It’s a Game You Never Knew You Needed until Now
Ori and the Blind forest has been met with critical acclaim after its release back in March. The game started out small and grew over four years to be the gorgeous culmination of storytelling, setting, characters, music, and design it is today. The game ranks high among all fans.
It’s a coming-of-age story that takes a lot of its inspiration from video games and movies from the early nineties. Moon Studios wanted to bring that “old-video-game” feel to a new generation of gamers; and oh, how they have succeeded.
Debut trailer for Ori and the Blind Forest.
Now, I’m going to tell you the most important things you should know about this awesome game.
1. You are a Forest Spirit
And you are absolutely adorable.
Ori is cute and fluffy, and he brings light to his surroundings. However, Ori is also powerful. As you level up, you gain the ability to shoot spirit flames, which become your primary means of getting past enemies and gaining collectables.
While you have been orphaned, you are part of the forest, Nibel. You are vital to Nibel’s survival. Your job is to bring the light back to the “blinded” forest and bring hope to the forest’s inhabitants.
2. The Characters Have Personality
Ori kind of looks like Pikachu. Ori’s companion, Sein, kind of looks like Navi.
While you may look like Pikachu, you are not Pikachu. Similarly, Sein is not Navi—for more reasons than one. Ori and Sein have their own personalities that are developed throughout the game.
Ori and the Blind Forest doesn’t have a lot of characters and the ones it does have are fully developed. Ori starts the game as a child. But within the first few minutes of the game, Ori starts to show empathy, determination, and care for Naru.
Naru is a motherly figure, who took Ori in as her own. Naru and Ori have a sweet and kind relationship at the start of the game. Ori and Naru are fully-developed characters that you truly start to care about.
Even Kuro, the enemy, has reasons for her actions and is not simply a flat character.
3. You Connect with the Characters through the Storytelling
Ori and Naru as their home dies around them.
See, that’s the thing, Ori and the Blind Forest makes you care about the characters from the start. As you pass through the “n00b questing” at the beginning of the game, your heartstrings get tugged on by Ori, Naru, and their life around them. You haven’t just learned the controls, you’ve grown supremely attached to the characters.
You are sad alongside Ori when Naru dies as the famine persists. You can see how lost Ori is after that point. And that’s when the game truly begins.
4. The Prologue Sets up the Story
The prologue from Ori and the Blind Forest.
Within the first 10 minutes of the game, you have a pretty good idea what you’re up for. The backstory of the game—or, all you need to know about it at this point—has all been laid out for you. Your setting, characters, and objective are all given to you.
The rest of the game can then be spent mastering the controls you’ve been introduced to. You can explore the vast world, learn more about the characters, and complete your objectives. Ori and the Blind Forest has an overarching story, it’s not just a set of controls and a sidescroller.
You legitimately care about how this one ends.
5. The New Objective: Restoring the Forest
Ori and Kuro.
Now, your goal is to restore the Water, Winds, and Warmth to the Forest. You must search for these elements scattered all throughout the maze of forest scenes. Naturally, on your way, you gather collectables that help you level up so you can keep traversing Nibel.
You’ll need to gather Key Stones to unlock different areas of map. Sein, another spirit whom you meet along the way, helps you out by telling you about the gameplay and giving you tips and tricks. Your overall objective is to restore life to the dying forest around you.
As the game moves along, you find out how the forest came to be “blinded.” Kuro, a spirit who takes the shape of an owl, grows angry at the light of the forest when it accidentally kills some of her children. She then begins to act menacingly towards Ori because Ori of what Ori is doing.
Thus, in addition to restoring the light, Ori must go up against Kuro.
6. The Irony behind the Forest Being Blinded
The Spirit Tree lights the skies ablaze.
There is a cruel irony to Ori’s predicament after Naru dies. Originally, when Ori became lost to the Spirit Tree, Naru found him and began raising him as her own. All was well until the Spirit Tree called out to Ori to bring him home because the Spirit Tree was under distress.
The light got Ori’s attention, but Naru was scared of the light and hid them both from it. Meanwhile, the light that night kills Kuro’s children, so she becomes vindictive towards it. She attacks the Spirit Tree, which is what purges the land of the light and blinds the forest.
The ensuing famine is what eventually kills Naru and sends Ori out on his own. Had Naru let Ori investigate the light originally, perhaps Kuro’s children would have lived and the famine would not have happened.
7. Sidescroller Meets Dungeon-Crawler
This video demonstrates the feel of the game and the seamless transitions of frames.
It looks and sometimes acts like a sidescroller or a dungeon-crawler, because that’s what the developers at Moon Studios wanted it to do. It took pages out of the books of Metroid and Legend of Zelda in order to bring about the feel of earlier video games.
However, what Ori and the Blind Forest also does is add in the RPG elements of story-telling and exploration. The gameplay doesn’t just take you from left to right endlessly. Oftentimes, you find yourself going right to left, then down, then left to right, then back up again as you figure out all the nooks and crannies of the forest.
During escape sequences, the screen moves seamlessly even as you travel to the edge of the left side of the screen, only to show back up on the right side. It’s sidescroller meets dungeon-crawler meets the 21st century.
8. Timing is Everything
Gameplay from Ori and the Blind Forest.
The controls are fairly intuitive from the beginning, but they are only easy at the beginning. As the game progresses, you must get more and more precise in your keystrokes or button presses. Mistimed actions can lead to death very quickly.
That’s not to say Ori and the Blind Forest is hard, but it does certainly harken back to the old days of gaming where you had to play a section over and over again until you had the timing exactly right. At least in the case of Ori, you can create Soul Links, which are Save and Check Points wherever you want if you have the stats for it, to enable you to save right after you’ve crossed a difficult section.
9. The Sound Effects
Sound designers have a blast making the sound effects for Ori and the Blind Forest.
The sound designers really went all out on this one. The video above shows clips from recording sessions as they create the sounds for one of the characters: Gumo.
The rustling in the rocks and sand will match the character’s movement on the screen. The voice will be adjusted to be the voice of the character. The clip is only a teaser of sorts, but it really goes to show just how much love and care went into this game.
10. 4 Years of Hard Work
Ori dutifully bringing back food for Naru.
Moon Studios is technically located all over the place. Designers and programmers have been connecting from all over the world for the past four years to put this game together. Originally, it started in Thomas Mahler’s basement.
Thomas Mahler previously worked with Blizzard Entertainment. But he, along with the other developers of Ori and the Blind Forest crafted the game on the Unity platform with pixel perfect precision. After that, artists got together for the landscapes and musicians were pulled together for the music.
And thus, Ori was knit together piece by piece.
So, do you like the looks and feels of Ori and the Blind Forest? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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http://www.gamersdecide.com/pc-game-news/15-must-play-pc-games-decade
