know that ability is coming up. When you’re trying to outrun a big thing I won’t spoil, the part that kills you is totally unclear because it undulates and looks pretty instead of telling you “If you go past this part, you die.”
To top it all off, the save system is a clever and terrible invention. Let me save where I want? Cool! Charge me energy I need to use on five other things, so that sometimes I just happen to not be able to save where I want? So bad.
I’m making my way through it, because the amazing parts are amazing. The art direction is stupendous (but, again, often at the cost of playability). It gives Trine a run for its money as the best looking game ever made. If they had cared about solid gameplay design and good player feedback, this would have been an all-time classic. What a shame.