G2A Pick of the Week: Ori and the Blind Forest

Every week, Team Liquid will supply you with their pick for the G2A Game of the Week, which you can buy at an extremely discounted rate thanks to the G2A Weekly Sale. This week, we’ve chosen the powerful, witty, and colorful Ori and the Blind Forest. You can get it right now at www.g2a.com/weeklysale for $14.20, 35% off its usual price.

Review: Ori and the Blind Forest

Ori is a demanding, cleverly intricate Metroid-style adventure in which a quick trigger finger and perfect timing matter almost as much as exploring its secret-filled environments. That it’s also stunningly pretty, includes a sweeping orchestral score, and tugs at the heartstrings certainly doesn't hurt.

Ori and the Blind Forest is an action-adventure platformer that combines exploratory gameplay with a emotional narrative and clever gameplay mechanics-- like carrying a gravity-bending orb that lets Ori safely walk upside-down across lethally hot surfaces.





While taxing, those feel like cakewalks next to each dungeon's climax: an intense, no-room-for-error escape sequence that makes Metroid's time-bomb finales seem tame by comparison. Here, the difficulty spikes wildly as you're forced to execute a precise series of moves while death closes in on your heels. With no checkpoints, mastery through repetition becomes crucial, and that mastery gets a little easier if you can rely on muscle memory to, say, catapult yourself over an incoming fireball before scampering up a wall to relative safety.

The escape sequences walk a fine line between being rewardingly difficult and infuriating, partly because they disable your most important ability: the creation of "Soul Links," which let you save almost anywhere. There's very little auto-saving in Ori, and death reverts you to your last save, so it's up to you to remember to save often. Forget to use them, however, and it might take you a while to find your way back to where you were.

Not that that's necessarily a chore; Ori's level design is striking, with lots of distinct, memorable areas that are fun to get around in even after you've visited them a few times. And while there's no fast-travel in Ori's sprawling world (which is mildly annoying), it compensates by making backtracking actually enjoyable. As you work your way back to a previously unreachable spot, your new powers are almost guaranteed to help you discover a few hidden power-ups and secret areas along the way.





As fun as exploration is, combat is a little more uneven. Hammering enemies with fireballs is satisfying at first, but feels weak and ineffectual later on, so it's often better to use Ori's other moves, like catapulting enemy projectiles back at their owners, bashing monsters into thorny walls, or simply stomping them when they get underfoot. Having a diverse range of attacks is great, but none of them feel quite as precise as simply shooting, and they can frequently backfire (by sending Ori shooting into thorns, for example) while you're learning to use them effectively.

Also, Ori always feels fragile, even when his life meter is filled out, and his tiny onscreen presence (coupled with the abundance of glowing projectiles flying both ways) can sometimes make it hard to tell exactly where you are, who's shooting, and whether that shimmering blob sailing toward you is acidic goop or a clutch of harmless XP orbs. It doesn't ruin the experience, but it can lead to a few awkward deaths as you frantically leap into danger to grab a power-up.





Bigger and tougher than it looks, Ori and the Blind Forest is a beautifully realized, brilliantly designed, and at times brutally difficult platformer with enough charm to leave a lasting impression. It's often frustrating and sometimes confusing, but its spectacular platforming, memorable world, and engrossing story wash those concerns away.