I’ve survived the first week of shelter-in-place. I was hoping to get a Nintendo Switch so I could play Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but I got a $20 Steam card and got myself a copy of the Definitive Edition of Ori and the Blind Forest (Ori) instead. I shy away from platformers because often I’ll end up yelling at whatever unlucky gaming platform I happen to be playing it from. Though, strangely, while I was yelling at my poor PC, my Garmin watch was telling me I was actually quite relaxed. I think it has to do with the beautiful artwork and relaxing music.

I forget exactly how I came across the soundtrack, but I know I liked it enough to purchase it and use it as background music while working. The art style and color palette is a strange opposite where it is filled with bright colors, to the effect of “ooh shiny” whereas the music is more “ahhh”-chill. And yet they complement each other quite well. The sum is greater than its parts, sorta.

Audio and visual aside, the game, for all of its cutesy sound effects from Ori, is actually quite challenging. I figured I’d play on normal because it seemed like a short enough game. I rarely go for 100% completeness/exploration nowadays. After finishing up the first third of the game where you’re racing floodwaters from a rapidly filling tree (yeah, what?), I was starting to think maybe I should have played it on easy mode.

But, because I’m stubborn, I kept trying and quitting and trying again. I did complete the game and I liked jumping and zooming around so much that I started trying for 100% complete. I wasn’t quite ready to leave Ori yet. I got a couple of areas done, but the rest will just have to hover at 99%.

What bugs me the most about the game is the storyline. Specifically, the great tree emits a powerful wave of light that is strong enough to kill off innocent owl chicks, yet leaves Kuro relatively unscathed. The tree is searching for Ori, but even Naru knows to shelter from its light as she grabs Ori and hides them away. I never understood why this particular point of the story, which should be the strongest, is actually the weakest in the plotline. Then again, this is a platformer game so story is expected to be secondary. Except it’s not. There’s narration points throughout as you hit new areas. It plays out like a storybook. It’s like they couldn’t figure out how to make Kuro righteously enraged, so they “threw a hail mary” and it worked enough that to my recollection, no one’s really bothered by it. Except me. Unfortunately, I don’t have any better ideas off of the top of my head, so I’m not giving very good constructive criticism.

The mechanics of Ori includes a lot of previous platformer specialties–double jump, glide, wall jump, stick to walls, climb walls, force push (bash), stomp, etc. There’s also an RPG element of being able to invest in three ability trees–utility, efficiency, combat. The best part of it being you can fill up all three trees if you explore and kill enough enemies.

Playing with a keyboard and mouse has some perks, but also some drawbacks as apparently I can’t keep track of how many buttons I’m holding down at once, which often led to unnecessary deaths. For example, if I’m climbing a wall, I hold shift and the direction I want to go. Sometimes, I’d end up doing a stomp attack right into a thornbush without meaning to. Or I’m sticking to a wall and I want to jump to another wall, but I need to use the charged jump with an angle and end up doing a normal jump off of the wall because I forgot to keep the direction (left/right) button down. Thankfully it didn’t take me hundreds of retries to do something.

Except for that one area that was all thorns and I had to pick up four fragments to unlock a door. And of course three of the fragments require precision and a lot of shift-key tapping (yeah, I set off that sticky keys shortcut too many times) while navigating through the thorns. I was not happy.

Another thing that bugged me was the gravity area. While holding an orb, Ori is able to stick to surfaces she normally would not and essentially is able to walk on the ceiling. But what was not clear was to get that to actually happen, she has to first run on a particular surface that would connect one walking surface to another. What was also not clear was that particular surface, when on all sides of a block, could change the direction of gravity for Ori. And that messed up my head trying to figure out if I was positioned correctly to do jumps or if I was thinking about it wrong and went plunging to my death instead.

But what really got me was the chase/escape-type scenarios after each third of the game. The first was the flooding of a tree. The second was escaping some ruins. The last was being chased by Kuro and flames in a volcano. I noticed that most of the game has Ori center-stage, though there are points where it is transitioning from one zone to another that it’ll lag just a little bit before recentering. In the chase scenes, if you are going too slow or too fast, or there’s some special effect animation that needs to play, it would give me some motion sickness. I had to stop a few times and go do something else for a while.

But, I think I’ve already established I’m not anywhere near a pro-gamer. Yet I still enjoyed playing Ori. It’s polished, no overly wonky bits, challenging enough for me to yell at my PC but not too challenging that I gave up. If my watch is any indication, I was able to get into the Flow state and destress from the COVID-19 events. So, I would pick up Ori and the Will of the Wisps, the sequel, if the experience is much like the first game. The art style that I’ve seen so far looks to support that as well as the part of the soundtrack I was able to listen to. I’ll be lenient on the story because Ku is adorable. The rest remains to be seen.