Recent reviews by cg

Probably the best rogue-like game I know of. There are many ways to approach situations, and many viable builds and item load-outs. But most important for a rogue-like is that the mechanics are complex but clear, you have all the time you want to think about your moves, and if you screw up, you pay for it.

Highly recommend.

Just adding my experience. Spent two hours trying to fix the white screen of death. I'm sure the game is lovely if you get to play it.

This is the best puzzle game I've ever played. You'll be scratching your head as early as level 2, and it only gets better. Plus the aesthetics are fantastic. This is the only puzzle game I've ever gone back to play over again, and I do so regularly.

This game has a lot going for it. And by 'a lot' I mean the art direction is amazing, perhaps the best of any indie game. The problem is that the emotional impact of the art, the environment, and the story is overwhelmed by the frustration and annoyance of poor design decisions.

First, some context. A lot of people claim this game is a metroidvania - they are right about the mechanics, but not about how the game feels to play. In that area this game has much more in common with, say, Super Meat Boy.

The game provides you with a quick save that you can use very frequently, dozens of times throughout a given area, in order to save your progress through the various platforming gauntlets. Now, a metroidvania game generally makes a big deal of dying, sends you back to a checkpoint and makes you start the section again. That's because metroidvania style games are fair. You can reasonably expect to make the trek from save point A to the end of area A, even if you take a couple hits along the way. Not so with Ori.

In Ori, many of the threats to your character are instant kills, primarily in the form of spikes and lasers (yes this forest is full of lasers - no it doesn't make any sense. Anyway.). If you are caught off guard or make a small mistake, you're dead, and will respawn back at the last spot you saved. As a result, in tough areas the game has a sort of resource management feel as you try to conserve your energy - which is used to create save points - by stretching out how far you think you can get before saving again. But if you've used up all your energy, you may end up forced to replay the same long stretches of platforming over and over again until you're able to reach the next energy resupply.

This wouldn't be so bad if dying wasn't so often unfair.

Problem one: there are too many traps in this game. That is to say, places where you are killed without much/any warning, and simply have to restart and avoid the trap the next time. I say too many, but even one would be too many. Imagine you've been on a roll, haven't bothered saving in a while, and suddenly you die from some nonsense trap and have to go back and redo the last five minutes. This is bad design, it's like the jump-scare of platformers.

Problem two: the platforming is not precise. It's good, don't get me wrong, but it's not good enough. Much of the platforming has to do with jumping off walls, but the geometries are odd and don't always work right. Quite often you'll get caught on a knob that you thought you could just slide past, or try to jump off a wall that for some reason is treated like a floor, and that's enough to kill you. Meanwhile, the ever-present spikes have hit-boxes that are not well-defined, and Ori's jumps have a floaty quality that makes them pretty imprecise as well. Sometimes you'll slip off the edge of a block you were jumping to because you're half a pixel short. Overall the platforming is punishing rather than forgiving.

Whenever I died because of these issues, my response was not "Oops I made a mistake," it was always "That was some B******". And the further you get in the game, the more the levels are designed around instant death. To make matters worse, the last sequence (as well as two other earlier sequences that are mercifully not as hard) is a long platforming gauntlet that must be completed in one continuous run. Each section is timed, and if you're too slow to figure it out you're instantly killed (that's in addition to the regular hazards killing you), at which point you head back to the start and redo all the earlier sections, over and over again. During that sequence I must have thought "That was B******" twenty times in the course of the fifteen minutes it took to complete. By the end, instead of being fun and satisfying, it was a just relief to finally be done with it.

There's plenty more to criticize about this game, from the combat that is little more than rapidly pressing the x button (incredibly tedious), to the environments that are often unclear (one puzzle stumped me for a while before I realized that what I thought were deadly spikes were actually harmless spike-shaped ice crystals -_-), to the lack of enemy variety (I think there are maybe nine total enemies with a few slight variations), to the sheer and utter absurdity of creating this beautiful, naturalistic game world full of forests and swamps and caves and then, out of the blue, throwing in a bunch of frickin lasers. They seriously couldn't think of a more appropriate hazard? Like a scary python or something? I don't understand these developers...

Anyway. In conclusion, Ori and the Blind Forest is fun to look at but tedious and frustrating to play. If you're like me and enjoy games that are hard but fair, I suspect that this game will piss you off more than it will entertain you, because it's only sort of hard, and definitely not fair.

For all its good qualities - and it has a lot - I can't recommend this game. It is, simply put, boring. Let me elaborate:

The core gameplay is to travel around a dungeon, clearing rooms. Each floor will have 15+ procedurally generated rooms full of enemies. So, in order for the game to be enjoyable, naturally, this clearing rooms should be fun, or at least rewarding. But it isn't.

There are a limited amount of enemy types, and their AI is simplistic to say the least - as a result, clearing these rooms quickly becomes a chore. The ridiculous scarcity of guns in the game means you'll probably do most of this room-clearing using your worst guns (to save ammo with your good guns, which you'll need for the boss fights). It's tedious as hell, but you still have to take meticulous care so you don't lose any of your very limited health - there's precious few ways to get it back.

What's more, the game itself is built around the concept of unlocking most of the cool weapons and powerups through a currency you get by beating bosses. In other words, it's designed to be less fun the first dozen (or hundred) times you play it! It's artificial nonsense that forces you to play the same battles over and over again.

Even the premise is a let down. You're supposed to be slinging all sorts of crazy weapons! But I've played a few dozen runs and found maybe 4 guns that I actually enjoyed using. Many of them are run-of-the-mill pistols and machine guns with little gimmicks attached, and precious few of them feel at all powerful.

Don't get me wrong. The core gameplay is solid and exciting - the boss fights are a testament to that! If this game were just a series of exciting fights like those then it would be amazing! But that would require getting rid of the touted "rogue-like" and "dungeon-crawl" elements so I doubt it will happen.

As it is now, this game is 20% fun, 80% a chore. If you like methodical gameplay and slow progression then maybe it's for you, but it you wanted an exciting action game you should just play Nuclear Throne.

Edit: The game picks up around the 3rd or 4th floor. This takes about 20 minutes to reach floor three if you start at floor one - I am strongly opposed to games that waste your time like this. However you can eventually unlock an elevator to the 3rd floor that provides you with a choice of weapon, which makes the game much more enjoyable, and individual runs less of a time sink.

The problem is that it takes a very high level of skill and/or ridiculous rng luck to get what you need to unlock the elevator. For someone who is really dedicated and/or obsessive (yours truly) this is doable over the course of many tedious hours. Again, everything about this game just feels like work, I don't know what the developers were thinking. A game does not have to be artificially frustrating for it to be hard!

When you play this game, you might not notice that you're not actually having fun.

You're invested, sure, you've done your time reading guides and watching videos, maybe you even follow the competitive scene. But then you get in the game and it's all frustration, monotony, and bad posture. You'll have enough good moments to trick you, to make you think that the bad moments are the odd ones out, but they aren't.

The reason you'll come back for game after game isn't because you're having fun - it's because you're addicted. Get out now while you still can, and go do something worthwhile with your life.