Ori and the Blind Forest

I can’t remember if I looked anything up in this game. I try to avoid it as much as I can, but I do give in eventually when I’m stuck. Man I remember when you had to call a hint line for $1.99 a minute to get unstuck.

I got through it. So satisfying.

The only thing I’m worried about at this point is that I got this one bonus energy area early in the game. To do so, I had to move around some blocks in order to block an energy beam and get past it, and then use that block again to block a different beam. I got down there and got my bonus and got out. But there was another dead end there that I couldn’t unblock yet. Later I got the ability to unblock that blockage, but now I can’t get back to that area because the beam is in my way and the block I used to block in the first time is now below the beam. So I might not be able to get 100% of the stuff in the game because I actually did a section of the game too early.

If only I’d ignored that area until later. I could have gotten everything down there.

So I was stuck on the stealth section for about a week. I finally got through yesterday. It wasn’t so much that each individual action was hard, it was that I had to about 7 actions in a row without the ability to save the game. I always get a little irritated with that type of forced difficulty where it’s tough because of how many things you have to do correctly in a row without a mistake.

Still, I’m through it. And now that I’m in Sorrow’s Pass, I eventually had to stop because this music is so sad and beautiful. Stop making me emotional for no reason game! I’m just platforming here! I don’t need to start crying for no reason while I’m platforming!

It’s funny how music can do that sometimes. I’m a sucker for haunting strings - I don’t remember what that particular music was in Ori though.

Ori has great music. I remember this one place with water all around - the music there was so beautiful, so soothing, that I stayed still there, just listening to the music, for a longer time than my actual platforming time that day. So good.

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.

I’m still loving it, but now I’m completely stuck in Sorrow’s Pass.

There’s an area where you push a boulder to block a beam so you can move past the beam. And then there’s another boulder that you push into an air flow so that it goes to the top and blocks another beam, but then when you go past that beam there’s yet another beam. I could use the second boulder to block that one from the bottom side, but then I can’t get up top past the second beam. I seem to be missing something big here. As if a piece of the puzzle was missing.

Yes, it appears you’ve missed one object in that scene.

  • You need to block the top beam with something else, to release the boulder.

  • That something else is above the top beam, have another look there

  • There’s a pylon on the ledge. You need to ground pound it until it blocks the beam.

Thanks jsnell! I had to unlock 2 of your hints to finally realize that I did see an object up there, but I couldn’t find any way to interact with it. Now that I know it’s possible, I know exactly what I can try up there.

I made it to the top! Now I have no idea where to go next. I guess it’s exploration time. Time to go back to areas near the beginning of the game perhaps. My newest ability really increases my mobility and where I can go. The funny part is, the move I learned by leveling up the inner ability try still can’t be used, because I have yet to learn “dash”, so therefore when I gained the ability to “dash in mid air”, that’s still meaningless. The controls in the menu say dash is RB, but obviously RB does nothing right now. I guess maybe dash is something I’ll learn near the end of the game. It’s so strange that they would tempt me to gain an ability early on that does nothing.

Yeah, the fact that you can gain useless abilities before you can use them is a mistake. But I don’t think Dash comes a long way into the game, so it’s likely you missed an ability tree in an earlier area.

Really? I thought ability trees were all part of the linear story. I guess there’s an optional one somewhere too? That kind of sucks.

Are you sure you’re not thinking of Bash? Which is tied to the Y button? Not Dash which is on one of the shoulder buttons (that I don’t have yet)?

I just looked it up. You get dash in the dark area where I couldn’t see a damn thing. It’s a new ability that was not in the base game, only in the Definitive Edition. I guess that’s why it’s optional.

But… how are you supposed to do that area early in the game? It’s so dark in there and you can’t see a thing so it’s too easy to die. I always assumed you’d get something later in the game that would light that area up a little brighter or something.

I found out where to go next!

And more importantly, I also couldn’t resist back tracking and back to the dark area. I figured if there’s a dash ability to procure there, then it’s worth fumbling around in the dark.

And it was! Once you explore it a little in the dark, you do find a little ball of light that helps you see. And once you get the Dash ability, the whole area lights up (thank god). It’s actually a really great area. Highly recommended. Now, as to when you should be able to tackle this area? I have no idea. I had a relatively easy time since I have quite a few abilities in my repertoire. I imagine this area would be a lot harder for people who tackle it near the beginning of the game.

I hot that pretty early, but I wondered half the time if I was supposed to be there. Interesting to learn that that was part of the “bonus” content in the Definitive edition. Makes sense, since it’s pretty self-contained. But can you really finish the game without the Dash ability? I can think of some spots with the bullet-shooting flowers that seem impossible without it.

Finished. That last sequence was really tough. I had to do that for a long time to finally get it.

It was worth it though. Great ending to a great game.

And just so that I’m clear about what I saw:

Ending Spoilers

Kuro, the owl mother, killed Ori at the end, right? When she then decided to deliver the light to the tree herself, getting wiped out by the same light that killed her children, that was pretty striking. And Ori’s foster mother then started taking care of Kuro’s one remaining offspring. But the death of Ori was left kind of ambiguous. I figured the character could just be unconscious, but then we would have seen the character at the end, right?

Total play time: 22 hours 18minutes.

But it feels incomplete since I didn’t get so many of the areas from earlier in the game. I’m very tempted to go back.

I went back into my game, and discovered I start at the last save point before the final area. In other words, in order to explore the rest of the game, I have to actually go back to a teleport shrine from the final area. That is not easy. I tried for a while last night, but this is harder (getting back to a shrine from the bottom of Mt Horu) than the ending was.

Was this game created by austrian sadists by any chance?

I am starting to hate it despite the nice graphics and music.

Hey, I finished it, and I’m not a masochist. It’s pretty hard in some places, but I don’t remember hating it at any point whatsoever. Well, maybe a little bit in a couple places at most. That’s it.

I don’t find it fun to do the same thing for 30 minutes in a row, which is how long it took me to escape the flood. I see Rock8man took 90 minutes. I was close to uninstalling the game even after those thirty - it just feels like a god damn waste of time. It’s not like the game is giving me much experience I have never had before in narrative or anything. It is just eye candy plus hand gymnastics…not really my thing I guess.
I don’t deny the game is well done, but I find it kinda chore to play. But now I have some 6 hours in it, so I want to see it through even if I do not particularly enjoy it. Dammit :)