10 Reasons Why Ori and the Blind Forest was Not For Me
Note: Contains spoilers for Ori and the Blind Forest.
If you’re at all into the indie game scene then I’m sure you’ve at least heard of this game, if not played it. With the beautiful soundtrack, stunning art direction and what looked from the trailers to be a solid narrative journey, I was pretty excited to play this game. I’d heard great things about it online and from friends and after giving the game a good portion of my time and energy, I think I can say that I’m perhaps the only person in the world who didn’t enjoy this game. In fact, I didn’t even finish it.
That’s right, I did not finish this Ori and the Blind Forest. *gasp*. This game is just not a game for me. Here’s 10 reasons why, in order from least to most off-putting.
- Unclear Locations between levels
Alright so this one really wasn’t so bad. But! This is the kind of thing that I know would have become increasingly frustrating and confusing to me as I went on through the game. In some segments of the map, where you’re between two levels, there is little intersections that have signs telling you where you just were and where you can go from there. For whatever reason, these never seemed to match up and I could never figure out why. It would tell me that I’d just come from Moon Grotto, Mount Horu or The Valley of the Wind, three places I’d never even heard of, let alone explored.
Maybe it all made sense later in the game, but for me this was confusing enough at the beginning of the game that it felt like a puzzle to be solved and yet I never really desired to solve it because there wasn’t going to be a reward for figuring it out.
TL;DR — intersections between levels referenced unidentified locations
2. Loss of glow when Ori is stationary
Again, this one is really minor and comes as a thinly veiled compliment. There is this really, really lovely glow effect when Ori is in motion. It distorts the actual image of Ori, giving him a ghost-like effect that I thought was seriously beautiful. So, I was really saddened to see that when Ori was stationary, this effect was pulled back drastically and you could see the character model for Ori really clearly. I don’t know. I guess… I felt kind of lied to? You know when you watch a monster movie and at the end of the movie you see the monster and it’s just a big let down? It felt like that. And to me, the model seemed too crisp and defined against the background. I wish the glow effect had been more maintained.
TL;DR — the character model for Ori wasn’t as ghost-like as I wanted it to be
3. The menu
What I mostly didn’t like about this menu was that there was no clear way to navigate it. There is a column of selectable text through the middle and then other elements on either side that look like you should be able to navigate a side step over to them but you can’t. I didn’t know if I was supposed to be able to interact with them or not. Furthermore, in the main menu, I could use spacebar to resume, but not in the ability tree. And the ability tree wasn’t even accessible from the pause menu, it was it’s own separate menu for seemingly no reason. I tried to avoid the menu as much as I could because it made me grumpy.
TL;DR — menu was stiff and blocked players from navigating it fully
4. Unnecessary and/or awkward cut scenes
This is something that I’ve been seeing in a lot of games lately. It will have what should be one long cutscene broken up into two or three segments with completely unnecessary gameplay in between. Ori and the Blind Forest was pretty bad for this, with gameplay sometimes being less than five seconds between cutscenes and all I’d really accomplished was walking forward a few steps. I’d forgive it if the multiple sections of cutscene were full of information and the game devs thought maybe you’d want to save in between, but 9/10 times this happened, the first cutscene was nothing crucial, and usually it was really nothing at all.
TL;DR — some cutscenes served no purpose and bogged down the pace of the game
5. Bugged Gameplay and UI
Now, this one I can forgive. I somehow manage to find bugs anytime I play a game, and although there is really no one to blame, it definitely added to the pile as I grew more and more frustrated with the game.I had two prominent game malfunctions. The first was that sometimes, inexplicably, the game would go in slow-motion. At first I thought it was a stylistic choice but when it started happening mid-level in places like Thornfelt Swamp, it was a struggle to keep my cool. I’m the kind of person who plays Sims on 3x speed and listens to podcasts at 2x speed.
The second bug, which was constant, was that my map had bits and pieces missing. I continually had problems with it throughout my game play. Chunks missing, Zooming in to one area slingshots me to another, clunky navigation. Blocky looking transitions. It was all very tedious. Often, there was gaping holes. I never really knew where I was or where I was going and sometimes even the background image for a level would black out, leaving just Ori in the foreground of an abyss. It kinda took away from the overall aesthetic, you know?
TL;DR — there was a slow-motion bug and a map bug that caused me a lot of problem
6. Character confusion
Here’s where we get into the meat and potatoes. There are so many characters that aren’t clearly defined. If you’ve played the game, you must be confused as to why I’d say that, but hear me out. There’s Ori. There’s Naru. Let’s start there.
In the beginning of the game, you flip flop between control of these two characters. And while this makes sense in a game like The Cave, where switching back and forth between characters is an important aspect of the game, in a game like Ori, it was really confusing. Here I was thinking, ‘oh cool, you can swap between these two really different characters to complete puzzles’, and then Bam! Naru dies and the mechanic never pops up again. You’re just Ori after that. I got my hopes up and then they were shut down… hard. It felt unnecessary to have had Naru playable in the first place.
Now let’s move on to Sein and the narrator, or as I like to call him The Big Booming Voice. The narrator is the narrator, obviously, he gives exposition. Then later in the game, where you’re introduced to Sein, she also functions as a narrator, often giving exposition in between exposition from the narrator. I can’t help but wonder what the point is. It bothered me so much, since they seemed to serve the exact same purpose for as far as I got into the game. Why hadn’t Sein just been the narrator the entire time? Why couldn’t she have been an extension of the narrator.
Plus, the narrator doesn’t really seem to have a character. He speaks in first person, referring to himself as ‘I’, but he doesn’t have a character outside of that. Yes, he “lights up the sky” and calls out to Ori, but that hardly seems to me like a character. I can hope that later he develops a character and it makes sense to have these two characters as two characters, but at the beginning of the game it seemed so unnecessary and confusing to me. The narrator also mentions a ‘she’ and a ‘he’. We find out quickly that ‘she’ refers to Kuro, a white Owl whose name means black in Japanese. I could only guess at who the ‘he’ referred to. Maybe it referred to ‘Nibel’? Which may or may not be the name of the forest? I honestly don’t know.
TL;DR — the introduction gave a false impression of the gameplay, and at times there seemed to be two narrating characters
7. The Spirit logic
What I mean by that is the internal logic in regards to how the theme of spirit comes into play narratively. Spirit is one of the key themes and motifs from what I experienced, yet somehow it felt less developed than I would have liked. There was a few places where I could feel the hand of the writer forcing the motif to work in certain ways because it was necessary for the narrative, but the logic presented to me as a player just didn’t flow. So the forest is dying and Ori is dying until the ancestral tree sacrifices itself to save Ori, thereby leaving the fate of the forest in Ori’s paws. Ori absorbs the tree’s spirit and in a few other areas in the game, Ori is given abilities by absorbing the spirits of dead creatures that have been stored in spirit trees.
This causes two problems in my eyes. The first is that without any sort of background or explanation, the fate of the forest is on Ori. Are we playing Ori Potter and The Blind Forest or something? Orphaned and now the chosen one? I know that Ori came from a leaf of the ancestral tree, but that doesn’t seem significant or purposeful enough. In Harry Potter, it’s not just the suspension of disbelief, it’s entirely explained and at the beginning of the story, all exposition indicates that Harry is the chosen one for a reason. This is not the case with Ori. There’s no indication that Ori is important. Obviously he is or else there wouldn’t be a game, but it didn’t seem to happen organically — I could feel the writer’s hand.
Speaking of it not being obvious or organic, why did the forest start to die? I know that it was “through the passage of time” but that just seems like such an easy answer to me. I want Ori to have more of a motive, so that I as a player have more of a motive.
My second issue in regards to this is that Ori gains abilities by absorbing spirits. Don’t those belong to someone? Sure, they’re dead someones, but I can’t help but feeling like Ori is slightly villianified in steal spirits from the deceased. I think I’d be pretty pissed if someone stole my soul and then got the ability to pull orbs to you like in Klonoa. That just seems like something a bad guy would do to me. I’m sure there are a million movies where the bad guy gets stronger by absorbing spirits. As a good guy, I’d think Ori would want to let the spirits Rest In Peace and find some other way to better himself.
TL;DR — the ‘chosen one’ trope is not expressed clearly, and aspects of Ori’s actions are commonly attributed to villain-like characters
8. Too much to remember
At the beginning of the game, I felt like there were way too many things for me to remember and keep track of. Energy shards, Soul links, Vitality, Spirit light, ability point, spirit light container… I think I can remember what one of those things does
It caused me a lot of confusion when the game would tell me to find one of these things and then I couldn’t remember what it was, where to find it, or what it looked like. I was overwhelmed. And then there is a spirit tree and an ability tree that are different kinds of trees. Then there is a spirit well and I don’t know what it’s for, and to use an ability skill you have to make a soul link for some reason and there are keystones and spirit gates, and, and… it was just really frustrating to have no idea what was going on. I took notes and still, I was confused.
At one point, I was so confused that I had to go to Youtube to have an angry Irish man explain these things to me. I will admit that there are some games where I don’t mind pausing and referencing the internet, but that’s reserved for crafting games like Subnautica, Minecraft and Graveyard Keeper. But for me to feel the need to go online for a game like this, it felt like cheating. It really just puts me in a bad mindset, you know? Anyway, the angry Irish man explains soul links to me. Apparently, you have to make the soul link yourself and then it’s like a check point.Once I relate that to playing Sack Boy in Playstation Allstars I have it figured out. Part of me wonders if having a section of the menu that explained all these details more thoroughly would have helped.
TL;DR — there was an abundance of unique items and RPG elements that weren’t differentiated thoroughly enough.
9. Difficult with PC controls
I much prefer PC to any console. I like that I can alt-tab out of the application if I want to, that I can have two screens, that I can use a smaller mouse for my small hands, that I can use headphones easily. The second biggest contributor to me up and quitting this game is the fact that it was not smoothly ported to PC. Wall jumps… wall jumps are nearly impossible. I spent so much time trying to figure them out only to be told that I should switch to a controller if I want to wall jump reliably.
Now, call me old-fashioned, but I think if a game is made available for mouse and keyboard, it should be playable, winnable and enjoyable with a mouse and keyboard. When I first began playing, I was prompted to move with either WASD or the arrow keys. It said navigate and showed the arrow keys. I know now that it was referencing the menu, but you see where a user could easily be confused. I opted for the arrow keys, because they worked well enough and I got used to that. Then, I met my Navi-like sidekick, Sein, and had to start using my mouse. *sigh* It was annoying to have to readjust my whole set up to accommodate this and it really took me out of the experience. It was like I’d accidentally settled into the wrong room at a hotel and I had to pack up and move next door.
I also had to ask myself, how would this have been done on a controller? Anything with a controller should be able to convert almost directly to a keyboard since consoles don’t really have cursors in the same way a computer mouse does, so why do we even need to use the mouse?
TL;DR — having a comfortable PC control system may have not been thought through enough or was sacrificed
10. Not for unskilled players
While nearly all gamers play games for the challenge, I am one of those select few who would prefer my games to be easy. I always play on the easiest level and I will always praise Horizon: Zero Dawn for having a ‘story’ mode which is a level down from ‘easy’. I’m not the kind of person who wants to spend half an hour taking down a boss or trying to fend off walkers. I’m there for the story. For me, an unskilled player, and I imagine beginners too, this game was way too difficult. So many things seemed almost hidden and I had to run around all over the place to find things. And there wasn’t even any difficulty selection. Not all people who enjoy and play games are good at them. Sure, you could argue that this game just wasn’t made for players like me, but then I’d direct you to the title of this post.
In the Hollow Grove, I get a power up ability for my fire attack, which uses the same energy that I need for a soul link. Somehow there is at the same time, so many different pieces, and also overlap that has you making on the fly micromanagement decisions. It just makes it so unapproachable for new players or unskilled players. I just wish that someone at some point had piped up and asked “maybe is this a wee bit difficult?”.
There’s actually one point where an on-screen prompt teaching a new mechanic is so small that I had a hard time getting Ori to stand on it so that I could read it. I feel like a new player, who needed to know which button to use for ‘jump’ would have been frustrated trying to stand on the exact 1mm wide spot.
TL;DR — this game is complex and hard… like really, really hard
Conclusion
I’m bad at video games. It’s just a fact. It takes me a much longer time to play through a game than it would most other people who play games as much as I do. This game was near impossible for me, I kid you not. Within the first hour, I had a strong desire to put the game down and play Jak & Daxter instead. Video Games are supposed to be escapism, right? On the day I was playing this, I had spent the entire morning in the emergency room with a sprained ankle, so to be in pain and then to be this frustrated that the difficulty of a beautiful game was too much for me... It was a day and a half. At one point, I literally grabbed my crutches and hobbled away from the game. I really wanted to play but the darn thing hated me. If there was an 11th item to this list it would be that I was broken and just wanted an easy, straight forward game with logical world building that I could enjoy without any stress. Now, because that was a lot of negativity, let me leave you with a few of my favourite things about Ori and the Blind Forest:
- There is a wispy feel to the onscreen UI that is reminiscent of the storm from the first scene of the game. This is immediately before the scene where Naru dies, which works really well to subtly ease the player from the calm scene into one of turmoil. I think most players wouldn’t even notice, but would unconsciously feel the affects of it.
- I like the slight foreshadowing when the frog guy appears in silhouette as the forest is dying. While I don’t know the whole story of this character, or how prevalent he is in the game (because I didn’t finish playing it), from what I later learned about this character, this foreshadowing seems to be just big enough without being too subtle. Very appropriate.
- The soundtrack is incredible.
- The art direction is really good.
Thanks for reading, have a wonderful day!
