Ori and the Blind Forest Review (pretzelcat)
what to say about ori and the blind forest...this game is..intricate. intricate in the sense that it's a rage game disguised as a survival game disguised as a puzzle platformer that tries to distract you with pretty visuals. this game is good in sense of atmosphere, visuals, sound design, storyline all that jazz. where this game lacks is in the game play itself. for one, the save system is awful. in the game you have a bunch of different energy bars that act as resources in the game (this is largely where the survival element comes in) one of those is your "spirit energy" what you're able to do with this is open doors, perform special attacks and also save the game which allows you to save your progress in real time. pretty cool right? W R O N G. the game's design is literally so ungodly difficult which combined with a very much problematic lack of energy pickups makes saving a near constant necessity to make any progress whatsoever. this is due to the game basically not having a checkpoint system; it will literally reset all of your progress if you don't save every 2 seconds. this gets rather annoying because EVERYTHING will kill you. touch a thorn? all your health vanishes faster than haitian relief funds at the clinton foundation. too many projectiles clogging up where you can go? your health drops faster than my credit score. simply touch a slime on accident? it's like watching a mexican kid get slapped by a sandal, that little sucker loses a chunk of his soul. when this game gets into the late stages of the story, things get (even more) difficult. your brain has to operate like the gpu for the james webb telescope. basic accomplishments require millions of tiny micro-adjustments to the point where if people could see what im doing with my hands playing this game i might just get a girlfriend. one last note; I actually really hate the skill trees in this game. you kill so many enemies and get very little xp for each and with different skills having different costs and even prerequisites it gets very expensive to make a noticeable change. word of advice though: max out the blue and purple trees first as those are the ones that allow you to survive long enough to make a save. getting skills barely improves anything and finding things like life cells (pickups that increase your max health because yeah it's not your skill points that do that it's a bunch of hidden pickups strategically placed around the map so you have to repetitively die to learn how to get one) and energy cells (which virtually don't exist) is tedious at best. pls collect my spirit energy